1.3. Building a Successful Service Center

1.3.1. Defining the Mission

The primary purpose of all service centers, both internal and external, is service delivery. Your service delivery goals, the services you will provide, the service levels you will offer, and whether you will be a profit center or cost center must be determined, documented, and understood at the outset of establishing the service center. You need a mission statement that summarizes your charter. Your mission statement very broadly defines what you are supposed to do and establishes the overall expectation of how well you will do it. Establishing a service center is first a higher management decision, the expectations of which may or may not be realistic. You must be prepared to negotiate the feasibility of each goal. Be careful with words like most when stating expectations. Does most mean 60 percent or 90 percent? The difference between solving 60 percent of all problems in 2 hours or less and 90 percent of all problems in 2 hours or less is immense. It's comparable to the difference between 99.9 percent reliability (8.76 hours of downtime per year) and 99.99999 percent reliability (4 seconds of downtime per year). Both are doable, but the difference in costs is enormous.

A clearly defined mission statement helps to ensure that everyone is working to achieve the same goals and defines the expectations of both management and customers. Those expectations are how you and the service center will be measured. A sample mission statement is: "To increase customer productivity by promptly resolving problems, identifying and eliminating the cause of problems, and delivering other value-added services as required."