Experience Management Office (XMO)

How to start establishing an XMO and why you should have one.

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Objective of an XMO

Create an Experience Management Office team responsible for managing and analyzing experience data weekly, monthly, and yearly to aid the IT organization's transformation into a more human-centric entity.

Impact of an XMO

Setting up an Experience Management Office (XMO) will enable the involvement of multiple stakeholders in ITXM decision-making by analyzing experience data on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis - enabling change to happen.

About this ITXM Best Practice

Contributors:
Neil Keating / BrightHorse
Pasi Nikkanen / HappySignals

Reading time:
10 minutes

Level:
Strategic

Updated:
2nd February 2023

What is an Experience Management Office (XMO)?

Experience Management Office is the group of people, either a virtual or dedicated team, sitting behind your Experience Metrics and your Experience Level Agreements (XLAs). Your XMO will be the torchbearer for Experience Management to evangelize the benefits and impact IT Experience Management has on IT end-users and the company's employees.
 
Organizations need to have people creating, updating, and managing the Experience Levels, looking at the data and understanding precisely what that data is telling you. If you haven't got people doing that, then there's a danger that your XLAs and Experience Metrics become "nice to have" things. If no one is looking at them, managing them, and trying to understand what that experience data is telling you, then it will become an overblown reporting function more than anything else.
 
There are excellent resource links at the bottom of this page, where you can learn more about XMOs, so here we focus on the overview and how it ties in with the practices of ITXM.

What is the mission of an Experience Management Office (XMO)?

The XMO's mission is to handle experience data, including technical data that affects how end-users work and what they consider most important to improve. They manage this data to improve end-users' overall experience.

When should you build an Experience Management Office (XMO)?


Building an XMO should be one of the first things to start with. It doesn’t have to be perfect from day one, but establishing IT Experience Management in your organization needs to be owned by a team rather than a single individual.

How to implement an Experience Management Office (XMO)?

Here are some best practices on setting up and implementing an Experience Management Office.

Find the right leader

  • The person interested in the experience
  • Key to getting XMO into use
  • Name this person the Experience Officer

 Gather the team

  • This can be a virtual team built around people who are interested in IT Experience Management and have already bought the idea that you need to focus on end-users' experiences to create better outcomes
  • To get more tips on choosing the right people, XLACollab and BrightHorse hold excellent courses.

Train your team

Create a mission and objectives for your team

  • Follow the best practice of Objective Setting to get started
  • Write it down so that it’s clear how your objective is related to end-users experiences of IT
  • What is the mission of an XMO?
  • What are your objectives in the next 12 months (strategic)?
  • What should you focus on in the next six months (tactical)?

Agree on the roles

  • Agree again in writing, who does what in the XMO
  • You can use models suitable to your organization, for example, based on Service Area, Business Area, or other expertise the XMO members possess.

Setup a meeting cadence

How does an Experience Management Office (XMO) operate?

 
“Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and KPIs are typically measured monthly and often forgotten. Then, before you know it, you've moved on to the next month. Experience is cumulative, so we're building it up over time.” - Neil Keating, BrightHorse
 
Experiences build up cumulatively over time, so managing them for the long term is important. Unlike operational metrics that require daily or weekly monitoring, experience needs to be observed and controlled over a more extended period. That's why it must take weekly, monthly, and quarterly actions to manage it effectively.

Measurement Tooling

Before an XMO can do its job, it must have Experience Data available. A good practice is to combine Experience Data with Operational Data; this helps to understand where experience is good and needs improvement.

Quarterly Strategy Meetings

A quarterly review is where you look at the trends of experience, what has gone up, gone down, or stayed the same. The key is to see what has happened and what needs to be done and address the change. A good rule of thumb is to ask two questions: “So What?” and “What now?” Update your objectives and review how they tie into the bigger strategy of the company.
 
Actions during the meeting:
  • Decide on findings: what needs to be done, or do you need to do anything
  • Identify the focus areas
  • Follow-up on continual improvement initiatives
  • Follow-up on XLAs
  • Communicate decisions to IT teams and adjust your monthly experience meeting scope and agenda based on the decisions

Monthly Experience Meetings

  • XMO schedules and runs the monthly experience meeting
  • Refer to the Monthly Experience Meeting best practice on how to run these meetings

Weekly Actions

All About Experience Management Office Video

For an introduction to the Experience Management Office (XMO), listen to this conversation with Neil Keating from BrightHorse, where we cover the basics so that you can get started and learn more. This is also available as an audio podcast: All About XMOs with Neil Keating

References and Resources

Here are some useful resources and providers related to this best practice.