1. NTEU Update Briefing World-Class Enterprise Operations
Presented by Tony McMahon
February 23, 2010

2. Today’s Meeting… Agenda: Introduction of Presenters
Background Information
Focus Group Results:
Optimize workflow
Streamline communications
Improve system efficiencies
Enhance employee career development
In Summary
Next Steps
Questions

3. Background Information
Objectives:
Increase efficiency to enable focus on both strategic priorities as well as on-going operations
Equip EOps to utilize industry best practices through the Information Technology Infrastructure Library1
Improve the quality of service delivered to IRS employees and taxpayers
Aspire to become the Federal agency leader in world class IT operations
History:
Initial NTEU briefing 12/07/09
Solicited employee volunteers to participated in focus groups
~20 BU volunteers, 8 manager and front-line focus group discussions (4 in DET and 4 in MEM, including remote volunteers)
Today’s briefing will present research findings
The employee discussions resulted in the following areas of focus:
Optimize workflow
Streamline communications
Improve process efficiencies
Enhance employee career development 1 2 3 4
1 (ITIL) Framework developed by British government for managing IT operations

4. Focus Group Results – Optimize Workflow1
Focus Group Results – Optimize Workflow
Current state
Focus group results
Segment-ation
SAs work across all work types, resulting in fragmentation and task switching losses
Align work based on work type (e.g., incident, transmittal)
Pooling
Most systems aligned to 1-2 SAs; this structure requires continuous support and makes scheduling less flexible
Increase employee cross-training to pool skills and allow increased scheduling flexibility
Managing “other work”
All SAs handle untracked “other work” (e.g., password resets, system checks, etc)
Document all requests to reduce redundant or low priority work and allocate necessary resources to more critical tasks
Dispatch
There is no consistent process for evenly and efficiently allocating incoming work, resulting in uneven distribution of workload
Centralize work and allocate to team members to manage and track demand, as well as minimize disruptions to team members
Workload balancing
Workload spikes are typically addressed with extended work hours
Leverage resources in pools during workload spikes
Monitor and balance workload across multiple SAs to ensure that no one individual is overloaded

5. Focus Group Results – Streamline communications2
Focus Group Results – Streamline communications
Current state
Focus group results s
SAs receive and review hundreds of s each day – only a small number of them (<20-30%) are applicable to their areas
Leverage dispatcher to filter s (e.g. incidents, transmittals)
Streamline and target communications by updating mailing lists or discontinuing automated notifications (e.g., OL5081s)
Meetings and calls
SAs attend around one, one-hour meeting each day - a majority of them simply attend to cover / listen
Optimize meetings - minimize the number of required participants for standing meetings and request attendance only for individuals with action items / decisions

6. Focus Group Results – Improve system efficiencies3
Focus Group Results – Improve system efficiencies
Current state
Focus group results
Best practices
Best practices and SOPs informally created and distributed by a few teams in an ad hoc manner
Formally codify and consolidate best practices and SOPs in a centralized location
Emphasize proper use of best practices through coaching
Contin-uous improv-ement
Continuous improvement activities performed in ad hoc manner without time formally allocated
Use freed resources for continuous improvement (e.g., documentation of best practices)
Metrics
There are very few metrics used consistently at the team level (e.g., productivity and quality)
Track a simple set of team level front-line metrics - deploy productivity and quality metrics at team level to provide transparency into optimized workflow and process efficiencies

7. Focus Group Results – Enhance employee career development4
Focus Group Results – Enhance employee career development
Current state
Focus group results
Employee training
Strong employee desire for training (e.g., peer mentoring and formal classroom training)
Formalize employee training plans; managers should support career development plans (IDP) for employees and set up local training opportunities
Increase informal employee capability building
Manager training
Employee desire for manager continuity (e.g., consistent use and definition of processes and procedures)
Manager interest in improved tools and increased training to be better managers
Define a set of consistent management practices to enhance communication with SAs

8. In Summary
Increased capacity could present new opportunities in the following areas:
Capability development (e.g., knowledge base development, training opportunities, scripts and tools, productivity documentation for metrics and continuous improvement)
End-to-end monitoring
Disaster recovery and security program
Asset management
Data-centric operating environment
Mandates & legislative changes (e.g., Tax Return Preparer Initiative, Information Reporting)
Insourcing (e.g., DITE)
Cloud computing

9. Next steps Will use the input of the focus groups to create the design6
Next steps
Will use the input of the focus groups to create the design
NTEU Article 47 notification to be issued (if applicable)

10. Questions ?