Here is a sense-making model of work management that makes the distinction between standardised transactional work and complex case-solving work, and unpacks how we should manage each differently.
Standard+Case is a realistic 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.
This second edition (the first was called “Plus!”) better integrates understanding of complexity and agility in real-world systems of work to make the Standard+Case model as close to reality as possible. This is how the world really works.
S+C marries the two, as yin and yang, and shows how they interoperate effectively in an adaptive model that copes with a changing world, providing an approach to categorising and resolving any sort of situational response work. (In an IT context, it can be “tickets”, such as requests or incidents on a service desk, problems, or changes; or even user stories to be developed). Standard+Case is a synthesis of our conventional “Standard” process-centric approach to responding, with Case management, a discipline well-known in industry sectors such as health, social work, law and policing. This description is written from the perspective of Service Management within the IT industry (so please excuse some ITSM jargon), but it can be applied anywhere.
S+C applies to anything that requires a human response: there’s either a standard response or there isn’t.
The world refuses to be standardised: there is other incoming stuff that we haven’t seen before, that we don’t already have a defined response for, that has to be handled as a case.
You can only industrialise that which you can standardise, i.e. make known: described, predictable, and repeatable. Only some of the world can be standardised.
Whether you are talking development, deployment, or response to situations, some of the world will always be unfamiliar due to change, or unpredictable due to complexity.
That’s Standard+Case.
This is of course an over-simplistic dichotomy, which makes it useful 🙂 (it can be seen as a simplification of the famous Cynefin model).
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…
S+C addresses criticisms of process-centric approaches to managing responses that they don’t deal with the undefined situations, and they don’t allow customers and knowledge workers to be empowered to deal with them.
And unlike some new-fangled theories, S+C does not seek to replace or change existing approaches: it expands and clarifies that theory to provide a more complete description of managing responses.
- Improve performance: improve responsiveness, efficiency, and effectiveness of your service responses
- Empower knowledge workers to use their creativity, expertise, and leadership
- Improve morale amongst your service desk and other responders
- Empower your customer to ask for what they need not what the rules say you provide
Thanks to Charles Betz for pointing me to Case Management
The book is available on Amazon in paperback or Kindle.
Ideas or corrections since publication of the Second Edition.
Case work may be more permissive of the quality of the work: Case work allows development “hacking”, winging it to find solutions. Whereas Standard work will expect more careful precision engineering as we standardise the work, “measure twice cut once”.
There are different modes of failure in Standard work and Case work. Case work will involve Amy Edmundson’s Intelligent Failure: (1) takes place in new territory (2) in pursuit of a goal, (3) driven by a hypothesis, and (4) is as small as possible.
Whereas Standard work will deal with what TU call Inevitable Failure. To take the same format, perhaps Inevitable Failure is made up of (1) in familiar territory – often business as usual (2) in pursuit of an output (3) driven by a need – often a request or work demand (4) the same size as every other time. As Dr Richard Cook taught us in that great paper How Complex Systems Fail, failure can happen the same way as success.
It might be human error – which is inevitable – or a novel conjunction of defects, but it comes out of the blue on a task that has been done before. It is still not “failure that can be prevented” and it is still a great learning and improvement opportunity.
From a Standard+Case user organisation:
My first impression after just a week is that the ‘standard guys’ are very happy and the turnaround of tickets has improved. On the case side it is interesting as all of a sudden people are concerned about making it easier to work with cases. What tools do we need to put in place? How can we document our systems better?
To sum it up I think focus is the word that comes to mind. Less context switching.
From a book review (Karen Ferris, itSMF Fellow and author of the seminal Balanced Diversity: A Portfolio Approach to Organizational Change
):
This book is an eye-opener and a must-read. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone involved in situation response. This is a game-changer
From Phil Green on LinkedIn
I’m a big fan of Standard+Case. I attended your workshop at LeadIT 2013 and it literally blew my mind. Ground breaking, yet at the same time genius level simplicity and common sense. I’ve called upon it numerous times since then and found it of great help.
This page provides some additional resources for readers and users of Standard+Case.
Videos, podcasts, and webinars
I was honoured to be invited on the DevOps Cafe podcast. Jump to about minute 14 if you want to skip discussion of other topics:
DevOps Cafe Ep. 40 – Guest: Rob England
I got to be on Practitioner Radio and here is the podcast on iTunes
And on ITSM Weekly The Podcast, USA edition: This seems to be the only place it still survives
A blog interview with Rui Soares on ITIL Blues:
Rob’s presentation materials on slideshare:
Standard+case explained in German:
Links
Discussion of Standard+Case:
See the reviews and feedback on the book here
More about Case Management:
Mastering the Unpredictable: How Adaptive Case Management Will Revolutionize the Way That Knowledge Workers Get Things Done, Swenson;Meghan-Kiffer Press; 2010 (Amazon book) Has some really useful content: it taught me an immense amount about case management. But the book is about technology solutions to what I maintain is not a technology problem. in true IT fashion this book tries to solve ACM with tools – tools should always only have a supporting role. (Nor is it terribly well edited: more a collection of essays)
See also Keith Swenson’s blog
An interesting academic paper about Case Management: Case Handling: A New Paradigm for Business Process Support, van der Aalst, Weske, Grünbauer
The Case Management Model and Notation standard has a useful introduction
Wikipedia on Advanced case management (not terribly good)
Case Management; Kitson, Ravisanskar, Soudamini; CapGemini 2012
The Association for Information and Image Management has a page on Case in the IT context, very technology-centric. What is it about IT people?
There is a Case Management Body of Knowledge, accessible online by annual subscription. It is focused on health and social welfare cases: cases dealing with people. As such, the usefulness for IT is limited.
Similarly The Case Manager’s Handbook, Fourth Edition is focused on the health industry. I haven’t read it. It rates highly on Amazon.
The Case Management Societies of America/Australia/UK are also focused on health. So is the American case Management Association. And so on.
Related topics:
Stateful and Stateless Design of Work