Intro
We mean really over-stretched, crazily busy? Are they at breaking point? Read on, we might have the answer….
If we have service management experts, service designers, service management consultants and service management teams, surely someone must know what constitutes a service!
As an adjunct to our blog, How good is your Service Design and Transition?, I thought I’d reflect on the effects of poor Demand Management, Service Design and Transition processes.
This has come about as a result of some work we’re doing for a client to help them define a new IT Operating Model. One of the key elements which we’ve found to be missing is the capture of all new work coming into the organisation; we’ll call this Demand.
IT Demand
It’s best visualised as a funnel, see diagram below. It’s critical that all potential aspects of Demand on IT resources time are captured in one place. To achieve this, you may wish to categorise the types of demand.
For our client, we’ve used the following:
- Business change programs
- IT upgrade programs
- Small IT projects
- Small business projects (enhancements, bug fixes, etc)
- Support activities
You’ll need to adapt this list for your own organisation.
The diagram below depicts the Demand “funnel”, and then some fairly rudimentary stages that new work goes through in most organisations.
There are some key points to consider if any element of these stages fails to operate effectively.
Poor Design results in:
- Project delays as build timescales are elongated, test cycles fail, and retrofitting / redesigning takes place
- Service unreliability, poor performance and/or unavailability
- Increased overhead on support teams to manage unstable services
Poor Transition results in:
- The quality of the service being transitioned falling below operability and supportability expectations, standards and service levels (SLAs)
- Increased overhead on support teams to manage unstable services
You might have noticed that poor design and transition share a common result; increased overhead on support teams to manage unstable services.
Often, in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness of operational teams, we need to look upstream of their normal work, into the world of demand, design and transition. Fixing deficiencies in these areas will create capacity in the support teams, improve service reliability leading to improved end-user experience and overall satisfaction.
