Agile Service Management - it’s a thing.
A few years ago, far, far away in a large Government Department, we got the idea to link technology monitoring to business facing services in real time. With no money available to do this, no Project Manager to support the delivery, and only a couple of people at the start who wanted to be involved, it might have been over before it started. But we got approval to experiment and see how far we could take it.
We created a backlog of items we wanted to work on and assessed the size and value to be delivered by each work item, and we had a regular coffee meeting to see what work was completed and what we were going to work on next. Before long other people started to get interested and volunteered their time to support the activity. No one had this work as their first job, but everyone gave some time to keep the work going as we could all see the benefits that were being delivered. Everyone in the team was energised to support the activity because no one had to be in the team.
The work proved to be valuable to the business and went on to win a national award and many years later the tool is still being used actively and continues to be improved. This was a lesson for me on the benefits of working in an agile way and yet at the time, I didn’t immediately apply the lessons to the way we worked in service management on our own practices and processes.
So, although we knew how to work in an agile way. we didn’t apply the thinking to what we as a team did from day to day. We still produced pages and pages on processes and procedures that were primarily there to impress auditors rather than being useful in improving our business focus. And we still operated like the world wasn’t changing, a two-and-a-half-hour Change Board meeting was not unheard of, but we weren’t helping anyone including ourselves to be agile.
The aha moment came with Agile Service Management - a DevOps Institute training course that demonstrates how Service Management can be agile in processes and practices. We could also be agile in the way we worked and improve our way of working without some of the extensive documentation we had thought was at the core of what we did. Furthermore, our Service Management toolsets could be replaced by modern toolsets that we could not only configure to streamline and automate our work, but we could continually improve them so that we could evolve our practices to be more responsive to delivering for the business.
And then we started to challenge ourselves on some of the ways we had worked in the past, did we really need that two and a half hour Change Advisory Board or could we see ourselves not controlling change but enabling change. Once we started looking to deliver improvements ourselves in sprints, we realised how our own practices were holding up delivery. This led to new ways of working like aligning change to a two-week iteration so that we could still get the benefits of change management while enabling agility in the organisation. Service Management can enable change and the capability offered by new toolsets supports automation of workflows, and this does make delivery of new ways of working a lot easier. But in truth we must start with our mindset, and first port of call is our own processes and practices and how we can support agility in our organisations. So first up, let’s acknowledge that agile service management is a thing and that we can be leaders in delivering agility in organisations.
Agile Service Management
01 : Add Value
02 : Work alongside customers.
03 : Keep it simple
04 : Continually Improve
