Service Management in 2020 and Beyond

I’ve seen many organizations work hard to improve how they manage IT services. And almost every time they’ve focused on changing the way they run their internal processes, and the tools and technology they use.

This focus on processes and technology does deliver improvements, but there’s is a limit to how far it can take you. Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your incident management, change management, problem management, and other ITSM processes can lead to benefits. But if you think beyond these common processes, and focus on how you co-create value with other stakeholders, you can get so much further.

Here are 5 things you can do to make the kind of difference that you, your organization, and most importantly, your customers and users, will genuinely appreciate.

1. Focus on value streams, not processes

Improving a process like incident management, or change management can certainly enable you to work better, and can often lead to lower costs or improved service quality. And yet, these improvements sometimes fail to make things better for your customers, and sometimes they result in an increase in overall costs. This is because your processes don’t exist in a vacuum.  They’re not independent, and they each have a part to play in the overall value streams that create value for you and your customers. What this means may be counter intuitive.  When you optimize just one process you can end up making things worse.

Let’s think about why. Every value stream starts with demand or opportunity and ends with value being created for one or more stakeholders. But there might be many different processes involved in the end-to-end stream from demand to value. So, if you really want to make valuable improvements, first identify all the activities that are part of the value stream, and then think about what improvements might be helpful.

For example, consider the value stream for recovering from a hardware failure in your data center. Maybe a server has failed, or a storage array has dropped offline, and you find that this incident or failure has not been well managed. You might think that what you need to do is improve how you do incident management, but actually dealing with server failures, or storage arrays dropping offline are part of a value stream that involves many other processes that you might need to take a look at.

• Improved monitoring and event management might enable you to detect failure sooner
• Improved service desk might help you communicate the status of the incident to your users better
• Improved incident management might help you investigate and resolve the issue faster
• Improved configuration management might help you understand the cause and rectify it faster
• Improved IT asset management might ensure that you have the right spare parts available to resolve the situation
• Improved change management might help you review your planned resolution and implement it faster
• Improved problem management might help you investigate why the failure happened in the first place, and how to prevent future failures

When you understand the end-to-end value stream you can identify what really needs to be improved to offer a better service to your customers and users.

You can read more about the need to understand value streams in my blog: How Value Streams Can Help You Do a Better Job.

2. Manage customer journeys, not just IT activities

It’s really important to understand how your customers experience your services. To do this you need to think about their entire journey, from their first contact with you and all the way through your subsequent interactions.

Every time you interact with a customer you have an opportunity to delight them, or to disappoint, but the customer journey is much more than the sum of all these interactions. For example, your service desk may do a fabulous job every time they speak to a user, but if your user has called with a reasonable request and you fail to meet their reasonable expectations then they’re still going to have a negative experience.

Customer journey mapping involves understanding everything that happens in a series of customer interactions from the customer’s point of view. This will allow you to design your services, and your value streams, so that they deliver a great experience every time, and at every point along the way.

If you do decide to invest time in customer journey mapping, you’re likely to find some opportunities for improvement even if the customer journey is working well.

You can read more about customer journeys in my blog: A Great Customer Journey Has to Be Planned from End-to-End.

3. Manage employee journeys, not just human resources

Many organizations pay far too little attention to staff experience. Organizations with happy and fulfilled staff almost always have happy customers, and organizations with stressed and unhappy staff tend to have dissatisfied customers. If you think of IT staff as ‘resources’, as though people are interchangeable parts that can be replaced at will, then they’re likely to behave as resources, rather than as intelligent, thinking, people who can make a great contribution to your success.

If people feel that it’ is safe to identify risks and issues, then they’ll contribute to continual improvement, and help you to avoid expensive mistakes. On the other hand, if people are worried about being blamed when things go wrong, then it can be really difficult to investigate incidents and problems. Staff will be more worried about the impact on them than the impact on your customers and users.

People who are appropriately empowered to make decisions that go outside of the normal process are much more likely to make the kind of decisions that earn the trust and respect of your customers. This can be invaluable to your organization.

You can read more about this topic in my blog: Do You Know When to Break the Rules?

4. Build relationships with suppliers and partners

The future of ITSM is all about relationships. So far in this blog, we’ve discussed relationships with customers and users, and relationships with internal staff. This leaves one important area to think about. Relationships with suppliers and partners.

I’ve seen many dysfunctional supplier relationships over the years, where the IT department and the supplier are constantly arguing about whether monthly KPIs were met, and what penalties should, or should not, be paid. The IT department blames the supplier for the poor service they deliver and feels unable to do anything to improve matters.

The good news is that these broken relationships can be fixed, although it may not be simple. What you need to do is to raise the discussion above the details of contracts, KPIs, and penalties, and think about relationships, customers, and value. No supplier actually wants to deliver poor performance. So engage with them positively and try to discover what the issues are from their perspective, and then see what you can do to help them deliver better service. Remember every broken relationship has two sides.

Even if you have a good relationship with your suppliers there are always opportunities to improve. You can make use of your good relationship to involve your supplier in your continual improvement activities, helping them to help you better.

You can read more about this topic in my blog: Supplier Management Is More than Just Negotiating Contracts.

5. Think about service management, not just IT service management

So far in these tips we have looked at understanding the end-to-end flow of work that helps to create value with your customers, and at the relationships that can help that to succeed, but the focus has been on IT.

If your value streams are IT value streams, then you may not be as well connected to creation of value as you think. Most organizations don’t exist just to deliver IT services, the IT is part of something bigger. If we think of ourselves as ‘IT’ and focus only on improving our own work that may well encourage a silo approach to working.

Every business has its own value streams; the best way to analyze IT value streams is as part of those wider business value streams. For example, one organization I worked with was a finance company that sold mortgages. One important business metric was onboarding time, i.e. how long it took from the time a new mortgage agent started work,  to the time everything was in place for them to work productively. The IT department worked together with their customer (in this case the business organization they were a part of) to understand everything that was required for onboarding. Some of this was IT related (provision of equipment and accounts), but some was not (training in financial regulations, provision of a desk). They worked together to understand what activities were needed to onboard a new agent, what information was needed for each activity , where to find the relevant items of information, and when and how best to trigger each activity; this allowed them to design an end-to-end value stream that reduced onboarding time from weeks to days.

In another organization the IT department had great tools and processes for managing incidents and problems, but of course the business also had incidents and problems that were not IT related. We combined both into overall business processes for incident management and problem management, which resulted in a major improvement in how different issues were impacting the bottom line.

Many of the tools and methodologies that we use in IT can be applied throughout the business, and many organizations have tools and methodologies that could be adopted in IT.  If everyone in the organization works together with a focus on value, then everyone will do a better job.

Conclusion

If you’ve been working on how to improve your IT processes then you’ve probably done a great job of improving service quality and reducing costs, but you can go much further if you think about value streams and relationships.

Why not make 2020 the year you achieve a step change in service management, and really start to be seen as part of your organization’s value creation?