In March a new starter sat for a week without a login. Six people met four times and recommended a pre-start checklist. The checklist was adopted. In September a new starter sat for a week without a login.
The March report named three causes: unclear ownership of onboarding, a communication gap between IT and HR, and a need for better forecasting of start dates. All three were true.
January, February, March
In January IT consolidated identity management onto one platform. The licence cost fell, and provisioning moved from on request to a nightly run.
In February HR added an e-signature step to contracts, closing an audit finding. It added two days.
In March a new starter sat for a week without a login. The working group was convened by the service desk, and looked at the service desk.
Each decision was correct on its own terms, and each was taken by people who had been told what their part was for.
Someone from IT sat on the working group. The January consolidation did not come up. The group had been asked about onboarding delays.
Eleven steps, three swimlanes
Time to productivity is on the quarterly scorecard. There is a monthly service review, an escalation path with three tiers, a target of five days, and an owner for each of the four onboarding sub-processes.
There is also a process map. Eleven steps, three swimlanes, accurate. Nothing on it shows which of the eleven steps anyone in the room can change.
The map is owned by the process improvement team, which owns none of the steps.
Up the service desk’s line
The delays appear as item four on the monthly service review. The instruction that comes back is to review the onboarding process.
The March delay was escalated twice. Both escalations went up the service desk’s line.
The onboarding process was reviewed in April. The review recommended a pre-start checklist.
The report has gone up every month for eleven years. The instruction has come back in some form for most of them.
Everything travels up or comes back down. Nothing travels across.
One level down, one level up
The service desk lead can change a ticket’s priority. Changing the provisioning schedule needs the platform owner. Changing the signing step needs HR and legal.
One level down, a team lead can chase a ticket and cannot change the nightly run it waits for. One level up, the director who could change the schedule and the signing step does not see a new starter waiting.
The service desk holds its own weekly review. Ticket ageing is item two. The instruction that comes back from it is to review ticket ageing.
The September report named unclear ownership of onboarding, a communication gap between IT and HR, and a need for better forecasting of start dates. It recommended a pre-start checklist.
A regulator needs a model of what it regulates. The result predates every one of these meetings, and it sits in Metier beside two things that share an abbreviation and are not the same: viable systems and value streams.
Stafford Beer called the first of those the Viable System Model, and built it around the question of how a system stays able to sense, decide and act.
The working group reconvenes in March.