ITIL & Support Flow Management: Key facts

ITIL's long-standing dominance shielded recognition of three pivotal facts. By bringing awareness of them alongside the solution, the Focus Framework is set to improve how the world works and receives service.


Here's the key facts:

  • With its processes the basis of all ITSM tools, ITIL is "baked-in" to the status quo, making its best practice stature powerful and unquestioned.
  • But ITIL is a framework, not a methodology.
  • Framework processes are minimum operational requirements - best practice at the most basic level.
  • ITIL's minimum requirement for IT support is a ticket-focused approach that provides guidance only for new ticket responses - nothing afterwards except a deadline for completion.
  • Typically, over a quarter of tickets are not completed at the initial response, requiring timely onward progression activity.
  • 1: Absence of a way to identify, prioritise, and manage progression activity is a big shortcoming - a critical gap in support's process.
  • 2: Consistent status management brings focus to required activity, enabling timeliness for all support situations. It is a key aspect of support's minimum requirement, but it is absent in ITIL.

    Absence in ITIL means absence in tools, forming a status quo in which for over three decades, support has been focused on the wrong thing.
  • Worsening outcomes further still, as a framework, supporting processes are also absent in ITIL, including a way to handle chased progression that frequently arises due to untimeliness inherent of the misfocused process.

Conclusively:

  • ITIL's process for IT support is absolutely minimal, devoid of capability to handle support's complexity.
  • Teams are left misfocused, and unfocused, unable to fulfil their purpose of always timely, attentive service provision.
  • Nonfluid communication leaves customers frequently ignored. Unmanaged backlog comprises inappropriate delays and ticket inertia / abandonment. Vague inaccurate timeframe expectations leave customers "in the dark". Chased weak outcomes are largely unidentified, and unmanaged too.
  • 3: Inextricably, without adding Support Flow Management, ITSM tools are not fit purpose.
  • ITIL's embedded stature shields recognition of this pivotal fact - the fact that support's process is too basic.
  • Metrics produced by the ticket-focused approach, primarily the ticket SLA, are equally unfocused and inadequate, also unfit for purpose. This fact is a key focus of the Experience Management movement in ITSM.
  • The assumption that weak support outcomes, including weak metrics, are unavoidable because ITIL best practice is in use, is a misguided fallacy.
  • Global harm in lost work time and customer frustration is immeasurable.
  • Reliable support is easily achieved with Flow Management.
  • 21 operational issues are removed.
  • Standard Activity Prioritisation (sAP) is a rare kind of process. Dead simple, it guides effectiveness with no need for governance and management.
  • Furthermore, sAP produces operational metrics that directly reflect service experience. Highly accurate and actionable, Flow Metrics transform both SLA and XLA.
  • Without Activity Prioritisation, in fighting a weak process, any attempt at improvement cannot get far and usually makes support outcomes worse. Experience Management initiatives are no exception.
  • ITIL is no longer process oriented. It has moved even further from being suitable as the benchmark for ITSM tool functionality and IT support's way of working.
  • A detailed methodology was always needed, not a framework of general guidance.
  • The Flow Management methodology's common entry point is that any ITSM tool can become nearly fit for purpose simply by consistent status management becoming an organisation's way of working.
  • Most support organisations realise that status management should be advantageous and have some non-standard statuses added. Doing it advantageously by aligning with the Focus Framework to enable consistent status management is a natural enhancement that teams are keen to adopt.
  • In any tool, "Activity focus" is gained through basic AP that uses a Progression Dashboard.

Presented through a single ticket list as per the way that teams have always worked, sAP is simpler than any other approach but is optimal, sequencing all required activity with perfect timing:

AP explainer

Next: See how Flow Management can be expected to swing every managed service bid, and much more besides...

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