Everyone said “go SAFe”; but are you seeing the value realization, are you becoming more “agile”, and are your initiatives being adopted by the business?  

Having control of your core ITSM processes is the foundation for harvesting benefits of SAFe or other delivery framework – It is still essential to balance operations and development, let us explore how!  

Quick Recap on IT service Management (ITSM)

Maybe you were there to witness it, but let’s start from the beginning. Introduced in the 1980s, IT Service Management (ITSM) remains a cornerstone for delivering IT services that align with organizational objectives. ITSM provides a structured framework to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of service delivery, integrating best practices, standardized processes, and innovative technology. Hence being an enabler for delivering new shining technology and AI solutions which is the current hot topic.

The effectiveness of your ITSM practices directly reflects the efficiency of your overall system and delivery capability. In the following sections, we’ll explore how to optimize your ITSM framework by enhancing responsiveness to customer demands, setting actionable KPIs for continuous improvement, and identifying potential bottlenecks in your service delivery processes.

Where we see our client’s struggle

We see increasing complexity of IT environments and our business customers being deeply influenced by today’s “Netflix” culture with expectation for on demand responsiveness. Naturally that leads to request management as a common area of difficulty where speed is a crucial factor for successful IT service delivery.

Below is some of the most common challenges we encounter:  

• Ever growing backlogs: Many organizations struggle to manage incoming requests effectively. We have seen cases with less than 50% being properly addressed.
• Excessive work in progress: In some cases, organizations handle upwards of 350 active requests simultaneously. Unless you have a very impressive throughput, that amount, can take years to clear.
• Lengthy lead times: Lead times for fulfilling requests range from 1 to 4 years, severely limiting business agility and responsiveness to rapidly changing market conditions.

Even the largest and most established organizations face these challenges, highlighting the need for streamlined and efficient request management processes to meet both operational and customer expectations.

How to drive ITSM Excellence

To achieve ITSM excellence we see three key focus areas:  

• Start where you are and focus on value: Build on existing resources and capabilities and keep focus on value creation for customers and stakeholders.
• Establish processes and governance: Clearly defined processes and robust governance frameworks ensure accountability, transparency, and alignment with business goals.
• Measure what matters when it matters: Tracking relevant metrics at the right time allows for informed decision-making and continuous improvement.
• Protect your system and team capacity. Use above to understand how much you can deliver over a given period. Leverage that to drive prioritization with the business and control how much work you take in and have in progress.  

Integrate with your delivery framework

To ensure consistency and alignment with your development direction, ITSM should be integrated into your organization’s development framework. This becomes particularly critical in scenarios such as running a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), where a high volume of innovation and change requests from users can overwhelm your delivery capacity.

Here’s a simplified example of how to integrate change request management into your SAFe framework effectively:

1. Define process and governance structure:
   Establish clear guidelines for roles, responsibilities, and escalation path
   • Use RACI charts and process diagrams to document who does what, when, and how.
   • The Product Owner plays a critical role here, with a natural mandate to prioritize requests and decide what aligns best with business goals.

2. Setup process templates:
   Develop templates to streamline common tasks, such as rejection categories and standardized rejection messages.
   • These templates protect your capacity by enabling consistent, criteria-based rejections for non-priority requests. Essentially you should be able to reject all request based on these.

3. Define and measure performance metrics.  
   Clearly define KPIs to evaluate the effectiveness of your ITSM process.
   • We have created a template including a set of metrics to get you started. It only takes 4 columns data extract from your ITSM system to enable the insights for your organization - Get a walkthrough here.

4. Establish reporting and steering cadence.
   • Incorporate KPI reporting into quarterly Inspect and Adapt to review and refine ITSM processes.
   • From a Steering Committee (SteerCo.) for governance
     1. Ensure the committee includes members who are close to the product, understand its direction, and have the authority to prioritize escalations and make tough decisions.
     2. It is very important to have the business represented here.
5. ‍Utilize Scrum or Kanban boards:
   Visualize what is in the prioritized backlog and what is in progress. This way, both development teams and the business can track and follow requests.

What have we learned, what actions to take!

The power of saying “no”.

• Focus on valuable work: While difficult, saying no to low-priority requests is essential to maintain focus on what truly matters. You cannot take more work in than your team capacity permits!
• Visualize capacity and priorities: Having a visual board helps justify decisions and manage customer expectations. Let’s say you can deliver 10 request per Program Increment (PI). Then that correlates to 10 new request you can prioritize into your backlog during this increment.

If your team struggles to say “no” it can be helpful defining a rejections threshold. It makes it so much easier in your prioritization calls if you can set a cutoff. E.g.  “Do we see it plausible that we deliver the request within a year? – Then it becomes a simple [yes/no] decision based on what can realistically be delivered.

Process and governance are the foundation, but consistency is key

• Secure and control: Consistency in adhering to these processes is what drives long-term success. It’s not enough to set the framework; teams need to actively show up, follow the processes, and refine them regularly to adapt to evolving needs.
• Establish business engagement: You need to push for business engagement, and if they say “no”, you need to push them again! Is extremely important that business is prioritizing to engage in steering the product direction. In the end they are the customers and the ones using the product.