A Very Big Deal
Implementing an Enterprise Service Management workflow platform is a significant undertaking, and everyone involved knows it at the time.
It takes the time, energy and expertise of a lot of people. Gathering the data. Writing the user stories. Designing workflows, forms, dashboards and reports. Provisioning infrastructure, setting up databases, sorting licensing. Configuring and customising the platform itself, because low code and no code has never meant no effort. Then testing, data migration, user training and knowledge transfer.
It is a serious programme with a serious budget and serious executive attention.
And Then It Stops
So why do we see so little continual improvement and product ownership of these platforms once implementation finishes?
The pattern is remarkably consistent. The project team disbands. The budget line closes. Ownership passes to whoever has capacity, usually alongside their existing role. And the platform is left to reflect the business as it was on go live day.
It is almost as though there is an unspoken assumption that the platform will reconfigure itself in response to reorganisations, new services, changed processes and shifting business priorities.
"A space mission that spent all its resources on the launch would be certain to fail. The launch is the start of the mission, not the mission."
The Answer Was Always There
The fix is not complicated, and it comes from the same body of good practice these platforms were built to support. Continual improvement.
Without a continual improvement mindset applied to the platform itself, with the governance and the practice to back it, most of the effort that went into implementation slowly loses its value. Not dramatically, but steadily, as the gap between what the platform does and what the organisation now needs gets wider each quarter.
What Good Looks Like
In our experience, the organisations that avoid the expensive relaunch cycle do a few things differently:
- They assign a named product owner or product manager for the platform, with real time allocated to it
- They hold a standing budget for improvement and expansion, not just support and maintenance
- They treat platform changes through the same governance as any other service change
- They review the platform against current business needs on a regular cycle, rather than when something breaks
Note that support and maintenance in the subscription is not the same thing. That keeps the platform running. It does nothing to keep the platform relevant.
Before You Sign
Next time an Enterprise Service Management platform initiative comes across your desk for approval, the question worth asking is not about the implementation cost. It is what provision has been made for continual improvement and expansion after go live.
If the answer is nothing, you are not approving a platform. You are approving the first of two.
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