by Jenny Boronyak | Apr 23, 2015 | Collaboration, ITIL and Service Design |
“In this Age of the Customer, the only sustainable competitive advantage is knowledge of and engagement with customers.” – David M. Cooperstein, “Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer,” October 10, 2013. According to Forrester Research, the Age of Information is over and we are now firmly in the Age of the Customer, a time when a strategic focus on the customer matters more than any other imperative. In two insightful reports, The CIO and CMO’s Blueprint For Strategy In The Age Of The Customer, Forrester Research lists the four key strategic imperatives that are necessary to establish a competitive advantage in today’s customer-driven marketplace. Every service organization should be following these four imperatives: Focus on the customer experience. In the Age of the Customer, if we’re not strategically focused on designing and continuously improving a valuable customer experience, it is impossible to compete with the top companies in the industry. With all of the digital technologies and disruptions, today’s customer is more empowered than ever. The only way we can anticipate the needs of today’s customer and develop valuable service experiences that excite and delight is to become “customer-obsessed.” The definition of being “customer-obsessed,” according to Forrester Research: “A customer-obsessed enterprise focuses its strategy, its energy, and its budget on processes that enhance knowledge of and engagement with customers and prioritizes these over maintaining traditional competitive barriers.” – Kyle McNabb and Josh Bernoff, “The CMO’s Blueprint For Strategy In The Age Of The Customer,” September 12, 2014. To become customer-obsessed and successfully create excellent customer experiences, we need to improve the way we design all aspects of...
by Jenny Boronyak | Feb 11, 2015 | ITIL and Service Design, Product Development |
When we’re designing new solutions for our customers, it can be easy to get caught up in the products and features we create and neglect to ensure that what we are building actually ends up delivering value to our customers. It can be challenging to acquire the necessary deep understanding of what our customers consider valuable. Value Proposition Design, described in the book of the same name written by Alexander Osterwalder, et. al., is great for organizations who are overwhelmed by the task of creating value for customers, a task which can be incredibly difficult without the proper guidance. According to the authors of this useful method, value proposition design helps people “successfully understand the patterns of value creation” by making them easily visible. Following this method, we don’t just end up designing products, but rather entire value propositions that directly effectively target our customers’ jobs, pains, and gains. In the book, the authors describe tools that can be used to continuously create and improve value propositions that meet customer expectations. One of the most useful tools that can be applied to discover value propositions is the Value Proposition Canvas. The Value Proposition Canvas is made up of two sides: Customer Profile—This part clarifies our customer understanding Value Map—This part describes how we intend to create value for our customer The goal is to achieve “Fit” between the two sides of the canvas by ensuring one agrees with the other. The Customer Profile, or Customer Segment Profile, describes a specific customer segment by breaking it down into customer jobs, pains, and gains. Identify these three items to create a...
by Jenny Boronyak | Dec 29, 2014 | Business Analysis, ITIL and Service Design |
As organizations search for new ways to deliver solutions and increase customer satisfaction, many have turned to the discipline of IT service design. But still, many organizations haven’t made the transformation yet—big mistake! Don’t take our word for it; hear what the experts have to say about what exactly service design is, and why it is so important to the success of the company: What is service design? “The objective of ITIL Service Design is to design new IT services. The scope of Service Design includes the design of new services, as well as changes and improvements to existing ones… Service Design identifies service requirements and devises new service offerings as well as changes and improvements to existing ones.” – IT Infrastructure Library “Service design is sometimes easiest to grasp when contrasted with product design. Product designers create tangible things such as bikes, cars, coffee machines, MP3 players, and laptops. Service designers create intangible experiences, such as the series of interactions that you have as you book a flight, pay a bill, get a driver’s license, or visit a doctor. Service designers also design the behind-the-scenes activities that enable those experiences to be delivered as planned.” – Kristina Dervojeda, et. al., Design for Innovation: Service design as a means to advance business models “Service design applies design methods and craft to the definition and orchestration of service experiences. Service design examines the operations, culture, and structure of an organization for impact on service experience.” – Jamin Hegeman, 5 Things I Wish I Knew: A Service Design Journey “Service design is a relatively new discipline that asks some fundamental questions:...
by Jenny Boronyak | Dec 15, 2014 | Uncategorized |
Maintaining the service portfolio is a great way to identify service enhancements, document service definitions, and determine which services need to be retired or replaced. But, we have a service catalog, you say. So we’re gonna move along. Wait a minute. Sorry to break the news, but you need to go back and do some work on an actual service portfolio. The service portfolio is not the same as the service catalog. An IT Service Portfolio describes services in terms of business value, specifying what the services are, how they’re bundled or packaged, and what business benefits they provide. It’s articulated from the customer’s perspective and answers the following questions, according to ITIL: Service Strategy: Why should customers buy our service? Why should they buy this service from us? What features and components do customers want and are willing to pay for? What is the demand for the service? What are customers willing to pay for our service? What resources are needed to provide the service? On the other hand, an IT Service Catalog is a service order and demand-channeling mechanism, which is a fancy term for a website. It takes services that are already defined in the service portfolio and describes them as offerings that a customer can buy through an online service catalog. You need the foundation of the service portfolio before creating a useful service catalog. Too many IT organizations rush to define the catalog without starting with the portfolio, causing services to be poorly understood and insufficiently defined. Those organizations are probably currently in the process of overhauling their service catalog, if they haven’t already....
by Jenny Boronyak | Dec 10, 2014 | Agile, Business Analysis, Collaboration, Product Development, Project Management |
A clearly-defined Definition of Done is absolutely essential to agile software development. At the end of every sprint or increment, software is demonstrated to the product owner and relevant stakeholders to make sure that the increment is done. But too often, we end up accepting the work completed during the increment even though it isn’t truly done yet – “DONE-done,” as we call it at Enfocus Solutions. A Definition of Done creates a shared understanding of what it means to be finished. According to AgileAlliance.org, the Definition of Done is a list of criteria that must be met before a product increment is considered “Done.” The Definition of Done is also an expression of the team’s quality standards. A more precise Definition of Done is often associated with the delivery of higher quality solutions. Generally, the team will increase their velocity as their Definition of Done gets refined, because they will improve release planning and spend less time fixing old problems. The most important function of the Definition of Done is that it provides a clear description of what it means for an increment to be done and ready to be implemented. It helps us avoid misunderstandings and miscommunications, and makes sure that there’s transparency around what the team is doing during the sprint. It is difficult to pin down a Definition of Done that suits all circumstances. Each organization needs to define their own definition; the checklist found in this pocket guide is meant to serve as a guideline for building your own Definition of Done for an iteration. Here’s a couple tips for dealing with the Definition...
