How to conduct Service Delivery Review; 10 pieces of advice to improve Service Delivery Review
Introduction
As part of my professional activities, I help the customer learn Kanban skills and improve their internal capabilities in Kanban. This activity has led me to conclude that many Delivery Managers and leaders often face challenges regarding service delivery reviews. It became clear that support in this area could positively impact many Kanban practitioners, so I thought this would be a nice topic for my next article! The goal is to provide insights to improve your Service Delivery Review. I recommend reading this article if you:
- You are about to schedule your first service delivery review and wondering what to consider.
- You want to improve your current format of Service Delivery Review or get more value out of it?
- As a leader invited to the Service Review, you want to understand how to meaningfully contribute to this cadence and what best practices can be expected.
As we progress, I will first provide basic information about the Service Delivery Review as a reminder. The main section of the article will describe each of the ten pieces of advice in more detail. Finally, the conclusion will focus on approaches to implement changes. The shared advice has helped some; I hope it helps you, too. Enjoy!
What is a Service Delivery Review
The Service Delivery Review (SDR) is one of the seven Kanban cadences. It focuses on assessing and improving service delivery through reflection and data analysis. During this review, participants examine and improve the effectiveness of the selected service.
The typical agenda for a Service Delivery Review covers the following:
- Comparing current capabilities against customer expectations,
- Analysing shortfalls of SLE’s (service level expectations),
- Potential improvements for service delivery,
- Discussing possibilities for better balancing demand and capabilities and heading risks.
The typical attendee’s list of Service Delivery Review consists of:
- Service Delivery Manager,
- Service Request Manager,
- Team Representatives,
- Customers Representatives,
- other external Stakeholders.
The Service Delivery Review is typically associated with level 3 of the Kanban Maturity Model (David J. Anderson, 2020). This feedback loop’s evolution is out of this article’s scope and will be covered in another article <link in future>.
To simplify it, the Service Delivery Review is a kind of retrospective, where the team focuses intently on service. In this review, participants evaluate service performance against customer commitments. They analyse customer-focused, service-oriented metrics and delve into flow metrics with a keen eye for improvement. Service Delivery Review plays a key role in enabling change. It’s about continuously checking how effectively your team delivers and what can be done to enhance service quality and efficiency.
Service Delivery Review Recommendation
The ten pieces of advice are presented in no specific order. Depending on your team’s and organisation’s context, some may be more relevant than others. Following Kanban’s evolutionary approach to implementing changes, I considered each of them more as an invitation to explore a specific aspect of the review rater’s predefined cookbook. I encourage you to explore the highlighted tipping points of the process with your team and, based on it, get the most value out of the Service Delivery Review.
Know Your Services
Service definition Source: Own elaboration based on (Kanban University, 2024)
Before you dive into your first Service Delivery Review, it’s essential that all participants clearly understand the services they will be reviewing.
As a reminder, service starts with a customer’s request. This request can be through service delivery, which generally involves performing a series of activities to achieve an outcome that should satisfy the customer’s needs and bring value to the customer.
This point is all about STATIK step 0 (Walczak, Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban (STATIK), 2024). An effective Service Delivery Review will be difficult without understanding your service definition. Check to ensure that your service definition is aligned, updated, and reflects reality. Do not assume; check and verify empirically. As a tangible outcome of this check, create an artefact or canvas that outlines your service definition. This can be presented at the beginning of each Service Delivery Review, Believe me, not only newcomers will greatly appreciate this habit.
Establish Service-Delivery Expectations – Define Fitness Criteria
Focus on the Work, Not the Person Responsible for It
The Service Delivery Review is not a performance appraisal. Discussions can easily shift to who was responsible for certain work items or why a particular person didn’t deliver on time.
Avoid that!
Your goal is to understand how your system works and what factors influence delivery. Focusing on individual blame only can create a blame culture and stifle collaboration. Instead, constructively and thoughtfully see the bigger picture and understand how the system impacts the flow and efficiency of work and what can be done collectively to improve it.
Instead, constructively and thoughtfully see the bigger picture and understand how the system impacts the flow and efficiency of work and what can be done collectively to improve it.
Know Your Data
Data are the foundation of a Service Delivery Review. Analysis and reflection on service fitness criteria, flow metrics and other relevant metrics and their trends over time are essential.
Take the time to gather relevant data before the review and analyse it before the event. As an outcome of this analysis, you might reveal patterns and trends that might not be so easy to spot. Presenting this insight in front of review participants often leads to meaningful conversations.
This is a really good way to structure and clarify the conversation and ensure that it is grounded in facts rather than assumptions. Be sure that visualisation tools like cumulative flow or scatterplots can be easily accessed and read. This is a great first step toward achieving transparency, and it will really benefit everyone in the long run!
Let the People Be Prepared
Recommendation 4 –“Know Your Data” is important for all attendees of the Service Delivery Review. It’s crucial that everyone is informed upfront and aware of what to expect during the review. Send out invitations in advance with the agenda, a summary of data, metrics, and charts, and encourage attendees to familiarise themselves with the information before the review.
It is common sense to give people appropriate time to understand the data and consider the issues. In my experience, transparency in the data describing your service’s performance and fitness criteria leads to more productive discussions and meaningful insights.
Preparedness also helps participants contribute more confidently, allowing them to address challenges rather than reacting impulsively to new, unknown facts.
If You’re Too Busy To Build Good Systems, You’ll Always Be Too Busy
This advice reminds us of the importance of taking the time to build systems that help improve delivery. If you feel there’s never time for proper reflection, that’s a strong signal that you need to improve your systems instead of constantly firefighting and drowning in the operations associated with an unoptimised system.
The Service Delivery Review is about system-level improvements. It’s an opportunity to discuss systemic bottlenecks (Walczak, 2024) and inefficiencies that make people feel constantly busy without actually improving outcomes. Use this time to consider how you can build better systems that make future work smoother and less chaotic.
Learn the Ropes –Metrics and Charts
Your metrics, KPIs, and charts may not be familiar to everyone in the room. In this context, you need to understand how important it is to explain each element clearly. Ensuring clarity can significantly enhance the experience for everyone, so for a host, it’s important to ensure all attendees feel supported and informed.
Slides presenting a metric or chart should include a pictogram, a brief definition, or a computation equation to clarify its meaning.
When introducing new metrics or fitness criteria, take the needed time to explain what the metric means, how it is calculated, and why it is useful,
Relating the metric to the decision-making process is a good way to evaluate it. You should be able to define the decisions that can be made based on the metric. If the metric fails this test or if the decision is relatively unimportant in the context of the service delivery review, it may be a strong recommendation to skip the metric. Save time and effort, and spend it wisely.
Using simple language to explain your points makes discussions more inclusive, ensuring everyone understands the context. This is especially helpful if you have stakeholders or members from other teams who might be less familiar with your context.
Make Your Meetings a Safe Space for Honest Conversation
It’s important to have a safe environment for open and honest conversations to promote transparency, enhance team collaboration, and facilitate meaningful change. When conducting a service delivery review, it’s crucial for every participant to feel at ease expressing their concerns, sharing their observations, and proposing improvements without worrying about being judged or facing any form of retaliation. The effectiveness of your feedback loop hinges on how freely participants can communicate their viewpoints.
Establishing clear ground rules based on respect and openness is essential to fostering this environment.
A key strategy to create a safe space is to acknowledge vulnerability and encourage transparency among leaders. Different formal and informal leaders such as the Service Delivery Manager, Service Request Manager, delivery team representatives, service customers, or stakeholders will participate in the service delivery review. When leaders admit what they don’t know and show openness to new ideas, it encourages the rest of the group to feel safe doing the same (Edmondson, 2019).
As a facilitator, frame your questions to encourage thoughtful contributions instead of defensiveness, ask open-ended questions such as,
“What changes could we make to decrease the failure demand of our service delivery?”
rather than assigning blame or pointing fingers like,
“Why did the testing team miss so many bugs in the last release?”
This transformative approach doesn’t just aim to make meetings more comfortable; it’s designed to supercharge productivity and drive impactful results. Open and honest team conversations are crucial for identifying and addressing challenges effectively, driving Service Delivery Review. Without such an environment, hidden issues can lead to repeated inefficiencies and missed improvement opportunities (Edmondson, 2019).
Proposed Improvements as Experiments
This point emphasises the Kanban practice of “Improving collaboratively and evolving experimentally.” Many teams struggle with implementing this practice, so it is worth highlighting it. Rather than implementing changes based on assumptions or strict plans, it’s crucial to treat each proposed improvement as an experiment.
To adopt an experimental mindset, you should use the scientific method. This means creating a hypothesis, testing it, gathering data, and analysing the results to draw conclusions. Setting up hypotheses and gathering data can significantly help guide the improvement process. Here is a simple framework to summarise your experiments, making the process more precise and more structured:
- Hypothesis
What do we believe will happen if we make this change?
Example: Reducing the number of items in progress will lead to faster delivery of individual work items.
- Expected Outcomes
What specific results do we expect?
Example: We expect an average reduction in lead time from 12 days to 8 days.
- Test Plan
How will we test our hypothesis?
Example: Implement a WIP limit 3 for a one-month trial period in each flow stage from commitment point to delivery.
- Data Collection
What data will we gather during the experiment?
Example: Track the average lead time for each item completed during the trial.
- Results and Analysis
What did we observe? Did the hypothesis hold true?
Example: Average lead time reduced to 9 days. The hypothesis was partially validated.
- Next Steps:
How should we proceed based on the results?
Example: Adjust the WIP limit to 2 and run another trial to see if lead time can be further optimised.
Using a presented framework or a similar one can help to make the experimentation process more transparent, structured, and easier to communicate with the team and stakeholders.
The learning process takes time. Enshuring that the team is given sufficient time to conduct an experiment. This will allow them to adjust, adapt, and observe the impacts of the changes with reasonable stressors for the system.
Using the right tools – is making things easier for you!
Everyone would expect that! When I started my journey with Kanban many years ago, I typically did computations, drew graphs presenting trends, and then presented the outcome on a physical board located somewhere near the Kanban system—which might still be the case for some teams.
Instead of manual or Excel-driven computation, you can use dedicated software or add-ons for your work management systems. (ie. Jira, Azur DevOps) to make your life easier. Let me be clear: this is not a hidden product placement, and I did not receive any incentives for this content. I would love for you to check out some software that I have used in the past. You never know, it might be just what you’re looking for! Here are three randomly listed tools worth exploring:
Business Mapa (formally Kanbanize)
Picture 2. View of business map dashboard. Source
Swift Kanban
Picture 3 View on Swift Kanban dashboard. Source
Actionable Agile
Addon available for Jira and Azure DevOps users
Picture4. View of Montecarlo simulation available in Actionable Agile. Source
Not every tool will be the perfect fit for you! Take a moment to consider whether the tools you’re using make your life easier or add unnecessary stress. This issue involves both the review preparation process and the ongoing accessibility of data. I encourage you to be open to experimenting with different tools. All the tools presented offer free trial versions, so you don’t risk much. Having relevant information about your service’s performance presented transparently can save you a fortune!
It is all about evolution
Whether you are forming a Service Delivery Review from the ground up or in full swing with it, I hope the recommendations in this article bring you value. A Service Delivery Review is about creating a structured space where you and your team can assess your current performance, reflect on what’s working, and identify areas for improvement.
It would be great if we could use the Kanban approach to implement the advice shared in this article. It is evolution rather than revolution. You can gradually introduce these recommendations into your review.
Effective feedback loops can help create a unique organisational culture that supports innovation and provides an environment conducive to business innovation. More information about business innovation can be found here.
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Bibliography
Anderson, D. (2016, 1 26). STATIK – Systems Thinking Approach to Implementing Kanban. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/statik-systems-thinking-approach-implementing-kanban-david-anderson/
David, A. (n.d.). STATIK STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTION BY DAVID ANDERSON SYSTEMS THINKING APPROACH TO IMPLEMENTING KANBAN.
Walczak, W. (2024, 01 28). Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban (STATIK). Retrieved from meirik.pl: https://www.meirik.com/articles/systems-thinking-approach-to-introducing-kanban-statik
Walczak, W. (2024, 1 4). Working with bottlenecks. Retrieved from meirik.com: https://www.meirik.com/articles/working-with-bottlenecks
David J. Anderson, T. B. (2020). Kanban Maturity Model: A Map to Organizational Agility, Resilience, and Reinvention. Blue Hole Press.
Kanban University. (2024, 10 5). Kanban Glossary. Retrieved from https://kanban.university/glossary/: https://kanban.university/glossary/
Edmondson, A. (2019, 04 01). Make Your Meetings a Safe Space for Honest Conversation. Retrieved from Harvard Buissnes Review: 2019/04/make-your-meetings-a-safe-space-for-honest-conversation.