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 business collaboration to co-create value through carefully designed best-fit solutions.

Flow Management joins them to reform the fundamentals - people-provided IT support - laying the solid foundation that's necessary 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). Based on Activity Prioritisation (AP, aka "Progression Scheduling"), the capabilities continuously guide teams to carry-out the right activity at the right time through natural processes.

Flow Management and SOFF's second practice, Team Performance Management (TPM) that is based on Contribution Recognition, are built upon SOFF's twenty good practice principles that cover all operational needs including attentiveness, teamwork, performance, and continual improvement.

Aside from AP, other 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.

TPM capabilities enhance Flow Management and are effectively a part of it, making FM the overall capability.

Flow Management (including TPM) utilises modern (digital) service tool functionality that didn't exist when ITIL became standard practice over three decades before. Technology driven, they form a modern way of working (wOw) - 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 specific and highly practical methodology dedicated to IT support. Flow Management capabilities are easy to introduce, usually "off the shelf", with success achieved simply by their use because its processes provide all the guidance teams need to be self-managing.

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 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.

Activity Prioritisation is key

As an unprecedented methodology dedicated to the needs of IT support, all of the Focus Framework's principles and operational requirements were previously missing from best practice guidance. Activity Prioritisation being central to SOFF and its base capability, AP's principles and requirements are the most important:

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 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. Standard AP (sAP) is a breakthrough that gives rise to timely activity, pinpoint expectations management, and breakthrough metrics, 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.

Like AP, Contribution Recognition is also about activity, not tickets. It brings a second key 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, high priority activity is presented to everyone in a support team to be collectively "swarmed", motivated by the teamwork being specifically recognised. As such, advanced AP break-down ticket queue silos.

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.

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 experience - 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 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.

Benchmark data also shows that timeliness falls short in 10% of all tickets, and over half of these turn bad. With more than three quarters of support needs being met straight-away (timeliness and experience is mainly good), the balance is this...

When XM is introduced, the only change is that completion taking far too long is often replaced with "my ticket was not solved": 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.

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

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