Quality Management

For quite some time, I couldn't put my fingers to this role. It wasn't exactly mapping to any traditional function in most of the Dutch companies' IT department. 

I learned on the job. It was for DiDi (the Chinese Uber) tailor-made to handle incident, problem and change management. Since the company has her headquarter in China (with the entire Technology and Engineering team), while operating in some 20 countries internationally (with local Business, Ops and CRM teams), my team was filling the gap in between. To mitigate the challenge of time difference and language barrier, we defined and implemented a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) consists of incident reporting, troubleshooting, release & deployment, legal consult & aftermath, and retrospective & Optimization. We trained the organization. We measured the results. We achieved operational stability. 

But we didn't stop there. Beyond stability, we were going after operational excellence. Here we established a structure to make IT and Business/Ops/CRM better collaborate with each other. We were the bridge, the crucial piece in the feedback loop. 

It was until later did I realize, that such function do exist here as well, even without the language, culture or geographic challenges. Because the gap between IT and the Business tends to exist all over (hence the philosophy of DevOps inspired). 

My function is part of Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) - which has everything to do with making IT better serve the business & customer. I know - when one of our hub managers in Egypt caught up in an incident-incurred custody and was finally released, and said to me "God bless you" - that all my work was worth it.