Deep Creek Center home.

Category: IT Service Management

Making IT Work episode 8 Customer Journeys: Onboarding

Making IT Work episode 8 Customer Journeys: Onboarding

Successful Onboarding starts in the previous Agree Phase of the Customers Journey. A clear chain of responsibility, whether a standard routine or a complete migration, needs a coherent process for both security and efficacy.

Minimizing risks and obtaining optimum outcomes  in all 4 dimensions is the goal. Using communication channels proficiently and wisely reduces anxiety, minimizes work disruption, and helps new processes integrate with better goodwill.

Patrick von Schlag introduces the opportunities and pitfalls to onboarding in this week’s Making IT Work.

To see the rest of the Customer Journey please watch these episodes:

Making IT Work Customer Journeys: Offer part 1 and Offer part

Making IT Work Customer Journeys: Engage Relationships

Making IT Work Customer Journeys: Explore and Engage  and Agree

Making IT Work episode 7 Customer Journeys: Agree

Making IT Work episode 7 Customer Journeys: Agree

Now that an offer has been determined, it is time to come to a formal agreement. We have clear expectations, the development of trust, and exploration of roles for all parties; establishing the formal agreement has specific steps to provide both customers and service providers with the “Best Value.”

In addition to determining the right levels of Utility, Warranty and cost, there might be other security, regulatory or business specific requirements that must be met. This episode provides a nice summary of the most important pieces to review before finalizing an agreement.

Making IT Work episode 7 Customer Journeys: Agree

To see the rest of the Customer Journey please watch these episodes:

Making IT Work Customer Journeys: Offer part 1 and Offer part 2

Making IT Work Customer Journeys: Engage Relationships

Making IT Work Customer Journeys: Explore and Engage 

 

Mapping the Customer Journey Part 1

Mapping the Customer Journey provides a basic template for understanding how a customer feels at each stage of a service engagement. While it may look like a sales cycle from the outside, the magic of a well-executed Customer Journey lies in the insight provided by this fundamental perspective shift. In this short video Patrick von Schlag begins walking us through the aspects of the Customer Journey.

The ITIL 4 Journey – One Year In

Blog post – The ITIL 4 Journey – One Year In

Axelos was nice enough to ask me to write an ITIL 4 blog post a little while ago on the Managing Professional certificate. I was happy to do it; you can read a little more about what we came up with at https://www.axelos.com/news/blogs/december-2019/itil-4-mp-transition-a-transformed-framework

It’s been a couple of months since I worked with them on this post, and I’ve had a chance to reflect a bit on what we’ve learned in this first year of ITIL 4, and as part of this ongoing transition. A few lessons seem to keep coming up again and again, and I thought I’d share them with you.

  1. Value Stream Mapping is a game changer for IT organizational practices. While many people and organizations have leveraged LEAN practices for years, there is unique value to using it in the context of IT service delivery. Most compellingly, it gets IT organizations thinking cross-functionally and, even more importantly, across many different ITIL practice areas. I have been a long term proponent of “working backwards” from the customer and desired outcomes to how and what we do to help facilitate service value creation. Most of my customers struggle with cross-functional alignment and, when they have been able to operate successfully in a cross-functional model, do so in the context of a process or two, like incident management or change management. ITIL 4 emphasizes and demonstrates that many practices contribute to each and every service value chain, and that organizations must look at how (and how much) practice support they require to deliver the desired business outcomes.
  2. This focus on value is reinforced by the emphasis on Customer Journeys as part of the Driving Stakeholder Value guidance. Very few people in an enterprise actually understand the entire journey that a customer takes to co-creating value, and in most instances confuse success at a particular touchpoint with success in facilitating an excellent customer experience. So much of IT culture has traditionally been reactive (‘no news is good news”) that we often accept a lack of active complaints as a substitute for real validation of an excellent customer experience. Modern social media culture has taught us the compelling value of engagement with stakeholders through the entire journey, and that customer feedback is the shortest path to compelling improvements.
  3. The emphasis on high-velocity IT is critical, but only if it is velocity to value, not just velocity to more “stuff.” IT organizations continue at times to confuse features with benefits, and speed to market with use and value conversion. If organizations adopt Agile practices such as value-based prioritization of backlogs and teams focusing on delivering the highest value solutions first, all the time, they will avoid this challenge. However, sometimes organizations find themselves trapped by the desire for “low-hanging fruit;’ many times the fruit may be low-hanging, but low value too. Also critical is that the customer is driving the prioritization, and is accountable for optimizing the value delivery for the business.

There are countless new areas of guidance in ITIL 4 that will help you during your digital transformation journey. If you haven’t explored some of the new ITIL Specialist and ITIL Strategist programs, I encourage you to take a look. If you haven’t read the new ITIL books, they go far beyond traditional ITIL practice guidance to help you improve customer value and optimizing organizational resources. Take a look and reach out to us if we can help you on your journey.

Putting the Service in IT Service Management

Many people understandably think about ITIL as a process framework. When you describe good practices for 25+ processes and capabilities it seems a no brainer. Yet when you look at the books, their names, and their objectives, it becomes clear that processes are an important means (COBIT calls them one of seven enablers), but that the desired end is delivering services.The entire concept of service in ITIL is embedded in thinking end-to-end; how service teams facilitate outcomes for customers and manage costs and risks on their behalf.

When I teach ITIL courses, I emphasize the idea that services describe not in fact what we do in IT, but what the customer gets. How do our hardware, software, people, processes, etc. produce valuable results for customers and enable them to perform better, faster, or more cost-effectively? The entire construct of information technology is predicated on the CSI model, or how the technology enables the use and processing of information to automate and otherwise facilitate business processes.

If the goal is services (and therefore outcomes for customers), the how-to is the Service Lifecycle. WAAAAAAYYYY too many people consider ITSM consistent with the operational and support process around Incident, Problem, Change, and Configuration Management. In order to set the table for success in those operational processes, we have to be able to manage the service first. Here is a brief summary of how the Service Lifecycle notion really supports the cultural transformation from technology provision to service and outcome enablement.

Service Strategy – there are many things we’d like to do, but simply cannot. Why? Not enough money, time, people, etc. In short, we are always facing some type of constraints. Therefore, given all of the things we could do, what things will we commit to do, and who decides? Service Strategy outlines a transparent way to make strategic decisions in the face of uncertainty and limitations.

 Service Design – how do we understand customer requirements for a service (utility and warrant you), and how do we in turn build/buy/integrate a service to meet the requirements. The Service Design processes enable us to essentially take a piece of paper (a Service Charter, and Approved Change Request, etc.) and transform it into a new or updated service.

Service Transition – my usual flip statement about Service Transition is how to take a new or changed service from development successfully into production without “blowing stuff up.” Sadly, the industry data continues to finger transition practices as a primary reason for production incidents. In the highly dynamic and Agile world we are working in today, change is normal and a fundamental source of competitive advantage in business. Our ability to streamline transition practices and build compelling and highly reliable models is critical to supporting highly iterative business needs.

Service Operation serves essentially as a party host. Deliver services to customers according to our agreed levels and support them as needed. In order to actually be able to operate services, we have to be able to visualize them (typically through a CMS), monitor them, and be able to coordinate support for them across a number of technical/functional teams. The service lifecycle emphasizes early engagement with operations teams during design, transition ( and even strategy) to ensure we don’t get over our skis when establishing service targets that will be incorporated into SLAs.

CSI emphasizes the need for accountable owners and the intentional and ongoing use of metrics and measures to drive ongoing, consistent improvement in the performance of processes and services. CSI supports process and service owners (and managers) in the proactive seeking of improvements in all practices across the lifecycle, and drives the execution of the 7 step improvement process to execute improvement projects and drive iterative improvement in practices.

 While each service lifecycle stage clearly uses processes to carry out many of their activities, the bigger value proposition is how the service lifecycle itself visualizes how we manage constrained resources to optimize service value delivered for customers. In this blog we will explore many processes, but you will see me tend to tie these back to bigger picture questions that hopefully answer the “so what” question for you. If we follow these practices, so what? Stay tuned!