The USDA Forest Service contacted me to help in describing their improved approach to managing thousands of technical service requests. Our Forest Service manages land resources across the country, and the requests coming into the CIO vary widely from mobile land radio support in remote woodlands to more common requests for software and hardware upgrades and management.

The new approach to work requests follows a rigorous ITIL-based process that supports transparency, customer service, and smart resource planning. Unfortunately, the new work intake framework was not easy to explain to the field. I’ve enjoyed working with the branch chiefs and subject matter experts to clarify how the new process will work in practice. Below are some before and after examples demonstrating the solution’s evolution.

Following are a couple of the first phases in the work intake framework, before and after…

The other four process steps are under development still. If you’d like to see them or discuss your process representations, drop me a note.