For heads of IT service and operations in mid-sized companies
Brightspire helps heads of IT service and operations find out exactly where the load is coming from, then stays long enough to take it out. Not a report. Not a framework handed over at the door.
Work arriving vs work cleared, in a team that never gets ahead.
If several of these are true, the problem is structural rather than a staffing gap — and structural problems respond to a different kind of work.
Ticket volume climbs every quarter and nobody can say precisely which categories are driving it.
The same three issues come back every month and get fixed again rather than fixed properly.
Users tell you a system is down before your monitoring does.
Your SLA reporting is green while the business tells a very different story.
Too much depends on one or two people, and everyone knows exactly who they are.
Changes go out and something breaks, and tracing it back to what changed takes hours.
Improvement work is always scheduled and never actually happens, because firefighting wins.
A previous consultant delivered a report. You can probably still find the file.
Who this is for. Heads of IT service and operations in companies of roughly 500 to 5,000 people — big enough that informal coordination has stopped working, not big enough to have a dedicated service-management function. Where that is not the case, Brightspire says so early rather than scoping a project around it.
Published benchmarks from the organisations that study IT support and operations for a living. Every figure below is sourced, and each one gets applied to your numbers rather than the industry's.
The range a single support ticket costs across North American service desks. The spread is almost entirely explained by operating maturity, not by company size.
HDI service desk benchmarkingHow much more a ticket costs once it escalates past the front line. Every failure to resolve at first contact multiplies the cost of that ticket.
MetricNet / HDI benchmarkingAverage time to resolve an incident, measured in business hours — with real-world spreads running from under one hour to nearly twenty-eight.
MetricNet global benchmarking dataShare of unplanned outages on business-critical services traced to people and process failures rather than technology. More than half of those trace specifically to change, configuration and release handling.
Gartner, via the Visible Ops HandbookOrganisations that cannot calculate what an hour of downtime actually costs them. Without that number, every argument about investment in operations is an argument about opinions.
ITIC hourly cost of downtime researchTransformation programmes that fall short of their objectives. Only around three in ten meet their targets and hold the improvement in place afterwards.
BCG, Flipping the Odds of Digital Transformation SuccessA note on the numbers: benchmarks describe a population, not your company. They frame the conversation and sanity-check what the diagnosis finds — never a substitute for measuring your own environment. Where a widely-repeated industry statistic does not hold up to scrutiny, it is left out.
No methodology language. Here is the whole thing in four sentences.
The starting point is how work reaches your IT team, what happens to it, and where it gets stuck. That assessment runs on your ticket data and your costs, not a generic benchmark, so the picture is yours rather than the industry's.
What comes back is a named list of things to fix, in priority order, with what each one is worth — and the arithmetic shown, so your finance team can attack it if they want to.
Where you want help doing the work rather than just knowing about it, delivery happens alongside your team. Your people keep the knowledge. When the engagement ends, the fix does not leave with it.
That is genuinely all of it. The value is not a secret method — it is senior operational experience applied properly to your operation, and an engagement that does not end at the recommendation.
A maturity assessment that ends in a slide deck and a proposal for a bigger project.
A framework rollout, where the framework was chosen before anyone looked at your data.
A team of juniors on site, with the senior person from the pitch appearing only at steering meetings.
Senior-led work that measures your actual operation, then fixes a named list of things with your team until it holds unaided.
The output of an engagement is not a document about your operation. It is a set of working playbooks — the thing a team member opens when something happens and follows without needing to track someone down first. Here is how every one of them is structured.
What starts this playbook, defined tightly enough that two different people would agree it applies. Vague triggers are why most runbooks go unused.
A named role that carries the work and a named role that decides when it escalates. Not a team name — teams do not make decisions, people do.
The ordered steps, with the decision points made explicit: what to check, what the branches are, and what to do when the answer is unclear.
Who gets involved, at what threshold, and how fast. Written before the pressure, because nobody negotiates escalation well at 2am.
The one number that tells you whether this playbook is working, where it comes from, and who looks at it. A playbook with no measure quietly stops being followed.
What has to change in the business for this playbook to need rewriting — so it expires deliberately instead of rotting silently.
The diagnostic instrument itself — the domains examined, the questions asked, the scoring model, and the way findings convert into a prioritised scope — is the part clients pay for, and it stays between Brightspire and them. What is shown above is the shape of the output, not the method that produces it. The free maturity screen is a genuine sample of that method.
Three steps, and each one has to earn the next. You can stop after any of them and still be better off than when you started.
Step one
Free
A structured read on where your operation stands today, across the areas that determine whether support runs predictably.
Step two
€10,000–€15,000
A deep examination of one bounded problem area, using your data, ending in a scoped plan rather than a set of observations.
Step three
Baseline fee + share of the outcome
Hands-on delivery with your team, building the playbooks and taking the load out — paid partly on what the work actually returns.
The commercial model is borrowed from industry, where the shift from selling equipment to selling results is decades old and well proven.
Jet engine manufacturers stopped selling engines and started selling flying hours. The airline buys uptime, and the manufacturer keeps the engine running because that is what they are paid for. Lighting manufacturers made the same move — the building buys illumination, while the supplier keeps ownership of the fixtures and the maintenance.
In both cases the supplier's incentive flips. There is no revenue in selling more hardware, or more hours. There is only revenue in the thing working.
Applied to IT support and operations, that means you are not buying consulting days. You are buying a measured reduction in operational load — and part of the fee only becomes payable once that reduction shows up in your own numbers.
The baseline is fixed during diagnosis, from your ticket volumes, handling times and fully-loaded costs — before any work starts, so it cannot be redefined afterwards to flatter the result. The performance share is calculated against that baseline, on a method agreed in writing at the outset. Where a change cannot be attributed to the engagement with reasonable confidence, it is excluded rather than argued over.
The practice was founded on twenty years of running IT inside large organisations, not on advising from outside them. That means inheriting other people's audits, other people's recommendations and other people's half-finished transformations — and having to make them work on Monday morning with the team actually available.
It is the reason engagements here do not end at the handover of findings. What happens to that document afterwards is already well understood.
It costs nothing and commits you to nothing. At the end you will have a clear read on where your operation stands — and enough to judge whether a paid diagnosis is worth having at all.
mb@brightspire-advisory.com