True Best Practice
for IT Support
The gap filled
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 adequately covers just one type of support activity - new ticket response. Twelve others form the ITIL gap​, harbouring many operational issues that cannot be eased without Flow Management to overcome them.
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The gap is prevalent in most environments - hardware break-fix less-so.
The gap exists because ITIL processes have been the basis of all ITSM tools for decades, firmly embedding ITIL's way of working in the worldwide 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 being absent from the ITIL framework.
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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 process-led guidance means lack of focus, and misfocus. Consequent weak outcomes are maximised.
​​The missing supporting "sub" processes, all being optional Flow Management capabilities with an associated AP status, are:
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SLA Breach Prevention (available to basic AP). In ITIL standard practice for Incident and Request Management, absence of a ticket management process through Activity Prioritisation means focus is not drawn to impending service level target breaches.
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User Escalation (Chase) Management.
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Coordinated Customer Contact (appointments). Many staff in almost any organisation are often not at their computer, so the ability to coordinate a time to provide 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.
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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.
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Of the four, 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.
Without an adequate 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 acute and urgent.
Furthermore, chased tickets are an accurate "barometer" of service performance and health, but in ITIL standard practice, they go uncaptured and unmeasured - unrecognised.
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The importance of auditing IT support
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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 the operational issues that cause weak support, and what is needed to overcome them so that deficiency is removed, and the status quo changed.
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Complementing XM insight if practicing Experience Management, the reality of issues caused by the ITIL gap should be determined through detailed analysis of aged tickets. By baselining the "from" state in detail, 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.
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The importance for Managed Services
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Many IT organisations outsource support to a Managed Service Provider (MSP).​ Typically, during the extensive transition period, support worsens before it eventually 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.
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Legacy operational issues
The Support Ops Focus Framework (SOFF) doesn't just overcome support's historic operational issues that are the legacy of ITIL reliance, it raises awareness of them so that the imperative for Flow Management becomes known. The top four issues are:
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​Issues 1 - 6: With a ticket-focused approach, teams naturally approach new tickets first and foremost. Activity for the progression of older tickets isn't just secondary, it is completely unguided, including when tickets are chased.
Inappropriate delay and inertia is normal. Of particular harm, support conversations do not flow.
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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 7: 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.
Issues 12 - 16: Weak metrics. 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 and experience of IT support is never known.​​
Flow Management removes a further 9 operational issues inherent of the ITIL approach.
IT support is the ITIL exception: For success, the process must be improved
Progression SLA, which is Flow Management's primary Flow Metric, reflects a service provider's ability to meet expectations of a timely support experience. It is the percentage of on-time activity that hasn't been rescheduled - how well good service experience is maintained.
Next: All Key Facts about the ITIL status quo and Flow Management
