Plus! The Standard+Case Approach: See service response in a new light

by Rob England

If your customers see your group as bureaucratic and inflexible... If your staff feel process bound... If your process doesn't adapt to a changing world... See service response in a new light. Standard+Case is an exciting new approach to categorising and resolving any sort of response activity, such as service desk, tech support, public safety, social welfare, or health. If you have anything to do with responding to situations when providing a service, read this. It will change your view of how responses are handled. Standard+Case applies to anything that requires a human there's either a standard response or there isn't. Standard+Case is a new paradigm for categorising and resolving any sort of response "tickets", such as service desk requests (including incidents), problems, or operational changes. The phrase “a new paradigm” gets much over-used but this time it applies. This approach changes the way we think about everything to do with response. Standard+Case is a universal approach to responding to situations. It offers the following tangible • better utilisation of staff resources through greater throughput of responses because of more effective and efficient resolution of unknown and unfamiliar situations • reduced user down-time and time spent waiting on responses • fewer errors in complex and complicated situations. Standard+Case offers the following intangible • greater flexibility in responding to user needs • higher customer and user satisfaction • improved staff morale • better greater predictability of Standard responses and more meaningful monitoring of Case responses Much of our thinking in providing service is drawn from manufacturing, and focuses on standardisation (definition, repeatability) and statistical improvement of repeated tasks. But we no longer live in an industrial economy; we live in a service economy. We no longer manage industrial production lines; we manage the delivery of services to people. People cannot to be standardised. Much of our traditional approach tries to make them be to engage users in a standard manner, to respond back to them in equally standard ways. We pretend the world is standardised. When it is not - when non-standard things happen - we treat them as exceptions, and as failures of the system. Think of long-running incidents, or requests that do not fall into any defined category. As a consequence, non-standard responses are poorly controlled, misleadingly reported, and no formal practices exist; so there is minimal structured improvement of how we deal with them. Standard+Case acknowledges much of our service activity will always be non-standard and has to be dealt with in a formalised way in order to manage, report and improve it as we do for the standardised part. We do that by treating non-standard responses as cases. Standard+Case accepts that much of the service world is non-standard. It is not a new way of responding to situations; it is simply a new way of looking at what we do now. We do respond to non-standard situations now, but we have little rigour around who and how. Standard+Case formalises and brings rigour to our ad-hoc response, so that all instances of service response are managed, reported and improved, not just the standard ones.

Genres: Business

120 pages, Paperback

First published May 21, 2013

Reviews

[BCS · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is written for service management practitioners in general and ITSM practitioners in particular, and assumes a basic understanding of service management. It is aimed at those who are working on service desks, technical support, public safety, social welfare or health care and who need/want to improve service levels and therefore customer satisfaction.

The book attempts to produce a single methodology that combines responding to both standard and non-standard (case) scenarios. The author was inspired by another source (Workflow Management Coalition), which classified that ‘highly predictable and highly repeatable business situations are best supported with BPM’, and ‘unpredictable and unrepeated business situations are best handled with [case management]’.

The book starts by examining the existing and separate nature of standard and case management models and why many of the approaches derived from the manufacturing industry don’t easily fit with non-standard situations and knowledge workers.
The early chapters cover the merging together of the Standard+Case model as a means of routing all issues that do not fit a predefined model or where there is no existing model into a case management loop.

The middle sections of the book look at the ITSM ‘people/process/technology’ layers (which the author changes to ‘people/practices/things’) and how the Standard+Case model impacts on these. This is followed by a fictitious case study of Standard+Case at work. The final section covers adopting Standard+Case. Some additional resources can be found on www.basicsm.com

There are some convincing arguments about how the merging of the two models is ultimately more efficient, although I can see that it’s going to be a bit tricky negotiating SLAs, which differentiate between standard and non-standard (i.e. case) issues.

Certainly those with experience of ticket systems will have come across certain types of tickets that are never closed. With the Standard+Case approach these tickets are dealt with via case management (and by a higher level of expertise if necessary), and are then fed back into the loop. Key however is that the case management records are reviewed to see if either a new standard process or a change to an existing standard process are required.

Even for those readers who are already doing some, much or all of this, it is still worth browsing the material as there are lots of checklists and bullet-pointed ideas. For those not doing any of this, this book should be essential reading.

Reviewed by Mike Rees IT Consultant MBCS CITP

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a specialized book for IT service management practitioners and IT folks in general.

The overall concept is brilliant.

The cover photo, once I understood it, goes very well with the title too - Standard and Case is a clean cut of the whole whereby Incident and Request isn't.

This is obvious but never quite so until someone mentions it. Not everything in IT operations fits a standardized model. The brilliant part is looking outside of IT for insight on how knowledge workers go about their work and finding case management. It's what detectives do, nurses/doctors, social workers, and other professionals.

At a company I worked for, we called this IT transactional and non-transactional work. S+C formalizes this much further.

Pulling service management and case management together is what makes this worth reading. It's ok not to be able to standardize everything and certainly to stop expecting it to.

Everything else in the book is pulled from various references and put together in a small 100 page book. The extra bonus about the book is the sources for the content. As an example, it recommends the checklist Manifesto which I've just finished and really enjoyed too. And, it makes me want to learn more about adaptive case management. So, it is a great bridge to other knowledge in this area.

Although it introduces case management to IT, it also brings clarity on how to go about reviewing cases to identify new standard models and shows how the 2 sides feed each other.