Service Management Best Practices

Overview

Even with a well-functioning process for identifying improvement opportunities, organizations with limited improvement capacity must make difficult choices about which improvements to pursue first. Without a principled prioritization approach, improvement backlogs are managed by urgency, political influence, or the preferences of whoever is making decisions at a given moment — none of which reliably produces the best outcomes for customers or the organization.

Best Practice

Establish a principled prioritization framework that evaluates improvement opportunities against two primary dimensions: customer impact (how significantly does this improvement benefit the customers of the affected service?) and organizational value (how significantly does this improvement benefit the organization’s operational efficiency, strategic alignment, or risk management?). Improvements that score highly on both dimensions receive the highest priority. Improvements that score highly on one but not the other are evaluated in the context of organizational constraints and strategic priorities.

Benefit(s)

Principled improvement prioritization ensures that limited improvement capacity is directed toward the highest combined customer and organizational value. Customers receive improvements that matter to them. The organization receives improvements that matter to its strategic and operational health. The prioritization framework provides a defensible basis for improvement investment decisions that reduces political friction and increases organizational confidence in the service management capability’s judgment.