ITIL Success | Opimise

Flow Management is

True Best Practice

for IT Support

The "Service System" blog

Start with the Key Facts Summary.

Support Flow Management fills a critical gap in ITIL standard practice.

The ITIL gap | Legacy issues | The imperative

The gap filled: Beyond the Key Facts - a more detailed view.

ITIL is global best practice for IT Service Management (ITSM) with a ticket-focused approach to support. Tickets are not what is important though - not what teams must do. Support activity is.

It's a pivotal fact: Support has always been focused on the wrong thing.

ITIL covers just two types of support activity. Ten others form the ITIL gap, harbouring many operational issues that cannot be eased much without Flow Management to overcome them.

The gap is prevalent in most environments - hardware break-fix less-so.

The gap exists because for decades, ITIL processes have been the basis of all ITSM tools, firmly embedding ITIL's way of working in the status quo and consolidating the framework's global stature with such strength that it remained unquestioned.

How does support compare to other ITSM processes?

All ITIL processes are minimum operational requirements typical of a broad framework. Most can be built-upon through ITSM tool configuration to be made fit for purpose, assisted by good governance and management where necessary.

IT support Incident and Request Management are the only exception. Due to the ITIL gap, no matter how well the two processes are configured and assisted, support's primary purpose of always timely, attentive service provision cannot be met.

With Incident and Request Management the main use for an ITSM tool, and because the gap can be filled, ITSM tools were never fit for purpose.

Missing processes widen the gap

The ITIL gap is widened by four supporting processes also being absent from the ITIL framework.

Absence in ITIL means absence in tools, further reducing fitness for purpose.

The stark reality is that worldwide, ITSM maturity has been minimised because ITSM tools provide ITIL processes alone. For IT support, lack of focus, misfocus, and consequent weak outcomes have been maximised.

The missing sub-processes, all being optional Flow Management capabilities with an associated AP status, are:

SLA Breach Prevention (available to basic AP). In standard practice Incident and Request Management, absence of a ticket management process through Activity Prioritisation means focus is not drawn to impending service level target breaches.
User Escalation (Chase) Management.
Coordinated Customer Contact (appointments). Many staff in almost any organisation are often not at their computer, so the ability to coordinate support is vital. With communication prone to failure at both ends, absence of coordinated customer contact is a substantial operational shortcoming that leads to tickets being chased but often falling to the same communication failure.
Service Desk Reinvolvement and Learning. New Service Desk team members inevitably make ticket assignment mistakes where either the wrong team is selected, or captured information is inadequate for the resolver team to be able to proceed with support. Without a process to handle these occurences, receiving teams either reluctantly absorb the mistake or "bounce" the ticket back to the Service Desk where typically it either takes hours to be picked up, or if assigned to an individual, might not be noticed at all, causing long periods of delay or inertia.

As an AP integrated sub-process, Service Desk Reinvolvement and Learning prompts for a reason explaining why the ticket is being "rejected" back to the Service Desk, enabling upper support teams to help their Service Desk co-workers who are informed of the reason for their mistake, improving inter-team relations and helping prevent future occurence. The "Rejected" status has a high level of status priority, i.e., a short progression threshold period, ensuring tickets in this situation are quickly progressed onwards.

Chase Management is the most striking omission because chases are caused by the ticket-focused process being inadequate in the first place.

An IT organisation might have a standardised Service Desk process for passing-on phoned-in chases to ticket owners and managers, but not for ensuring they are reviewed and appropriately handled, and not for capturing those raised simply through a ticket update without phoning-in.

With no Chase Management process, the likelihood of a bad service experience is substantially increased. When a chase is valid but not managed, the service customer is directly ignored at a time when their support need is at its most urgent.

Furthermore, chased tickets are an accurate measure of service performance and health, but in ITIL standard practice, they go uncaptured and unmeasured - unrecognised.

The importance of auditing IT support

A ticket-focused approach for support is too broad and sweeping to be in-touch with support outcomes. Information on how often support is unacceptably slow, or needs are unmet, and how often chases aren't managed, is unknown.

Insight produced by Experience Management (XM) feedback makes the previously hidden reality known, but only the Focus Framework identifies what causes weak support and what is needed to make a big difference for improvement initiatives, to reverse the status quo.

Complementing XM insight, the reality of an organisation's operational issues caused by the ITIL gap should be determined through detailed analysis of aged tickets before the issues are removed by Flow Management.

By baselining the SOFF identified "from" state, the extent of improvement and lost work time reduction can be gauged from a second audit once Flow Management has been introduced, reflecting value realisation from bringing it in.

The importance for Managed Services

Many IT organisations outsource support to a Managed Service Provider (MSP).

Typically there is an extensive transition period during which support worsens before it settles. By adopting Flow Management and including audits, quick improvement can be shown instead -improvement that continues while support settles.

For existing outsourced support environments, the importance of SOFF-aligned audits is the same.

Legacy operational issues

The Focus Framework raises awareness of support's historic operational issues that are the legacy of ITIL reliance. The issues shed light on why it is imperative to advance beyond ITIL by adopting Flow Management. The top four are:

Issue #1. The ticket-focused process means teams generally approach new tickets first and foremost.

Issue #2. Activity for the progression of older tickets isn't just secondary, it is completely unguided.

Inappropriate delay and inertia is normal. Of particular harm, support conversations do not flow:

For reason that questions emailed to support customers are service tool (system) notifications making them prone to not being read, unanswered questions must be followed-up promptly and with success, but with no process, they are not.

Replies must receive focused attention similar to a ticket's first response, but even when quickly seen, onward activity is easily unprioritised and skipped, leading to inappropriate delay still.

All types of ticket update are affected, either unseen or ignored, including sensitive comments - those that are time-critical, or a chase on progress.

Prone to failure at both ends, communication barriers are a primary cause of lost work time and needs failing to be met. Resulting frustration is where perception of service is at its weakest.

In total, 21 "mid-lifecycle" support situations arise in all IT organisations, completely unguided: unidentified, unprioritised and unmanaged, all contributing to delay, inertia, and consequent weak support experiences.

Issue #3. Ticket progression relies on the ticket owner alone. Being a "single point of failure" devoid of any cross-queue-cover, ownership silos substantially worsen untimeliness and unreliability in IT support.

Issue #4. Support's primary ticket-focused measure of performance, the ticket SLA, is highly inaccurate, lacks detail, and provides the false impression of acceptable service quality. With little actionable scope, it lacks purpose and so is not widely used. When used, the real performance of IT support is never known.

Flow Management removes a further 15 operational issues inherent of the ITIL approach.

IT support is the ITIL exception: For success, the process must be improved

Where governance and close management was needed the most, adding Flow Management means it is not needed at all.

Teams unify with a systematic focus primarily on high priority activity. Managers intervene simply by exception when monitors show that help is needed recovering back to the expected service experience. Team size can be adjusted with confidence.

Business lost work time is minimised, absolutely.

See how AP works

Progression SLA is the level of ability to meet expectations of a timely support experience, equaling the percentage of on-time activity where it is not rescheduled, or the progression threshold has not significantly breached.