Service management
Keeping live services running, every day. Demand to value improves a product; service management keeps it working for the people who use it, and feeds what it learns back into the product backlog.
The seven stages
Engage
Get help. People search knowledge, ask from the catalogue or report a fault in plain words. The desk logs calls, emails and monitoring alerts the same way.
Log
Classify and prioritise. Every ticket gets its service, its type (incident, service request or problem) and a priority from impact and urgency. The clock starts from the agreement that covers it.
Route
Approve and assign. Requests that need approval wait for the Service Owner. Tickets go to the service’s support team: a service team’s queue or board, or a sprint team’s backlog as a service request.
Restore
Resolve and fulfil. The team works against its agreements. On hold pauses the clock with a reason. A major incident raises an emergency, pauses sprint work and times the outage.
Learn
Problems and knowledge. Repeating incidents become a problem. The known error and workaround are published to knowledge and sent to every caller affected.
Improve
Fix for good. The permanent fix becomes a defect on the product backlog, entering the demand-to-value flow, and a change on the change calendar. When the change is in, the problem and its incidents are resolved.
Review
Service levels and value. Each agreement is reviewed monthly. Service health, the service’s life since go-live and early life exit criteria show whether the change worked and the service is stable.
How it joins demand to value
- Improve is where the two flows meet: the permanent fix for a problem becomes a defect on the product backlog and travels the demand-to-value stages, ordered by the DelPulse Value Index like any other work.
- Service requests that need building, not just doing, become service requests on a sprint team’s backlog and count towards its service share.
- A major incident raises an emergency on the product: all sprint work pauses until it is resolved.
- Changes for fixes go to the same change calendar and Change Authority as every other change.
- What the desk measures fills the early life support and stabilisation exit criteria of the project that built the service, and sits beside the product’s benefits.
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- Service board
- Three ways a team runs service work
- Roles
- Events
- Artifacts
- Agreements and the clock
- Measures
- If you already have a service management tool