The Link Between ITSM and SDLC: A Cycle of Continuous Improvement

Any IT product company, sooner or later, realizes it needs to do more than just develop software; it also needs to provide related services to its clients. These can be services for implementation, user training, technical support, updates, and feature development. Essentially, the company becomes a provider of full-fledged IT services, which means it has to set up all the processes for interacting with clients and understanding their needs.

However, on closer inspection, it becomes clear that integrating SDLC and ITSM practices is critically important for ensuring continuous improvement of both an IT company's products and its services.

In this article, we'll look at why product companies need to act as service providers, how to establish collaboration between development and support teams, and how practices for managing problems, incidents, and product backlog formation are connected. Special attention will be paid to the importance of a unified information environment and platform solutions in implementing an integrated approach to SDLC and ITSM.

The Product Organization as a Service Provider

First, let's define a "product organization." This could be an entire company, like a major software vendor, or a small automation group within an IT department at a larger enterprise.

Resources of a Product Organization

Resources include employees (staff), information technologies, information systems, infrastructure, codebase, and other IT-related means of production. Additionally, resources include the processes the team uses, as well as partners and suppliers the product team interacts with.

Elements of Product Value

A product is a formed configuration of resources, their combination and assembly within an organization, which can potentially bring value to the consumer.

A product can exist without a consumer — that's a key point to understand. Simply creating and releasing a product isn't enough. This combination of resources, potentially bringing value, might just sit on the shelf. A product organization must present its product to consumers and organize the actual process of product consumption. Also, products are often complex, and not all parts of them need to be 'visible' to consumers.

What Needs to Be Done for a Product to Start Bringing Value to the Consumer?

For a product to start bringing real value, it needs to be presented to consumers in the form of services and service offerings. Services are the very link between the product and its users, ensuring its availability, convenience, and quality of use. Service offerings can include various ways of providing the product — from completely transferring a copy of it to the client to organizing access to its functionality using a SaaS model. One product can be the basis for many service offerings aimed at different consumer groups.
Service offerings usually come in three types and can include:

• Transferring product copies to the consumer;
• Providing access to products and resources;
• Specific service actions.

A Product Organization Becomes a Service Provider

Any product organization primarily centers its efforts on creating and developing software products. Teams of developers, testers, analysts, and other specialists work on releasing quality software that meets business and user needs. However, a finished product alone doesn't ensure full client satisfaction; it's only part of the picture. It's also important to ensure effective implementation, support, and continuous improvement of the product. Here, the product organization also takes on the role of an IT service provider.

Delivering Value

By becoming a service provider, a product organization takes responsibility for the complete lifecycle of delivering value to clients. This means that besides direct software development, it must ensure its correct implementation, user training, technical support, handling change requests, and much more. In essence, the product company builds long-term partnerships with its clients, taking responsibility for their success in using the product.

Continuous Improvement

Such a transformation requires the product organization to rethink its internal processes and practices. Traditional software development approaches, focused solely on creating quality code, are no longer enough. It's necessary to build end-to-end processes that cover the entire product and service lifecycle, while ensuring effective communication and collaboration between development, support, operations, and client interaction teams. Only then can you guarantee that the product will not just meet specifications but also bring real benefit to consumers, continuously evolving and adapting to their changing needs.

SDLC and ITSM — A Unified Value Stream

Realizing its role as an IT service provider lays the foundation for a product organization, but it's just the first step toward truly effective product and service lifecycle management. The next task is to ensure seamless integration of development (SDLC) and IT service management (ITSM) practices. Even though both methodologies aim to deliver value to end-users, they have several fundamental differences.

Differences in Tools and Systems

• Development teams use various development systems and task trackers to manage backlogs, tasks, and defects, as well as version control and CI/CD systems;
• Support teams use ITSM systems for handling requests, managing incidents, problems, service requests, and delivering services.

Differences in Object Models and Processes

• SDLC deals with backlog items (epics, features, stories, defects, releases, etc.); processes are focused on development, testing, and product delivery;
• ITSM works with services, incidents, problems, service and change requests, and configuration items; processes are aimed at ensuring service stability and availability.

Organizational Separation

• Development and support are often handled by different departments or organizations;
• Specialists have different competencies and speak different professional "languages";
• Using different tracking systems makes communication and knowledge transfer difficult.

The separation of SDLC and ITSM processes and tools hinders effective collaboration between development and support teams. Bridging this gap to ensure coordinated and manageable work across diverse organizational units requires a unifying common structure. This structure is the value stream.

A unified value stream should cover both product development and service delivery processes. To build such a stream, it's important to consider SDLC and ITSM practices together, ensuring:

• End-to-end traceability from client needs to specific tasks in the development backlog, avoiding the accumulation of technical debt;
• Effective task prioritization based on business value and user feedback;
• Quick handling of incidents and change requests, involving necessary experts;
• Continuous improvement of products and services based on collected analytics and metrics.

Implementing an integrated approach requires both organizational changes and appropriate tools. Development, support, and client interaction teams must establish close collaboration. Additionally, creating a unified information environment that ensures seamless integration of SDLC and ITSM processes is crucial.

Interaction Between Development and Support Teams

Effective team interaction requires setting up solid processes for information exchange and collaborative product improvement. User feedback coming through the support service is a valuable source of data for product development. Let's look at how to properly build data exchange and collaborative work processes between development and support teams.

Analyzing User Feedback

Most requests coming into technical support are "live" feedback from people who use the product every day. Behind every request is a real person with their own needs, pain points, and expectations. This information needs to be treated with extreme care and attention.

Analyzing user requests helps paint a detailed picture of their experience with the product, identify problem areas, and pinpoint opportunities for improvement. Product teams can use this data to build and prioritize their backlog, supplementing it with user stories, business-valuable features, and important enhancements.

Incidents as Growth Points

Many product teams try to distance themselves from operational problems, shifting the responsibility for resolving incidents onto the shoulders of tech support specialists. However, this approach doesn't allow for fully utilizing the potential of incidents to improve product quality.

Developers who become direct participants in the incident resolution process get a chance to dive deeper into the problems of real users. Involving product teams in investigating the causes of failures and finding workarounds not only improves the quality and speed of incident handling but also provides invaluable experience that later translates into product enhancements and optimizations.

Managing Changes Together

Change requests from users are another important feedback channel that helps keep a finger on the pulse of changing client needs. Properly handling these requests requires close interaction between product teams and support specialists.

Working together, they can ensure an effective process for accepting, approving, and planning changes. This will allow for quick adaptation of the product to changing business requirements while maintaining service stability and manageability. Transparent communication with users at all stages of handling change requests increases their loyalty and trust in the IT service.

Unifying Processes, Integrating Tools

Building effective interaction between product teams and the support service requires not only organizational changes but also the right tools. It's necessary to ensure process unification and integration of development and support systems to organize a full-fledged end-to-end process for managing the lifecycle of products and services.

Platform solutions allow for seamless integration based on a unified system. SimpleOne SDLC for managing the software development lifecycle and SimpleOne ITSM for automating service processes form a single information space. This opens up opportunities for cross-functional interaction and allows for building a complete development cycle based on feedback from real users.

The Role of Requests in Shaping the Backlog

Creating an effective continuous improvement process requires close integration among problem management, incident management, and backlog formation.

Incident management and problem management are two complementary ITSM processes that, nevertheless, have different goals and focuses.

• Incident management aims to restore normal service operation for users as quickly as possible. The main priority is to solve the user's problem as fast as possible and minimize the negative impact of the incident on the business. However, the underlying causes of the incident often remain unknown.
• Problem management, on the other hand, focuses on finding and eliminating the root causes of incidents. Its task is to prevent incidents from recurring in the future.

Separating these processes allows for both quickly addressing the consequences of incidents for clients and systematically working on the quality and stability of provided services. But it's important to understand that ultimately, both processes should be integrated into a single stream of continuous improvement.

Incidents and problems are traditionally managed by the technical support service, whereas product teams typically focus on developing new features. Effective lifecycle management for products and services, however, requires these distinct teams to closely interact.

Involving product teams in the incident and problem management process has several advantages:

• Developers get firsthand information about the real experience of using the product, which helps them better understand user needs;
• Product teams can diagnose the technical causes of problems more quickly and accurately and suggest solutions;
• Working together on incidents and problems helps develop a culture of quality and responsibility for the final result.

On the other hand, support teams accumulate a huge amount of knowledge about client "pain points" and product weaknesses. This information is invaluable for forming and prioritizing the backlog of product teams. User requests, frequently occurring incidents, and identified problems — all of this should be reflected as tasks for product development and improvement.

Thus, incident and problem management become an integral part of the backlog formation process. And product teams and the support service transform from office neighbors into partners working together to achieve strategic business goals.

Putting such integration into practice allows for an end-to-end process from user request to product improvement development and release:

1. User incidents and requests are logged by the support service in the ITSM system.
2. Based on incidents, problems requiring deeper investigation are identified.
3. Information about problems and improvement requests is automatically transferred to SDLC systems as development tasks.
4. Product teams, using Agile practices, include these tasks in their backlog and plan their implementation within sprints.
5. After product updates are released, information about resolved problems and implemented improvements is sent back to ITSM.
6. The support service informs users about the changes made and collects feedback.

This forms a single, closed loop that ensures continuous product improvement based on real user needs. Integration at the data and process level helps eliminate gaps and increase work speed and quality.

Platform-Based Process Integration

Building effective interaction between product teams and the technical support service, and integrating lifecycle management processes for development and service delivery, requires an appropriate technological foundation.

Separate systems and tools used by different departments often become an obstacle to building a unified value stream. The solution to this problem can be the implementation of an integrated platform that ensures seamless interaction between processes and teams.

A unified information environment for SDLC and ITSM integration provides:

• Transparency and accessibility of data for all process participants;
• Elimination of information silos and bottlenecks between departments;
• Automatic transformation of user incidents and requests into development tasks;
• Joint release planning and change management, considering business priorities and user needs;
• Creation of a single repository of knowledge and experience accumulated during product development and operation;
• The ability to build end-to-end analytics and reporting across the entire product and service lifecycle.

SimpleOne SDLC and ITSM platform solutions are a clear example of end-to-end integration of software development processes and related IT service management. Their joint implementation and use on a unified Low-code platform open up possibilities for effectively supporting a single value stream:

Seamless integration of data and processes by using a unified information environment and a unified object model.

End-to-end process implementation on a unified platform ensures seamless integration between SimpleOne SDLC and SimpleOne ITSM products. A unified information environment and a unified object model help overcome the limitations of separate systems and organize effective interaction between product teams and the technical support service at all stages of the product and service lifecycle.

Value Stream Management based on its principles

The platform provides tools for mapping, analyzing, and optimizing the value stream, allowing for the identification and elimination of bottlenecks, minimization of waste, and increased efficiency of development and service delivery processes. Integrating metrics and analytics from SimpleOne SDLC and SimpleOne ITSM provides a holistic view of stream performance and allows for timely decisions on its improvement.

Flexible configuration and platform functionality extension through Low-code tools and an open API.

SimpleOne solutions can be adapted to the specific needs and processes of a particular company without involving developers. The ability to quickly create customized applications, automate workflows, and configure interfaces and reports ensures maximum alignment of the platform with business requirements and effectively supports its development.

Intelligent process automation based on machine learning and natural language processing technologies

The SimpleOne platform uses AI capabilities for automatic categorization, prioritization, and routing of user requests, identifying similar incidents and problems, and recommending solutions based on a knowledge base. This significantly increases the speed and quality of request processing, reduces the load on the support service, and frees up resources for solving more complex tasks.

Scalability and the ability to incrementally implement new practices and tools

The platform is architected to allow for the gradual scaling of solution functionality in line with evolving business needs. Companies can start by implementing individual products or processes and gradually expand the scope of automation by connecting new tools. Thanks to its modular architecture, the platform minimizes the need for extensive and costly projects when adopting new practices or integrating with other systems.

The ability to implement complex cross-functional scenarios by using a unified process engine and a common knowledge base.

The SimpleOne platform provides tools for creating and automating processes, managing configurations, organizing teamwork, and accumulating expertise. This makes it possible to build end-to-end product and service lifecycle management processes spanning multiple functional areas and roles.

Summary

Integrating SDLC and ITSM practices is a necessity for companies striving for continuous product improvement and increased efficiency in value creation.

Key factors for successful SDLC and ITSM integration:

• Rethinking the role of product teams as service providers;
• Establishing effective feedback loops and collaborative work on product improvement;
• Integrating service processes into backlog formation;
• Implementing integrated platform solutions to support end-to-end ITSM processes in development management.

Companies that manage to implement these principles will gain significant competitive advantages: increased client satisfaction, faster time-to-market for products, cost optimization, and greater innovative potential.