Success in ITIL & Experience Management requires Flow Management
85% of sector experts believe capabilities for Flow Management (FM) will be "must-haves" when switching ITSM tool. This 3-minute read explains why it is needed.
Summary
What is Flow Management?
Flow Management (FM) is a set of capabilities for Support Lifecycle Management that gives rise to good service ticket management for AI enablement. Unique to the Focus Framework, its complementary practice is Team Performance Management that's centred on inclusive Contribution Recognition. Together, they form a methodology and standard that brings twenty good practice principles to life by continuously guiding teams in the best way possible.
Flow Management makes the most of modern service tool technology, so can be considered to be "digital transformation for teams"; a modern service system of "true best practice" covering all operational needs.
What's its essence?
For the reason that it's not present in ITIL best practice guidance, IT organisations are usually missing something fundamental - and essential. Consistent status management.
Flow Management is Systematic Status Management.
At a basic level, consistent status management produces insight into the nature of all open tickets, of what needs to happen next. By then introducing Activity Prioritisation (AP) that's based on it, teams naturally become focused on the right activity at the right time for attentive service - the essential quality necessary for good service experiences.
Furthermore, being focused on activity ahead of tickets means that support's flow becomes known, through Flow Metrics.
Aside from providing detailed operational insight, Flow Metrics form Flow Management capabilities in the first place. The process is a positive cycle that together with Contribution Recognition fixes almost all of supports many operational issue. Other aspects of Flow Management fix the rest.
The ITIL process gap that FM fills
Few would disagree that for complex business operations such as IT support, a process is needed that makes sense of the complexity, to guide teams through it as effectively as possible.
ITIL is a framework though, not a methodology. Framework processes include only the most basic necessary steps. In the case of IT support, the fundament is to categorise, prioritise, assign, respond, and close tickets, involving escalation where necessary. So this is the extent of the ITIL process.
For tickets that are not completed at "respond", what needs to happen next on the run-up to "close" is not covered by the ITIL process. In other words, the support activity required for progression across a ticket's mid-lifecycle is completely unguided.
ITIL does not recognise the gap and what is required to fill it, so in its dominant position as universally accepted industry best practice, the imperative for good status management is not often realised and AP has remained elusive.
All ITSM tools are built on ITIL processes, so every IT organisation worldwide suffers the consequences - 21 common operational issues inherent of the process void, and symptoms of the issues: unresponsiveness, unmanaged backlog, many "chase escalations", and many weak or bad service experiences.
Without Flow Management... What to do?
A framework's processes must be built-upon to make them fit for purpose. Indeed, when moving to a new ITSM tool, this is what a good implementation will do.
But without the benefits of good status management being realised, improved ticket management is neither targeted nor accomplished.
So the operational gap persists and this is where you are:
Without Flow Management, there is very little that can be done about it, no matter the tool you use. The symptoms of weak support - unresponsiveness, backlog, chased tickets and bad service experiences - can only be tolerated.
Experience Management's biggest challenge?
IT Experience Management (ITXM) brings attention to the reality of frequent frustration from unacceptable slowness and service failure, but without improving support's process, 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 SLA's 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 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 weak process causing major operational issues in every IT support organisation worldwide, ITXM-led improvement initiatives aren't just overly challenged, they have a negative effect.
Overall...
The main thing to conclude, though, is this:
To prevent 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.
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