Tag: best practice

An enterprise service management system drives continual improvement, and for many this mountaintop seems far away. But a standard management system for the enterprise can be established one rock at a time.

The Unified Service Management Method’s universal approach to defining ALL services — along with 5 processes and 8 workflows that apply to ALL service providers — create uniform building blocks that enable a simple, sustainable service management system to be achieved incrementally over time.

Today’s service delivery involves complex ecosystems that involve multiple services within a larger supply chain or network. Regardless of where they are within this chain or network, every service organization performs the same activities to manage their part of the service.

Whether the provider is delivering an integral (i.e., end-to-end) service or is part of a larger network of services, they each strive to convert customer needs into predictable performance using people, processes, and technology.

All providers will make changes, handle incidents, deal with customer wishes and manage risk. Who and how they accomplish these activities will vary, but these routines can be structured in a uniform way that simplifies their management.

This enables an organization the flexibility to use the USM method anywhere in the enterprise, and incrementally expand it over time. USM provides a level of standardization and interoperability that allows for changes to procedures and work instructions without re-work, so as your service ecosystem changes or your ecosystem providers add new practice frameworks you don’t have to re-invent the wheel.

This provides a service management system that can be built and maintained — one rock at a time — using simple, standardized and sustainable service management building blocks.

The importance of establishing a service management system is old news; but it may be time to re-learn some old lessons: get your management system in order with a simple method.

It’s funny how wise words can seem boring; we’ve heard about establishing a service management system for years now. The nature of the improvement beast often comes from people who have been pushing the improvement ball uphill for a very long time.

The question is, have we been listening?

When I talk to people about the USM Method and say that it can help you establish a simple, sustainable service management system I can almost see the wheels in their heads spinning immediately to technology and ‘service management systems’.

And this completely misses the point.

Technology is only one of the organizational resources used in a management system:

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Management system: the coherent set of organization resources that you organize and coordinate to realize your goals effectively and efficiently.

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Applied to a service organization, a service management system defines the organizational structure, the roles, functions and profiles, the tasks, authorities, and responsibilities (TAR), the rules and guidelines, the culture, the means, and the routines: processes, procedures, and work instructions.

It is also well known that process comes before technology (remember that one?). Wise words indeed.

But are we listening?

Another common misconception about the USM Method is that it’s another practice framework. Even after repeatedly describing the differences between practice-based frameworks and a principle-based method (it’s even in the name!), I can tell that this has not always been fully understood.

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Service management method: a fixed, well-thought-out course of action, based on principles, for the management of services.

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A service management method is much more generic than a framework based on concrete practices. A service management method can produce all conceivable practices of a service organization and serves as a blueprint for practice-based frameworks. The method supports any organizational structure or technology.

With the emergence of enterprise service management and accelerating change, a simple and sustainable service management system is more important than ever.

It may not sound like ‘new thinking’, but the USM Method does take a look at service management from a perspective of wisdom.

“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”

Epictetus

Perhaps the USM Method is something worth listening to.

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Today’s enterprise portal encompasses all enterprise services and demands a simple, sustainable service management system at its heart. Attempting to adapt a single practice framework makes service management increasingly complex.

Today’s digital enterprise is leveraging multiple frameworks — ITIL, Scrum, COBIT, APQC, SCOR, IT4IT, NIST, ISO27001, and many others. The frameworks mentioned here are practice-oriented; they provide guidance on ways of performing tasks in actual situations. IT leverages ITIL, finance may use COBIT, and other business units may want to adapt APQC, Scrum or other ‘best practices’ based on their individual needs.

In 2015 I ran an IT Portal Boot Camp Series of webinars and talked about a one-stop IT shop which leveraged an IT portal and the ITIL framework. But attempting to ‘adapt’ a practice framework that was originally engineered for a specific business unit (such as ITIL for IT services) does not provide structural coherence with other practices within the organization.

A portal is a framework for integrating people and process across organizational boundaries, and this demands a unified service management system for the entire enterprise. USM provides a method for achieving this.

USM enables the enterprise to get in control of its service delivery, with a management system of 5 processes and 8 workflows.

“…Simplifying internal processes and structures will have positive impacts on the entire value creation capability of a company”

Deloitte

The Unified Service Management Method provides a standardized, unified link for sustainable supply chains in service ecosystems. The process model and standardized workflows are used by any organizational topology, leveraging any combination of practice frameworks for all internal and/or external service providers.

This step-by-step approach includes re-usable, standardized templates that easily apply to the entire enterprise and can be deployed incrementally. It improves interoperability between service teams by providing a level of standardization that does not limit localization of organizational structures or tooling.

“Managing complexity well can create … higher returns…lower costs…improved employee satisfaction…”

McKinsey

If you are re-evaluating your current ITSM tool, struggling with ITIL or other practice frameworks or are looking to achieve a customer-driven level of maturity it’s clear to me that a simple, sustainable management architecture (not a technology architecture!) is what should be defined first.

4me, The USM Method fits this bill perfectly.

To see if The USM Method is 4you too, contact me today!