Service Delivery Manager

Kanban has always been the “start with what you do now” method, and no one gets a “new role, responsibilities, or job titles” at least not initially. However, it is now clear that some roles are emerging in the field with some implementations. So, it is valuable to report this, while they remain suggestions, options, or ideas, rather than prescribed roles for a Kanban implementation. This post follows my previous one that Kanban doesn’t share Agile’s cross-functional team reogranization agenda, and has always been a cross team, cross function solution for service delivery workflows. What follows is in the context of a service delivery workflow which spans functions or teams and is (most likely) orthogonal to the organizational structure of the enterprise, business or product unit.

Service Delivery Manager

From the early days of Kanban, we talked about the need for a manager to take on responsibility for flow of work. Perhaps, echoing the concept of scrummaster, in some implementations the role of person responsible for flow has been nicknamed flow manager or sometimes “flowmaster”. It’s a sticky, if arcane and tribal, title. For our official literature, I wanted something more corporate friendly, and something that is more outwardly facing. “Flow manager” is inwardly facing and focused on process problems. I prefer names that are outwardly focused and address customer needs. This is in line with the Kanban value of “Customer Focus.”

There is precedent for renaming concepts in Kanban to give them more customer focus. Inspired by the Improvement Kata in Toyota Kata, we defined and named, the System Capability Review meeting in 2012. This was later renamed to Service Delivery Review (SDR). The name change was to give the meeting an outward focus on customer needs, rather than an inward focus on process performance. By keeping the naming, the language, and the values, externally focused, we insure that the right metrics are used to drive relevant, valuable improvements. An outward focus is vital to insure “fitness for purpose” and to deliver on the Kanban agenda of survivability.

So, the “flow manager” concept is called the Service Delivery Manager. It is primarily intended to be a role played by an existing member of staff and not a new job title or position. So, by creating Service Delivery Manager, we do weaken the message that no one gets new responsibilities – actually someone does, the someone who takes on the SDM role.

The SDM role existed in 2007 in our first full scale Kanban Method implementation. It was usually played by a project manager from the PMO. The SDM carried responsibility for the Replenishment Meeting, the Delivery Planning Meeting, escalating blocker tickets, and what we would now call Risk Review. Replenishment, Delivery Planning and Risk Review are 3 of the Kanban Cadences.

In more recent implementations the SDM also facilitates the daily Kanban Meeting. In 2007, this role was taken by one of the function managers in the workflow. The SDM role was usually played by someone from the PMO.

Service Request Manager

For some number of years, the question has existed, what do you do with middle-men in the workflow? As a general rule, we wish to remove non-value-adding middle-men positions from the workflow. However, we also wish to avoid resistance to change. These are two core tenets of Kanban coaching and general goals we might have for change management when deploying Kanban in an organization. And the following guidance has existed since 2009: we seek to elevate the role of the middle-man, above the workflow, out of the value stream. The most common example of this is shown in the diagram, “What do you do with the Product Owners?”

The goal is to reposition the role of product owner as a risk manager and facilitator: someone who owns the policies for the system which frame decisions together with facilitating the decision making mechanism. This role is of higher value, is transparent and open to scrutiny and relieves us of the risk of the “hero product owner” who magically understand where the best business value is to be found. This elevated risk management and policy owning position improves corporate governance, improves consistency of process, and reduces personnel risk associated with a single individual.

Nevertheless, an individual with a “hero product owner” self-image will resist such a change. Kanban Coaching Professionals are trained to manage this resistance as part of their training in the Kanban Coaching Masterclass.

When the product owner is successfully repositioned above the workflow as the owner of the policies for risk assessment, scheduling, sequencing and selection, they have successfully transitioned into the Service Request Manager (SRM) role.

Again, we are weakening the “no one gets new responsibilities” principle, but this transition is generally managed over a period of time and isn’t necessarily thrust upon individuals at the start of Kanban adoption.

When the SRM role exists, the SRM usually takes responsibility for the Replenishment Meeting and will play a role in the Strategy Review and Risk Review.

With the emergence of the SDM & SRM roles with Kanban, we need to ask the questions, when do we need these roles? When do we need both? And are they merely roles an existing member of staff takes on as new responsibilities, or might they be new positions for which we need to hire? This post provides guidance based on what we’ve seen in the field so far.

When do we need a Service Delivery Manager?

I genuinely believe you always need a service delivery manager. This role has existed since the first Kanban at Microsoft in 2005. In the early days the SDM role was always played by a project manager. So it isn’t a new position but a refinement of existing responsibilities for an existing member of the staff. The SDM is therefore a role played by someone external to the value stream or workflow.

In the upper diagram, a service delivery workflow is shown spanning a functionally silo’d organization. The SDM facilitates the Replenishment Meeting receiving customer requests and facilitating a collaborative decision making process to select, sequence and schedule work to flow through to delivery. The SDM will collaborate with the functional manager or team leads and play a reasonably active part in the day-to-day operation of the kanban system, definitely attending and perhaps facilitating the Kanban Meeting.

It’s been reported to me that in some organizations, the concept of a service delivery workflow is very weak, while the functional silos and structure are very strong. Usually, such companies lack any significant focus on customer satisfaction or any service-orientation in their thinking, mindset or value system. I’ve specifically had this reported to me from a large Swedish industrial company and several companies in China in the technology or finance sectors. In these instances, the change agents, usually process coaches or members of the PMO, felt it was necessary to create the Service Delivery Manager role as a specific position within the firm. The act of doing so, is actually making a very clear commitment to service delivery and customer satisfaction. In other words, the bar for the change initiative is raised – senior leaders are being asked to acknowledge that service delivery and customer satisfaction are important. They are being asked to explicitly put customer focus in the spotlight and make it part of the corporate value system. This is a non-trivial but hugely important step.

So where there is a current lack of customer focus and a lack of understanding of existing service delivery workflows, where the concept is weak, you need to create a position for SDMs.

When do we need a Service Request Manager?

A Service Request Manager is likely to be needed when contact with the customers, or service requestors is weak or distant. The SRM becomes a proxy or advocate for the customers. However, it is important that we don’t place the SRM in a decision making role. We don’t want them becoming a dysfunctional proxy for the customer, showing bias towards one over the others. We always want the SRM as the facilitator of selection not the person doing the selection. In organizations, where contact with the customers is weak, there is often already an intermediary possibly a sales engineer, an account manager, a product manager or in Agile adopting organizations a product owner. So we want to elevate that person’s role into the role of SRM. It is a set of new responsibilities, not a new position.

When the SRM role exists, the SRM will take on the responsibility for the Replenishment Meeting and will play roles in the Strategy Review and Risk Review.

When might we need SRM as a new position? If the SDM is the “flow manager” for service delivery, then the SRM is the “flow manager” for ideation or discovery. So we might expect to see SRM emerge as a specific role when we have an upstream or discovery kanban system. The more focus we have on ideation, option validation and discard, and discovery and validation of concepts (or minimum viable products, MVPs) the more likely we are to need a SRM as a specific position in our organization.

The SRM role is described as “marshalling options”. This is the act of facilitating flow, and discard or upstream kanban work.

When might we need both roles?

In discussing this amongst my colleagues and with leaders in the Kanban community, Mike Burrows commented, “I have seen the need for one or the other but never both.” And that is probably a fair statement, we have seen firms adopting SDM or SRM roles but so far we haven’t seen both, at least not explicitly. With larger scale ESP implementations, we do see a lot of SRMs. One client advertised for SRMs by placing job advertisements for Product Owners. This makes sense. You recruit for a title that people are familiar with, then you mold them into what you need. That client has a strong sense of service delivery and without doubt function managers or team leads are playing the role of SDM. It just hasn’t been made explicit in that company.

So I suspect that as we see greater emphasis on the use of Kanban upstream and the growth of Enterprise Services Planning, with business emerging where ESP/Kanban is _the_ way that they manage their professional services company then we will see strong growth and use of both SRM and SDM roles.

At smaller scale and where there is little ideation, option development and discard, and a strong connection to the customer together with a strong sense of service delivery, in these cases, I expect only one role, SDM, played by an existing member of the staff. So Kanban as we knew it in 2005-2008 doesn’t involve new positions or additional headcount, but the future with Enterprise Services Planning, particularly in organizations with a weak sense of service delivery and a lack of customer focus, we are likely to see the new job title of Service Delivery Manager emerge. In companies that do a lot of innovation and act as a market leader in an uncertain and emerging market, we are likely to see the emergence of Service Request Manager as a new position. Where both circumstances exist, we’ll see both roles in use, perhaps both as new positions and additional headcount.

Emerging Roles in Kanban – SDM and SRM