Procedure

The University‘s Research Ethics Committee approved the researcher‘s hosting of a focus group and informed consent was obtained from the corporation that employed the focus group participants and from the participants themselves. The focus group hosted in the pilot study was of the type known as an exploratory approach focus group, designed NOT for the participants, but for the researcher, to stimulate thinking and for the formation of future research to be undertaken, based on outcomes from the focus group (Calder, 1977).

The information obtained is pre-scientific—as it is not designed to obtain quantitative data upon which statistical analysis can be performed—but to use everyday speech and knowledge and apply them in a manner to allow further work to be done by the researcher.

After obtaining approval from the University to proceed, it was necessary to identify a corporation that was large enough that the number of incident managers it employed was likely to provide the a priori sought by the researcher. The company selected was Pyrux.

Pyrux is a pseudonym for an international data management business with its world headquarters in Australia. Pyrux Corporation has its main office in Melbourne, Victoria and employs more than 20,000 people. It has sales and support offices across Australia, New Zealand, Asia, England and the United States. Pyrux has an IT organisation that is among the largest in the southern hemisphere. It had annual revenues of more than ten billion Australian dollars in 2008 (its fiscal year ends in June) and has been in business for more than a century. Its combination of mainframe computers, midrange servers, and more than 25,000 desktops, coupled with its excess of 1,200 software applications (including Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS)) applications, vendor-built custom applications and some developed internally) led the researcher to conclude that its IT Service Management organisation would have an incident management team that would be large enough to have candidates with a broad spectrum of incident management experience and significant enough unplanned outages that members of its organisation would agree to participate in the focus group. The researcher met with three of the senior corporate executives at Pyrux, who, in turn, met with the corporation‘s legal representatives to obtain approval to extend

invitations to a subset of its employees to participate in the focus group. Those individuals who did participate provided their written consent to be included. Complete anonymity was assured to both the corporation whose employees participated in the focus group and to each individual participant.

Prior to hosting the focus group, the researcher outlined a set of questions to ask the focus group members. An initial set of questions was developed that asked about individual experiences of, by, and with incident managers, specifically regarding the actions of incident managers when an unplanned outage occurs. Questions were selected within the ITIL incident management framework, allowing a broad incident management discussion to occur. Allowing a broad discussion provided the moderator and researcher with the ability to contain the discussion solely to incident management and not allow it to broaden to other functions in the service support environment. The questions were pilot tested in the form of a verbal discussion held prior to the date on which the focus group was hosted with academics at the University, the researcher, and the professional moderator. Some questions were modified to extract specific citations about personal and professional experiences from the participants concerning their work with, or as, incident managers.

The focus group was held as a two-hour discussion with participation of all members, with one fifteen-minute break. The event was held in a private conference room at the Pyrux headquarters; all participants worked in or near that building, so face-to-face participation (rather than by telephone or via video conferencing) was assured. The event was professionally recorded and transcribed. The questions asked of the focus group were specifically designed to ensure active participation and broad input about the characteristics displayed by incident managers, as well as the approaches incident managers use to solve problems and restore service when unplanned outages occur. A sample of the questions raised by the researcher to the focus group participants about behavioural characteristics displayed by incident managers is presented in Table 3-2.

Table 3-2. Sample Questions Concerning Behavioural Characteristics Sample Questions Concerning Behavioural Characteristics Raised with Focus Group Participants

Sample Question 1:

Okay . . . what other abilities, do incident managers need?

Attitudes or traits. You said decisive. Are there others?

Sample Question 2:

Incident Manager 2 used a term, competent. Can anyone say, what are the competencies you expect from an effective incident manager?

Sample Question 3:

So can we just think of just personality? What sort of a personality strikes you when you see someone whom you would say is a best leader and their personality characteristics.

Sample Question 4:

We talked from incident manager’s perspective what are the administrative roles they perform in their task, in their role.

Now, you from a client perspective, what do you think is, what do you think in terms of an administrative role?

Sample Question 5:

What do you think? How do you build that trust in this sort of a confronting situation? Is it that people are so aware that this is only a situation which makes you behave like that and so the next minute once a situation or incident is done you are back to normal and you behave as normal and concerned about others? Is that how it happens?

In addition to raising questions with the focus group concerning the characteristics that incident managers display while working to restore service, questions were also raised about the approaches incident managers use to solve problems. A sample of the questions raised by the researcher to the focus group participants about approaches-to-solving-problems is presented in Table 3-3.

Table 3-3. Sample Questions Concerning Approaches-to-Solving- Sample Questions Concerning Approaches-to-Solving-Problems Raised with Focus Group Participants

Sample Question 1:

. . . what do you think would be the most important thing to restore services . . . ?

Sample Question 2:

So, what is the duty of care involved in restoring service?

Sample Question 3:

You are saying you must understand the nature of the problem before you can start to solve it, is that right?