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. So, what is Flow Management, and where is service experience without it?
Summary
The backdrop
In the current evolution of IT Service Management, AI leads lean efficiencies. Experience Management (XM) leads what really matters. Flow Management joins them to reform the fundamentals that is people-provided IT support, laying the foundation necessary for success in both XM and AI.
What is Flow Management?
Flow Management addresses the fact that ITIL standard practice for IT support is a ticket-focused approach, but tickets are not what is important.
Flow Management (FM) is a set of tool-based capabilities for support lifecycle management in which teams are continuously guided to carry-out the right activity at the right time.
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.
Other FM capabilities include Team Together, Quality and Security Protection, Service Desk Reinvolvement and Learning, Progression Automation, and Flow Monitoring, that together comprise a complete, fully integrated service system.
Flow Management utilises modern (digital) service tool functionality that didn't exist when ITIL became standard practice over three decades before. Technology driven, it is 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 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, 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. The most important is for Activity Prioritisation (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 nature of support's workload.
Activity Prioritisation (AP) 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.
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.
Although AP removes every operational issue intrinsic of ITIL's "minimum viable" approach, it's 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?
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.
Overall...
The main thing to conclude, though, is this:
If aiming to end weak support, an improved process - Activity Prioritisation for Flow Management - is absolutely necessary.
To learn more about why success is impossible without Flow Management, tap here.
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