What is Flow Management & where is Service Experience without it?
85% of sector experts believe capabilities for Flow Management will be "must-haves" when switching ITSM tool. Here's what it is and why it's needed.
Summary
The backdrop
AI leads lean IT. Experience Management (XM) leads what really matters. Flow Management leads success for both by reforming the mainstay of ITSM - people-provided IT support.
What is Flow Management?
One half of the Focus Framework methodology and standard, Flow Management (FM) is a set of tool-based capabilities for service ticket lifecycle management, continuously guiding teams to provide support in the best way possible.
Built upon twenty good practice principles that cover all operational needs including attentiveness, teamwork, performance, and continual improvement, Activity Prioritisation (AP) and Contribution Recognition are Flow Management's base capabilities.
Its capabilities utilise modern (digital) service tool functionality that didn't exist when ITIL became standard practice over three decades before. Technology driven, Flow Management is a modern way of working (WoW); Optimal people-provided Incident and Request Management for the digital age.
Activity Prioritisation is key
Being the only guidance dedicated to IT support, the Focus Framework brings forward important operational principles and requirements that were previously missing from best practice frameworks. The most important is for AP:
Principle: "Timely support activity leads to timely ticket completion. To meet service needs and expectations, support activity must be prioritised ahead of tickets."
The related operational requirement is:
- Consistent status management: 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 true nature of support workload.
Activity Prioritisation (AP) is Systematic Status Management. By adding tool functionality for status-based "progression scheduling", standard AP (sAP) is a breakthrough that gives rise to timely activity for attentive service.
With attentiveness comes what matters - good Customer Experience. AP makes it happen and its metrics - 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.
An organisation adopts one of four types of AP depending on circumstances and target level of maturity. If moving to "The Digital Channel Service Desk", Perfect Prioritisation is the most advanced in which 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.
In that it removes all operational issues intrinsic of the ITIL approach and produces "pinpoint expectations management", AP is a much simpler way of working.
The status quo without it...
Global acceptance of ITIL processes provided as standard in ITSM tools means that without Flow Management, this is where you are:
Even if support is over-staffed and micromanaged, frequent slow, unresponsive, and failed support is unavoidable.
Experience Management's biggest challenge?
IT Experience Management (XM) brings attention to the reality of frequent frustration from untimely support, but without Flow Management, still, 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 SLAs and keep ticket volume down leads to substantially increased service failure where "my ticket was not solved". It's a fact shown in global benchmark data produced by HappySignals.
Equally as striking, benchmark data shows that timeliness falls short in 10% of all tickets, and over half of these turn bad. More than three quarters of support tickets are completed straight-away (timeliness and experience is mainly good), so the balance is this...
This level of weak support has persisted over the years. When ITXM is introduced, the only change is that the rise in "my ticket was not solved" replaces completion taking too long: service failure is more prolific instead.
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.
Overall...
The main thing to conclude, though, is this:
If aiming to end frequent slow, unresponsive and failed support, an improved process - Flow Management - is absolutely necessary.
To learn more about why success is impossible without Flow Management, tap here.
Why not subscribe to the Service System blog written for HDI SupportWorld, to receive a key insight about IT support's struggles weekly...
