Developing a Costing Tool for Service Solutions in Digital Services
Safonoff, Jussi (2016)
Safonoff, Jussi
Metropolia Ammattikorkeakoulu
2016
All rights reserved
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-201605198596
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-201605198596
Tiivistelmä
This study investigates a real business need introduced by a business unit of the case company. The business unit is responsible for providing service solutions for the customers of the case company. The issue introduced concerns the costing of IT services enabling the service solution deliveries. Previously there have been larger service solution deliveries that have been struggling with cost management concerning IT services. For these deliveries, the service solutions have been designed partly on the fly and there has not been a dedicated resource for managing the IT project. As the whole service offering has not been fully productized, the costing issues occur already in the proposition-making phase. The objective for this study is to propose a configuration tool for the IT infrastructure services, providing costs calculations streamlined with the service solutions.
To study the issue, action research was selected as the research method. With the business challenge identified, the current state of the service solution deliveries was analysed. The data for the analysis was collected from existing company documentation and interviews conducted with key stakeholders from both the business organization and the IT organization. The key pain points in the IT service delivery were identified. The study proposes a tool for creating modular IT service configurations, providing cost calculations for these service deliveries. The proposal for the tool was created using the information found from the current state analysis with the best practices found in the academic and business literature, enriched with workshops with the key stake-holders.
Due to organization and personnel changes, only the original business case owner validated and approved the proposed tool. The outcome of the thesis was a design for the Microsoft Excel based tool, as producing the actual tool was not possible due to the limited time. The tool is intended to be deployed in two different stages. In the first stage, a high-level tool is created to be used by the non-technical sales teams. In the second stage, a more detailed tool is designed and then created to be used in the detailed system design by the Digital Services unit.
The proposed tool will help the ones using to identify the key elements included in certain service deliveries. It will also provide information on restrictions and possible problem elements. Thus, it will also ease up the project planning as standardized solutions can be used.
To study the issue, action research was selected as the research method. With the business challenge identified, the current state of the service solution deliveries was analysed. The data for the analysis was collected from existing company documentation and interviews conducted with key stakeholders from both the business organization and the IT organization. The key pain points in the IT service delivery were identified. The study proposes a tool for creating modular IT service configurations, providing cost calculations for these service deliveries. The proposal for the tool was created using the information found from the current state analysis with the best practices found in the academic and business literature, enriched with workshops with the key stake-holders.
Due to organization and personnel changes, only the original business case owner validated and approved the proposed tool. The outcome of the thesis was a design for the Microsoft Excel based tool, as producing the actual tool was not possible due to the limited time. The tool is intended to be deployed in two different stages. In the first stage, a high-level tool is created to be used by the non-technical sales teams. In the second stage, a more detailed tool is designed and then created to be used in the detailed system design by the Digital Services unit.
The proposed tool will help the ones using to identify the key elements included in certain service deliveries. It will also provide information on restrictions and possible problem elements. Thus, it will also ease up the project planning as standardized solutions can be used.