History
On the back of nearly twenty years working in IT support and service management, from 2017, the framework was developed by Opimise's founder, David Stewart, over a seven year period, facilitated and piloted through further in-practice roles.

Opimise became a Cherwell (acquired by Ivanti) Technology Alliance Partner in 2019. Incorporating five FM capabilities, Team Performance Management became available for the platform in 2021 and Flow Metrics for ITSM were introduced to the ITSM community for the first time, through articles written for ITSM.tool, then later for itSMF UK's ServiceTalk magazine, and HDI SupportWorld.

The term Activity Prioritisation was established in 2022. In 2023, Flow Management became the given name for the Focus Framework's overall scope of capabilities, and "wOw" the way-of-working and company slogan.

About David

"I have been a "systems thinker" ever since my early days of work but it wasn't until being challenged again in 2017 with turning around another failing support service, that I realised the fundamental reason for weak support prevailing in all organisations. I knew the simple fix must find its way into standard practice, so over an eight year period, I built and refined the Support Ops Focus Framework.

The Focus Framework is "true best practice" dedicated to the many specific needs of support. Its methodology centres on modern service tool utilisation to guide teams in the best way possible, and in everything they do, primarily by switching from ticket-based prioritisation to Activity Prioritisation.

Without familiarity with the Focus Framework, support's many operational needs remain largely unidentified and unmet. The reason is ITIL's best practice stature. This fact is a wake-up call that has been my mission to make clear and rectify. The explanation is this...

ITIL is a broad framework setting-out what's needed for good service management. Intentionally, it does not include specifics in how to work. It is left up to individual organisations to decide how their processes are to be built to wrap their own "ITIL-centric" way of working.

The intention is good, but the result is far from it.

For reason that a universally applicable practical methodology does exist but did not quickly arise following the early days of ITIL, ITIL support process basics became accepted as best practice and worse still, have been "locked-in", embedded in the functionality of all service tools for decades. ITIL Incident and Request Management continue to be blindly followed under the banner of "best practice" still today.

In other words, the fit for purpose "far better way" in how to work has been out of best practice and tooling scope, leaving what's brought forward by the Focus Framework to have remained obscured and out of reach.

With support being the centre of IT operations, its major process shortcomings are highly detrimental, especially in worldwide employee lost work time from support frequently being unncessarily delayed. The cost to business over the decades has been immense."