What is service flux?

We live in an increasingly service-centric world, where industry frontrunners are constantly raising the bar when it comes to services. And customers have noticed. In fact, Microsoft’s Global State of Customer Service Report showed that 55% of customers expect a higher level of customer service year on year, with a whopping 70% of those aged between 18 and 34 reporting increasing expectations. Your customers now expect your service department to match the level of service they’ve experienced in the wider world. This change means added pressure for your service department to deliver faster, smoother services. All while dealing with the challenges of being understaffed.

Just staying on top of your processes won’t cut it anymore. In an ever-changing world, service departments have to find a way to stay flexible. This is where service flux comes in: by embracing change and iterative improvements, you’ll transform your service department from a bottleneck to a department that actively enables your organization and all its employees to thrive.

• Get started quickly and make improvements later. Too often, service teams feel that they need to do everything right first time. With a service flux approach, you can take things step by step. Iterate, test, and improve.
• Respond to change with ease. A more flexible approach to ITSM makes it easier for service teams to adapt to new developments or changes in priorities with minimal disruptions.
• Encourage innovation. Service flux is all about iterative improvement, so IT teams can experiment with new ideas and solutions without worrying about long-term commitment.

How do service flux and IT frameworks such as ITIL relate to one another? And can you still apply aspects of the ITIL framework as a part of service flux?

Short answer, yes. A big part of service flux is actively looking for tips, tricks, and best practices from existing frameworks, finding the ones that work for your organization and applying them to your service management. But it’s important to remember that the guidelines that frameworks like ITIL provide are meant to be used flexibly, as frameworks – not as rules. If a process or best practice isn’t a good fit for your organization, there’s no need to stick with it.

And what about Agile? Can you combine agile working with service flux?

Definitely. Agile is an approach to software development that helps departments be more flexible and deliver customer value faster. But most importantly, Agile is a mindset. Agile’s emphasis on flexibility over following processes to the letter and not aiming for perfection right away makes its principles a great match for service flux. Agile also encourages taking an iterative improvement approach. Delivering new services in an agile way means you deliver something workable as soon as possible, collect feedback, and use this feedback to make improvements.

Transforming from a process controller to a service fluxer requires a mindset shift. Realizing that by working together you’re stronger. That enabling autonomy results in better, not weaker results. And that the process is a part of the puzzle — not the end game.

In practice, IT service flux could look like taking a continuous improvement approach to your services, like the non-profit organization, LTE group. Or trying out the first version of a solution with a test group and adjusting based on feedback, as Collège Boréal did with Change Management.