When we’ve been working in the same industry for a while, you get used to knowing a lot about a specific subject.

For example: You’re a security Management expert, you have all your qualifications and certifications that make you very wanted in this field.
People (clients) look at you as the subject matter expert because, let’s face it – your LinkedIn profile shows all the right experience and education.
You don’t even think about it, because it has become second nature.

Easy to get complacent at this stage – you still read articles about security and you have an interest in mobile security so you pay a bit more attention to that. But in reality you’re just super busy with all the engagements you have booked to dive deeply into the matter.

On top of that, you don’t really know what you don’t know. You know a lot – but not everything.. so how do you find out what the best way is to allocate your effort when you want to learn something new about Mobile Security? (or any type of security for that matter).

That’s why we at The Art of Service created the Mobile Security Self Assessment Toolkit. Because we’ve all been there… and we want to help you break through this challenge.

The toolkits consist of 3 different sets of questions about Mobile Security. These questions help you with your clients or your teams, to get them thinking about Mobile Security or the definition of this within the context of their business.

The questions are organised based on an increasing level of maturity of the business processes surrounding Mobile Security:

1. Recognise – at this level you recognise that there is such a thing as Mobile Security and that it may have an impact on your business or career.
2. Define – Once you understand the applicability of Mobile Security for your business it is time to define what it really means in the context of your business processes and customer service deliverables.
3. Measure – Identify how you measure and who measures what within the business and suppliers’ organisation to help you understand the performance of Mobile Security
4. Analyse – It’s not enough to measure, you need to do something with the raw data. Analyse it and map it against KPIs and metrics or benchmarks that you’ve identified earlier in the Define step.
5. Improve – Now is the time to improve the business processes surrounding Mobile Security. Take a structured approach to this improvement step and don’t try to do too much at the same time.
6. Control – This level is all about the control you have over each step in the business processes. How can you control the trigger responses, the process activities, the deliverables and results to make the process predictable and controlled.
7. Sustain – Now that we have control of the business processes surrounding Mobile Security it’s time to look into the way to sustain the results.

How can you use these questions? (being the subject Matter Expert)

There are a number of ways you can use the questions in the Self Assessment Toolkit. To be honest – the name says it all… Self Assessment.
Go through the questionnaire and randomly pick a couple of questions. Can you answer those questions for your current organisation without having to look for the answer online?

For Example:

Recognize – What is the underlying issue behind endpoint security and why is it becoming more difficult for companies to address it?

Define – Do the security policy and procedures clearly define information security responsibilities for all personnel?

Measure – How is the value delivered by Mobile Security being measured?

Analyse – Which users are working with the enterprises most sensitive data on mobile endpoints?

Improve – How much tolerance for risk do you have?

Control – Are all router, switches, wireless access points, and firewall configurations secured and do they conform to documented security standards?

Sustain – What are the most critical application security testing elements to add to CI/CD work ows?

These are just a small number of questions from a total of almost 1000 questions relating to Mobile Security.

You can also use these questionnaires to perform a self assessment with your team or with the stakeholders in the organisation. It is not a knowledge test, when you use these questions for your team or client you frame the question as follows:

In your belief, is the answer to the following question clearly defined

This will help with finding the gaps in the business processes and the assumptions made in relation to Mobile security in the organisation.

Going through these questions will unearth exactly what you don’t know about Mobile Security, especially in the context of your business (or your client’s organisation). And because you have a list of questions to choose from, you’ll be surprised at the un-expected gaps in your knowledge, understanding and definitions surrounding the business processes of Mobile Security.

Want to know more about the Mobile Security Self Assessment Toolkit? Check it out in our store.

What is a great question to ask about Help Desk Management?

Effective and efficient Help Desk Management is important for a wide range of businesses and companies. Private and Public companies use Help Desks and Service Desks to stay in touch with their customers, Irrespective of them being for profit or not for profit. 

Running a smooth help desk is not just important for IT departments and companies, it is an important skill set for many different industries. A successful help desk creates improved customer satisfaction as well as an improved business image. After all, we all make mistakes and unforeseen things happen but it’s how you handle the impact is what separates the successful companies from their lesser counterparts.

That’s why this month (March 2019) one of the Self Assessment Toolkits is the Help Desk Management (Available for Silver and Gold Level Subscribers).

Let’s take a deep dive into this toolkit and how the questions help you to identify the effectiveness and efficiency of the Help Desk at your work (or your customer’s )

In this toolkit there are 3 different sets of questions:

1. Checklists

The questions in the checklist are useful if you need a selection of questions in relation to Incidents, Management or Service. These checklists are specifically for those topics. For example, with your team you can go through the questions to identify if you’ve missed certain aspects of Incident management.
You can also use these checklists to quickly find areas where you can improve. These areas will be mostly around measurement, analysis and documentation. It’s one thing to be able to guess the answer to the question – the challenge is to find the correct and documented answer.

In this checklist you will find questions like:

• What do outages and major incidents cost you?
• How quickly are you responding to incidents?
• Who has the ultimate responsibility in case of a cyber incident?
  

2) Self Assessment Questionnaire.

In STEP 2 you will find a PDF book with a full Self Assessment and an Excel Spreadsheet with up to 1000 unique and specific questions in relation to improving the management of a Help Desk.

The Self Assessment questions are organised based on the maturity level of the business processes in the organisation.

For the benefit of the Self Assessment questionnaires, we identified 7 levels of process maturity:

• Recognise —> You recognise that Help Desk Management is a thing and that it may be of interest to you and your organisation.
• Define —> Now that you know that you need to invest in a more robust Help Desk Management system you need to define what this means to you and your organisation. What are the timelines you accept for incident handling? What are the definitions of a customer, VIP customer etc.?
  This section is important to set the foundation for improvement projects down the track, ensuring you don’t waste time and money by implementing the wrong thing for the company.
• Measure —> You have a Help Desk and a management system in place, but are you measuring the tasks and activities? How well do you document your measurements, and are you considering dependencies between measurements? To what level of granularity do you need to measure and report in relation to Help Desk Management?
• Analyse —> Measuring is great, but the raw data doesn’t tell the story. What type of analysis do you perform around Help Desk Management?
• Improve —> Now that you have an analysis of the measurements that you’ve taken about your Help Desk Management system you can start planning for your improvement projects. How can you implement ongoing and continual improvement as a second nature in all your processes? What needs to be done to achieve this?
• Control —> Once you achieve this level of maturity it becomes all about controlling the input, the activities and the output. How can we control every step in the management system so we can proactively change course when we feel things are going off the rails?
• Sustain —> The ultimate level of maturity and sophistication. It’s (relatively) easy to achieve a result once, but can you sustain this level of quality without negative side effects?

The questions in this questionnaire help you improve the Help Desk Management processes as you’re getting a deeper understanding of the process maturity across various areas in the organisation (or even between individuals). It helps to identify the gaps in knowledge, processes and documentation. 

You can use the questionnaire ‘as is’ to perform a Self Assessment in the organisation. Or you select a number of questions as the basis of an executive presentation or white paper to start a conversation about the Help Desk Management Processes that are currently in operation in the business.

You can also randomly select a question to use as a communication starter at your weekly meetings with the Help Desk team. 

NOTE: The questionnaire can be a bit overwhelming, especially when you’re looking at 1000 questions. It’s quite OK to cherry pick a number of questions from each section to have a more manageable sub-set of the questions to go through with your team. Also – make sure you mention to your team that they can skip questions they don’t understand or that don’t make sense in the context of the Help Desk you’re running in the company.

3) Implement, Track, Follow up and Revise Strategy

The questions in this section of the Self Assessment all focus on the implementation of Help Desk Management process activities and how to track the results. We recognise that most of our clients will use a specific project management methodology or toolset already in their organisation. But it never hurts to have a fresh look at the specific questions to ask at the different stages of an implementation project.

For example, as part to the Executing Process Group there are questions about change requests, quality audit, team performance assessment and Issue logs.

For example, in the Team Performance Assessment checklist you can find questions like:

• To what degree can all members engage in open and interactive conversations?
• How do you keep key people outside the group informed about its accomplishments?
• To what degree are the goals ambitious?
  

Want the Help Desk Management Self Assessment Toolkit at 60% discount? Sign up as a The Art of Service Member.

At the beginning of a new quarter or new year we tend to look forward and think about ways we can do things differently this time. We have goals to achieve and targets to reach…

In the past you’ve used several tactics and techniques that made you the person you are today; with the knowledge and skillset you have today. But it also means that you may not have achieved the results you were hoping or aiming for.

So it’s time to shake things up – to start using a different technique.

After all – “Doing the same things and expecting a different result is a sign of insanity” – isn’t that true?

Now, look back at the last year and consider what did work. What gave your clients the best value for money? What made them want to hire you again?

The power of questions

I’d like to take a guess to say that what you clients appreciate most about you as a consultant is that you know when to ask the right questions. You ask questions that makes them think. Perhaps think differently about a situation, or to even consider a specific solution in the first place. (the famous ‘AHA’ moment).

Sure, they appreciated the legwork you did for them at times, and they would have loved the briefs and documents you produced. But most of that could have been done in house by internal staff members.

Think about tit… Nobody in the company had the knowledge and skills to ask the right questions in such a way that it helped with the increased awareness around a topic and to guide the implementation project forward. That’s why they engaged your services and that’s why they would happily hire you again.

What does all this have to do with the Self Assessment Toolkits? Well, as you would have guessed.. the toolkits are packed with questions. Each subject has up to 1000 different questions that you can choose from. You choose your questions wisely based on your assessment of your client’s organisational needs. (that’s where your knowledge and skill set is important).

Is this company new to the implementation of the subject? Stick with the basic questions mentioned in the chapters ‘define’ and ‘Recognise’. These chapters contain questions that are more generic and cover a broad range of topics.

Or is your client’s company more advanced and looking on how to control and sustain the benefits gained from previous implementation and improvement projects?

It’s up to you how you want to use the questions. You can collate them into a brief or white paper document for your client where you answer the questions based on your knowledge of the company.

Or you use the questions as a conversation starter during stakeholder meetings.

There is of course the option to use the questions as is and have a team go through the Self Assessment to find out the current maturity of the organisation.

As a consultant you have so many ways to make use of these questions. All of them will increase the value you offer to your clients and improve your own understanding of the subject at hand.

Unsure about how to use the Self Assessment in your specific situation? Feel free to contact us for additional support and to answer any of your questions.
For more information on the Self Assessments and a full overview of the available topics, go to store.theartofservice.com/self-assessments/