Monthly Experience Meetings

How do you setup Monthly Experience Meetings with different stakeholders?

itxm-monthly-experience-meetings

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Objective of Monthly Experience Meetings

The goal of Monthly Experience Meetings is to establish a regular practice of discussing Experience Data and tracking the progress of initiatives, in order to increase awareness and understanding.

Impact of Monthly Experience Meetings

Monthly Experience Meetings provide a platform for participants to maintain a shared understanding of IT experience. These meetings provide an opportunity to discuss the progress made towards improving end-user experience.

About this ITXM Best Practice

Contributors:
Tuna Ozcer / Alhstrom-Munksjö
Pasi Nikkanen / HappySignals

Reading time:
7 minutes

Level:
Operational

Updated:
2nd February 2023

What are Monthly Experience Meetings?

Monthly Experience meetings are a retrospective of the previous month. Experience results are reviewed in detail by location, assignment group, service, channel, and other categories that focus on the area these teams are working with.
 
The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the experience the end-users have had with the services these teams provide. This will enable you to understand where the pain points and frustrations for the end-users are.
 
Depending on the organization’s size, several parallel meetings can happen in the IT department each month, as each meeting should be gathered around a specific IT area, such as the service desk. Each area should have its own monthly session, where they can openly discuss current issues without fear of being judged.

Why would you have Monthly Experience Meetings?

The primary reasons to hold regular Monthly Experience meetings are that they:
  • Remind teams about the Objective you have with ITXM
  • Give everyone a shared understanding of what impacts end-user experiences
  • Share the praises and good experiences end-users have had
  • Follow-up on continual improvement initiatives
  • Identify new continual improvement areas
  • Find improvement ideas directly from end-user feedback
The outcome of setting up Monthly Experience meetings is to bring IT Experience Management into the daily working practices of IT teams and to change the culture to gradually become more human-centric.

When would you put this practice into use?

These meetings should be started after 1-2 months of Experience Data gathering so that there's enough data to make decisions. However, there are progression steps one should go through to evolve.
 
If your organization is about to implement an Experience Management Office (XMO), it's a good idea to first start with the core XMO team that will run the Monthly Experience meetings.
 
If in doubt, start today.

How to progress with Monthly Experience Meetings?

  • 1st Month: Show and explain the data that is being gathered and answer any questions. Explain the progression, that you need to start making decisions in three months time.
  • 2nd Month: Show the data, but now have an open discussion to ensure that all questions are being listened to and that there's trust in the data within the team.
  • 3rd Month and future sessions: Now it’s time to start running the sessions with the agenda described below.

How should you run Monthly Experience Meetings?

Assign an Experience Officer

You should assign one team member, the Experience Officer, responsible for running the monthly meetings. Read more about the Experience Officer here. The Experience Officer is also the natural leader of an Experience Management Office (XMO).
 

Who to invite?

  • Experience Management Office members
  • Service / Business Area specific members
    • Assignment Group Leaders
    • Service Managers
    • IT Regional Managers
    • Process Owners (SIAM Office)
    • Business Relationship Managers
The list of invitees will be built around the XMO team and the specific area the monthly meeting handles. The audience can be wider in smaller organizations; in larger organizations, you probably need multiple smaller teams led by the XMO.
 

Before the session

  • Send a Monthly Experience Report to session participants before the meeting, or put a link to the reporting tool in the calendar invite to promote people regularly using the real-time data. Read more about the Monthly Experience Reporting here.
  • Prepare a list of free comments that mention team members and have 10 or 9 as the score. Refer to the best practice of Recognizing Job Well Done
  • Tag and gather free text comments from the past month that mention development and improvement ideas
  • Define scenarios you'll go through each month, For example:
    • Locations with the lowest Happiness
    • Assignment Groups with the lowest Happiness
  • Write the agenda and expected outcome of the meeting into your calendar invite.

Session Agenda (during the session) - 1 hour

  • Remind attendees about your common Objective for Experience Management
  • Give a quick few minutes overview of progression from the previous month (Monthly Experience Report) - 5 min
  • Appraise mentioned names for positive experiences
  • Use the experience data to:
    • Generate ideas and suggestions
    • Process problems
    • Review each scenario and have a discussion
    • Go through labeled feedback from each scenario
    • Ask open-ended questions like ”How can we fix this?” “So what?” “What now?”
    • Follow up on active initiatives
  • Agree on actions for the next month
    • Create new or update existing improvement initiatives

After the session

  • Send agreed actions and a reminder of how people can follow up on the experience data between meetings.

What not to do in the meeting

  • Don't judge or start defending
  • Allow everyone to get their opinions heard
  • Don’t treat it as a concept but as a formal practice
  • Don’t cancel monthly meetings even if you feel you're not doing anything; open discussion can trigger improvement ideas.

Monthly Experience Reporting

HappySignals Report-IT Incidents Overview

Monthly-Reports-in-HappySignals

Having simple and meaningful Monthly Experience Reports helps members have a quick understanding of where they are today. You should show the progress from previous months and the main pain points of your end-users. It's a good idea to create a report that speaks to the audience of this Monthly Meeting, so for example is it's about a specific Business Unit or Location, make sure you are showing data relevant to them. In HappySignals you can create automated Monthly Reports for each need.