1: The Eureka moment

David, Opimise's founder, was employed to improve service delivery for a large UK property company.

The Backdrop

4,000 supported staff.
Large volume of unmanaged backlog.
A survey showed that employees didn't often chase knowing it was unlikely to have a result.
Most upper tier ticket queues were excessive because support was treated as secondary.
Frequent failure to meet needs.
Periodic "ticket culls" were necessary, removing large volumes of unmanaged tickets.
Weak performance measures meant management was "in the dark" as to the problem's extent.

AP Transition

At the beginning of the assignment, several Flow Management capabilities had previously been derived and successfully implemented - Contribution Recognition, Service Desk Reinvolvement & Learning, and Chase Escalation Management, but AP had not.
To make sense of disorganised workload, ticket status codes were introduced for the Service Desk to add to a ticket's subject whenever progressed but not closed, differentiating one open ticket from another. The approach formed a rudimentary first incarnation of Activity Prioritisation by focus being brought to what the Service Desk team needed to do. Each status code reflected what needed to happen next for the ticket.
The status codes helped a lot, so were then transposed to meaningful statuses added to the ITSM tool, for workload to be organised on a "Progression Dashboard". This was the breakthrough realisation in the development of Flow Management. The importance of Consistent Status Management (CSM) for what came to be known as Activity Prioritisation, had been devised.

Outcomes