What is Flow Management & where is Service Experience without it?

The Key Facts give Flow Management its place. 85% of sector experts believe Activity Prioritisation will be "must-have" when switching tool. Contribution Recognition, too, but what exactly is Flow Management, and where is Experience Management without it?

The backdrop

In the current evolution of IT Service Management, AI leads lean efficiencies. Experience Management (XM) leads what really matters - the service experience - and Humanising IT leads the impetus for empathy with what stakeholders would expect of a service plus business collaboration to ensure it, to create value through carefully designed best-fit solutions.

Flow Management joins them to standardise reformed fundamentals that are required in people-provided IT support, laying a solid foundation for success in both XM and AI. For Humanising IT, when support customers are asked what they would like IT to provide for them, reliable, timely service that's easy to receive will always feature. Flow Management is the means to provide it.

What exactly is Flow Management?

Flow Management (FM) is the Support Ops Focus Framework (SOFF) central practice - a set of tool-based capabilities for Support Lifecycle Management (SLM), aka Service Ticket Management.

FM is based on Activity Prioritisation (AP). Of AP's five types, one is utilised depending on a service tool's functional capabilities and an organisation's objectives. In standard AP (sAP), "Progression Scheduling" continuously guides teams to carry-out the right activity at the right time.

Flow Management and SOFF's second practice, Team Performance Management (TPM) that is based on Contribution Recognition, bring SOFF's twenty good practice principles to life in the best way possible within the constraints of a service tool, covering all operational needs including attentiveness, teamwork, performance, and continual improvement.

Overall, Flow Management is about service tool utilisation to guide and assist teams in everything they need to do for always timely, attentive service provision.

Aside from Activity Prioritisation, other tool-dependant FM capabilities that can be adopted to increase operational maturity include Team Together, Service Desk Reinvolvement and Learning, Progression Automation, and Flow Monitoring. Joined with those for TPM, SOFF methodology comprises a complete and fully integrated service system enabling any chosen level of Digital Enterprise Service Maturity to be attained.

TPM capabilities enhance Flow Management and are effectively a part of it, making FM the overall term used for the methodology.

In its advanced forms, because Flow Management (including TPM) utilises modern (digital) service tool functionality that didn't exist when ITIL became standard practice over three decades before, it is optimal people-provided Incident and Request Management for the digital age.

Comparison to ITIL

ITIL is a broad framework that covers all of IT Service Management (ITSM). Centred on practices, not processes, its advice is non-prescriptive and unspecific. Its purpose is to be a flexible starting point from which an organisation can develop suitable ways of working that must usually include strong governance and management to help ITIL's basic processes be successful.

The Focus Framework for Flow Management is the opposite. It is a highly practical methodology that is dedicated to the many specific operational needs of IT support alone. Flow Management capabilities are easy to introduce, usually "off the shelf" and with no resistance to change because they are not change, rather adjustment for enhancement. Success is achieved simply by their use because FM processes provide all the guidance and assistance teams need to be self-managing and highly effective.

Overall:

As a framework, ITIL processes are minimum operational requirements. Flow Management builds on top to mature an organisation's way of working.

Rather than it being necessary to figure-out a suitable way of working based on ITIL principles and those for Experience Management and Humanising IT, which typically leaves IT organisations operationally immature due to the challenges involved in doing so, Flow Management provides all the answers that cannot be improved.

In most support environments, only through Flow Management can teams achieve their purpose of always timely, attentive service provision, i.e., reliability.

Activity Prioritisation is key

As unprecedented best practice guidance that is far more than being a framework because prescriptive methodology is at its centre, and being dedicated only to the needs of IT support, all of the Focus Framework's principles and operational requirements were previously missing from best practice guidance. With Activity Prioritisation at the centre of the methodology, AP's principles and requirements are the most important:

Principles:

"Timely support activity for ticket progression leads to timely completion."

"Support activity must be prioritised ahead of tickets."

"Every open ticket is in a situation that has, and should be given, a meaningful status, and like for new tickets requiring a first response, each status has an appropriate lead time before onward progression should happen."

"When IT receive information requested from a customer, follow-up should at worst be as quick as a ticket’s first response."

The related operational requirement is:

Consistent status management (CSM): A full set of "meaningful statuses" must be established and continuously used to clearly identify what needs to happen next for all open support tickets, differentiating one from another and providing snapshot insight into the nature of support's workload.

Key meaningful statuses as set out in the Focus Framework are described in lesson 6 of the SOFF Foundation course.

Activity Prioritisation is Systematic Status Management - CSM's tool-enabled process. Standard AP (sAP) is a breakthrough that gives rise to consistently timely activity for attentive service, pinpoint expectations management, plus deep service insight and exception management capabilities through Flow Metrics.

With attentiveness comes what matters - good Customer Experience. AP makes it happen and Flow Metrics make its success known.

Flow Metrics also form the sAP process in the first place. It is a positive cycle that is made even stronger with the addition of Contribution Recognition.

Like AP, Contribution Recognition is also about what teams must do - activity, not tickets. It brings another key Focus Framework principle to life - that where possible, everyone is responsible for fulfilling support's primary purpose of always timely, attentive service provision irrespective of ticket assignment / ownership.

SOFF identifies twelve types of measurable support activity. Six are high-priority types that are surfaced by advanced AP capabilities. If advanced AP is the way of working adopted by an organisation, high priority activity is presented to everyone in a support team to be collectively "swarmed", motivated by the teamwork being specifically recognised through the Contribution Recognition capability. In this way, advanced AP breaks down ticket queue silos.

If moving to "The Digital Channel Service Desk", the most advanced form of AP can be adopted by the Service Desk. In Perfect Prioritisation, teammates own several status queues on rota, not a personal ticket queue, so that every Service Desk ticket has multiplied cover for the entire time that it is open. Ticket queue silos no longer exist. Service is as quick and reliable as possible.

Standard AP removes major operational issues intrinsic of ITIL's "minimum viable" approach, but it is in fact a much simpler way of working:

The status quo without it...

In most IT environments, frequent slow, unresponsive, and failed support - weak service provision - is unavoidable.

Experience Management's biggest challenge?

By gathering feedback at a scale and quality to make it far more useful, a practice of IT Experience Management (XM) brings attention to the reality of frequent frustration from untimely support, yet still, without Flow Management, there is very little that can be done about it.

In fact, when unmanaged tickets receive managerial focus, or if the use of "on-hold" is prohibited to encourage improved ticket management, a drive to meet ticket SLAs and keep ticket volume down leads to substantially increased service failure where "my ticket was not solved". This is shown in global benchmark data produced by HappySignals. Also shown is that timeliness falling short in up to half of tickets that are not completed "straight-off" does not change in organisations practicing XM. The only change is that the reduced proportion of tickets taking far too long is countered by the increased incidence of service failure due to premature ticket closure.

With a process that's too basic for the nature of support, ITXM-led improvement initiatives aren't just overly challenged, they have a negative effect.

While Flow Management fixes the problem of untimeliness, unresponsiveness, and support service failure, XM is still an extremely valuable aspect of IT Service Management for many reasons. In relation to Flow Management, XM data identifies with certainty that problems fixed by FM do exists, and the data measures improvement achieved through FM.

This White Paper provides more information but is not required for the SOFF Foundation course.

Why not subscribe to the Service System blog written for HDI SupportWorld, to receive a key insight about IT support's struggles weekly...