This company’s helpdesk team discovered what most helpdesk teams learn when they first embark on a Six Sigma journey …that only reacting to the incident tickets will never get you to a significantly improved processConsists of input, value-add, and output.. By understanding the root cause, and controlling the “inputs”that create the tickets, you will see the significant reduction happen.
The helpdesk team discovered that they one of their significant inputs to Outlook Incident Tickets was due to unscheduled Internet Line outages by their provider causing Office 365 Email access to fail. They had no control over this input. What they did have control over was the way information was circulated letting users know of the outage.
In the unimproved process, information about the outage was not distributed. This led to users trying to connect to Office 365 and failing. This resulted in an increase of incident tickets.
In the improved process, a number of solutions have been employed to notify the users of an outage as soon as it happens. These solutions repeat every ½hour to keep the users informed of status. This has reduced Office 365 Email incident tickets that resulted from an outage by over 85%.
Value stream analysis can uncover activities that add waste to a typical help desk organization. Then that analysis can naturally lead to the implementation of a Lean Six Sigma help desk design. That process and descriptions of what is necessary at the organizational level to ensure that the Lean help desk succeeds are explored here.
A young boy, having lost his parents and home, begins to earn a living aboard a pirate ship. One day out at sea he encounters a mermaid who briefly mentions a treasure-filled shipwreck lying on the ocean floor. Although no one believes in his encounter, he strongly believes that she holds the answer to his poverty, and sets out to find her again. He discovers that the treasure comes at a cost which he is not expecting to pay, but through his quest he finds valuable lessons, which he capitalizes on as he travels along. He does so profoundly, and documents this into verses of a song: a song that ultimately reflects his quest for purpose, truth, and identity.
The iTRIZ methodology can be useful in helping inventors to better understand structural and functional alternatives to the inventions they have conceived. Often the process of determining alternatives, if considered to any significant extent, is performed based on the limited knowledge and experience of one inventor or a small handful of co-inventors. However, the iTRIZ methodology, when applied properly and rigorously, offers the potential to help such inventors to develop alternatives to their inventions (or the core components of their inventions) in a more systematic way. In this manner, the methodology offers the promise of enabling inventors (and their patent attorneys) to define claims for inventions that can provide far greater breadth than might otherwise be possible with traditional methods (e.g., relying on “rule of thumb” approaches, or approaches developed in significant part from one’s own limited or relative personal experience).
Once these alternatives become available, it should be possible to conduct on a straight-forward basis any necessary prior art searches and novelty and obviousness determinations. The key advantage offered is the apparent increase in inventive breadth that systematic and rigorous application of the iTRIZ methodology offers. Of course, a written description of appropriate breadth must be crafted to support the additional number of claims on alternative embodiments of the inventions, but this task too should become more straight-forward and should aid the efforts of prior art researchers.
Lastly, one of the most significant advantages of an iTRIZ enhanced invention approach is the potential for creating a portfolio of patent rights that is both deeper and broader than might otherwise have been possible. These attributes of the methodology should enable inventors to create robust “patent fences” around their core inventions that achieve enhanced licensing value while also reducing the potential risks of having to defend against inter partes reviews before the US Patent & Trademark Office since with more patent assets to assert, the lower the likeli