Think about designing your services so that consistent customer standards are met every time
Agile methodology plus a consistent service design process are essential for meeting your ServiceNow demand and keeping your customers happy. How important is good service design? Let’s look at Amazon.
What is it about the customer experience at Amazon that keeps people coming back for more? The answer is that they offer a simplified service design approach that is consistent and predictable.
When you think about Amazon, you expect the same great experience every time, whether you’re buying shoes or electronics. If you have a good experience with buying electronics, but a terrible one with your shoe-shopping, would you say some of it is good, and some bad? No. You would say Amazon is bad based on your terrible shoe-buying experience and you wouldn’t use it anymore to buy shoes, electronics or anything else.
But let’s be clear. The previous example is just a scenario. It’s not a reality with Amazon. This is because of Amazon’s consistent service design process; their customers expect (and get) the same great service experience every time. And your customers expect the same from you, too.
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Why Build and Modify stages in the Service Factory Workflow requires effective Agile project management
I’ve got good news and bad news. Which one do you want to hear first?
First, let me tell you the good news. ServiceNow is a modern Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) style solution that is very flexible, easily configurable, and fast to build and modify. From ideation to functional definition to initial capability to building and modifying, ServiceNow is much faster than the tools and solutions of the past. You’d do well by taking full advantage of what ServiceNow has to offer.
Now to the bad news. Building and modifying today’s solutions, like ServiceNow, requires that you move at the speed of innovation, while lowering the risk of poor outcomes. Why is this bad news? Because older style implementation methodologies like Waterfall are too monolithic and slow to respond to growing and evolving demands; what’s required is the Agile development approach. The bad news isn’t that we MUST adopt a new development process, it is that most IT operations organizations don’t know WHERE to start.
To that end I’ll offer some insights in this article. But before I go into that, and in case you missed it from my recent blog posts, there are four stages in the services factory workflow: Consider, Build, Modify and Retire.
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An overview of the Consider stage, the first step in the Service Portfolio “Factory” process.
Your customers are demanding a lot from you. From a business standpoint, this demand may be an indication that you’ve demonstrated to your customers that you can help them. That’s great news! ServiceNow certainly makes it easy to create new Service capabilities. The problem is, for many–customer demands exceed available resources.
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The Evergreen Instance Analyzer for ServiceNow: Demo it at #Know18
The ServiceNow platform is large and complex. It is easy to develop advanced functionality on it quickly. For many, it has grown quickly with a variety of parties developing on it.
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Why you need a Phased Strategy and Roadmap, Service Portfolio Mentality, and Service Portfolio “Factory” Thinking.
Think about ServiceNow and how it has truly changed things: it provides agility, flexibility and wide-ranging capability, and makes it easier than ever before to create new and enhanced solutions very quickly. This is VERY different than ITSM solutions of the past. The "problem" for customers I’ve talked to is that keeping up with the demand for new services is a big challenge, and it keeps growing.
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Don Casson
Every ServiceNow customer faces this issue: you can build anything, and fast, but meeting demand remains a challenge.
“If you build it, they will come.” This line is used in business to illustrate how building something new – whether a product or service – can deliver value and growth to a company. It is an adaptation of the line used in the 1989 film, “Field of Dreams.” While this post is not about the movie or baseball, the notion of “build it” or “build for” helps to illustrate the ServiceNow demand problem, which is the topic of this article.
The ServiceNow platform is great, and it has been disrupting the way IT service is delivered for some time now. In the past, solutions like HP and BMC were client server, monolithic, slow and expensive to create and maintain. They were implemented and configured for a specific, narrow purpose. And they lacked the power and broad development platform essential for updates or enhancements. After a while, since it was expensive and hard, any development on these platforms slowed to a trickle, then stopped. Other than some major upgrade every 3-4 years, things didn’t change very much.
ServiceNow has changed everything, dramatically. If you can think of it, you can create it almost as fast as the idea enters your mind.
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The sixth “build for” category focuses on improving service delivery and aligning your IT services with customer needs
I shared my perspectives on what an IT Service is and how to describe success in a recent article, “Reach For The Stars: Fresh Perspectives on Good IT Service.” In the following weeks since posting that blog article, I provided insights on five “build for” categories: customer-centricity, consistency, ownership & manageability, governance & compliance, and efficiency. There is a sixth “build for” category, improvement and innovation, which I’ll talk about later in this blog post.
But first, a quick refresher.
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Ensuring clarity on Service Ownership and Manageability is a key to delivering good customer service
How’s that saying go? “Too many cooks in the kitchen …”
It means that too many people are overseeing a task or a project, and as a result, the product or deliverable suffers. As you build your IT Services, you want to avoid this type of confusion at all costs. It’s important to clearly identify who the Service Owner is at the beginning of your project. Else, you suffer the consequences of delivering bad services.
As you build for Service Ownership and Manageability, be sure to provide the customer with enough information to make a self-service determination. Include the following information:
- Name and description
- Fit for my use
- Who can request it
- Cost
- Quality
- Delivery time
- How to request it
- Service Owner
Notice that I bolded the word, Service Owner. Read on to learn why.
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Effective service governance provides clarity and improves consistency throughout the service lifecycle
As I discussed in my previous blog posts, establishing a good IT Service requires that you build a customer-centric and efficient high quality enterprise portfolio of services which are consistent and easy to navigate. Now let’s talk about governance and compliance, which are keys to successful IT Service Management.
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The combination of self service, choice simplification and automation provides a solid foundation for effective IT services
In a business meeting, when the word “efficiency” is tossed into the agenda, the word “automation” soon follows. This is because the two words go together, especially when it comes to IT Service Efficiency and Automation, which can improve the impact your service has on your customers. While there are many ways to achieve service efficiency – examples include streamlining processes, getting rid of repetitive steps and boosting productivity – automation is increasingly the go-to method in a world reliant on technology to run effective IT services.
How do we, as IT service professionals, then, build for efficiency and automation?
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Service Taxonomy,
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ITSM Consultants,
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IT Service Owner,
Service Portal,
Service Catalog Planning,
ServiceNow Admin,
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