A curated list of awesome Swarming (aka Intelligent Swarming) resources.
"Don't push problems towards a solution, pull solutions to the problem."
This list is an attempt to bring all resources related to "Intelligent Swarming" (I prefer Intentional/Incident Swarming) to a single place to make the understanding and adoptin fof Swarming easier for newcomers.
| ICON LEGEND |
|---|
| 📹 A video from YouTube or another provider |
| 💻 An app or service to help with swarming |
| 🖥️ Slides for a presentation |
| 📖 An article, book, tweet, or thread about swarming |
| 📚 A collection of articles, books, etc |
| 📝 A doc, sheet, workbook, form, etc |
| ❗ Very important |
| ✍️ Take note of this |
| 🔥 Especially awesome :) |
📚 Intelligent Swarming by Consortium for Service Innovation
| Title | Intelligent Swarming |
|---|---|
| Author | Consoritum for Service Innovation |
| Date | N/A |
| Link | https://www.serviceinnovation.org/intelligent-swarming/ |
CSI produce the most original content on Intelligent Swarming and is the de facto standard for understanding and implementing it at an organization.
"Sometimes called collaboration on steroids, the Intelligent Swarming methodology is a new way to align resources to work. It involves removing the tiers of support and, when appropriate, calling on the collective expertise of a “swarm” of analysts. Our initial experience with Intelligent Swarming is exceeding expectations in terms of improvement in operational efficiencies, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction and loyalty, and it brings with it a host of questions around practices and measurements." - Excerpt
📖 Designing open collaboration in Red Hat Global Support Services by Sam Knuth on May 9, 2011
| Title | Designing open collaboration in Red Hat Global Support Services |
|---|---|
| Author | Sam Knuth |
| Date | May 9, 2011 |
| Link | https://www.managementexchange.com/story/designing-open-collab |
"This is the story of how we changed the way we solve customer problems in Red Hat Global Support Services from the traditional “escalation model” to a new collaborative model based on a concept we call “intelligent swarming”. Since we couldn’t find anyone who had done this before, and there was no script to follow, this is also the story of how we used open collaboration and design thinking to develop the process itself."
📖 No More Tiers: Is Intelligent Swarming a Better Way to Solve Customer Issues? by Greg Oxton on June 12, 2012
| Title | No More Tiers: Is Intelligent Swarming a Better Way to Solve Customer Issues? |
|---|---|
| Author | Greg Oxton |
| Date | June 12, 2012 |
| Link | https://www.thinkhdi.com/library/supportworld/2012/no-more-tiers.aspx |
"Intelligent swarming is a dramatically different way to organize the support organization, challenging thirty years of accepted practice and structure in support. However, the early adopters of this model are seeing improvements in all key operational measures of support, including productivity, time to resolve, employee growth, and customer satisfaction. And while it is not appropriate for all support environments, swarming is most effective when solving new, complex problems. The goal is to get the right people working on new issues, together, and as quickly as possible. Intelligent swarming facilitates the collaboration already happening between support agents and leads to faster and more creative resolutions."
"Let’s examine what is driving this change, how it works, where it applies, and why it can be a more efficient and effective way to deliver support."
📖 Does Your Organization Swarm? by Marla Gottschalk, Ph.D. on January 18, 2013
| Title | Does Your Organization Swarm? |
|---|---|
| Author | Marla Gottschalk, Ph.D. |
| Date | January 18, 2013 |
| Link | https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130118143727-128811924-does-your-organization-swarm/ |
"Developing an ability to swarm is just as much an orientation toward the work itself — as it is a problem solving technique. Swarming would require needed talent and skills to flow quickly toward projects, as it capitalizes upon an agile culture and a fluid talent stream. This requires a modern view of organizational boundaries and talent utilization. There are challenges to swarming — and the process may not prove appropriate for all organizations. However, it may be an interesting option to consider."
📖 The Future of Knowledge Management: Increased Value by Greg Oxton on March 1, 2014
| Title | The Future of Knowledge Management: Increased Value |
|---|---|
| Author | Greg Oxton |
| Date | March 1, 2014 |
| Link | https://www.thinkhdi.com/library/supportworld/2014/future-knowledge-mgmt |
"Intelligent swarming entails restructuring the support organization by doing away with support tiers and replacing escalations and inefficient hand-offs with collaboration. The goal is to get the person who’s most likely to be able to solve an issue working on it at the first touch, whether that person’s a specialist or a generalist. A generalist may even collaborate with a specialist to resolve an issue."
"Early adopters of the intelligent swarming model have seen dramatic improvements in skills development, employee morale, and operational efficiency. Most importantly, their customers love it! These organizations have also found that not all incidents require collaboration between multiple support professionals; only 20–35 percent of the incidents closed in these environments require collaboration."
📖 Birds, Bees and ... Intelligent Swarming? by Phil Verghis on January 12, 2015
| Title | Birds, Bees and ... Intelligent Swarming? |
|---|---|
| Author | Phil Verghis |
| Date | January 12, 2015 (slight updates Jan 2019) |
| Link | https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/birds-bees-intelligent-swarming-phil-verghis/ |
"In an intelligent swarming model, your silos are broken down and customer-facing teams are comprised of empowered, collaborative expert generalists. They understand the context of the customer and the business context of the organization they are part of, and they use their collective wisdom to work on resolving issues - with a 'one touch' model. There are no 'escalations' - just requests for help where people who have the context and ability to assist do assist -- regardless of 'level' or hierarchy."
📖 Intelligent Swarming: An Update by David Kay on June 22, 2015
| Title | Intelligent Swarming: An Update |
|---|---|
| Author | David Kay |
| Date | June 22, 2015 |
| Link | https://www.dbkay.com/intelligent-swarming/intelligent-swarming-an-update |
"First, let me back up and define intelligent swarming. It’s a way of doing support that replaces tiers (or levels) and escalations with a flat organization arranged into skill groups. The case owner owns the case to resolution (a practice sometimes called “touch and hold.”) If the case owner needs help, he or she can request it. Or, if someone else thinks they have the right skills to help, they volunteer to help. Laid out that way, it’s a pretty simple idea, but one with profound implications."
"Here’s what I learned..."
📖 Intelligent Swarming in Technical Support by James Karioki on August 29, 2016
| Title | Intelligent Swarming in Technical Support |
|---|---|
| Author | James Karioki |
| Date | August 29, 2016 |
| Link | https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/intelligent-swarming-technical-support-james-karioki/ |
"Intelligent swarming is about getting the best analysts to solve the issue working on the issue as quickly as possible. The goal is to engage the most appropriate or relevant skills on a problem, solve the problem as fast as possible and transfer knowledge expeditiously."
📖 Let's do away with support levels for good by James Karioki on June 7, 2017
| Title | Let's do away with support levels for good |
|---|---|
| Author | James Karioki |
| Date | June 7, 2017 |
| Link | https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lets-do-away-support-levels-good-james-karioki/ |
"Customers typically need answers fast. They do not want to explain the problem all over again and they do not want steps that have already been tried unsuccessfully before to be tried again. The solution is to ensure that such problems are solved by collaboration instead of escalation. By working closely with other experts and ensuring updates are shared with the customer by the expert and in the presence of the other team members, firstly, the problem gets solved quickly. Secondly, the other team members gain knowledge, which they can then utilize the next time a similar problem occurs."
🖥️ Aligning DevOps and IT Support in the Enterprise, Through Intelligent Swarming by Jon Stevens-Hall on October 23, 2017
| Title | Aligning DevOps and IT Support in the Enterprise, Through Intelligent Swarming |
|---|---|
| Author | Jon Stevens-Hall |
| Date | October 23, 2017 |
| Link | https://www.slideshare.net/JonHall7/devopsdays-edinburgh-2017-ignite-talk-swarming |
"As enterprises transform around software-led innovation, DevOps teams start to need to deal with customer support at scale, while IT Service Management needs to adapt to a new, fast-moving reality of increased developer autonomy and collaboration. One significant challenge is that ubiquitous multi-tiered structure of support team organisation, which, this presentation argues, is fundamentally incompatible with the DevOps philosophy. We propose its replacement with Swarming, a methodology that harnesses and enables the benefits of DevOps, while doing so on an Enterprise support scale."
📖 Tiered Support Vs Swarming – Which Will Suit You? by Praveen Ramesh on October 24, 2017
| Title | Tiered Support Vs Swarming – Which Will Suit You? |
|---|---|
| Author | Praveen Ramesh |
| Date | October 24, 2017 |
| Link | https://freshservice.com/itsm/three-tier-support-vs-swarming-blog/ |
"With DevOps gaining momentum among leading organizations, there’s been a change in the way IT teams have worked. Of late, swarming – a new form of IT support has been in the spotlight. Experts have taken the side of this new swarming model and backed it to be ideal for IT orgs of any scale.
What we aim to discuss in this blog is to compare and contrast between these two approaches on the following aspects,
- Swiftness in solving tickets
- Ease of collaboration
- Ease of implementation and adoption
- Before we delve into the comparison, it’s important that we know how the two models work."
📖 Lessons Learned in Intelligent Swarming by Adamo Maino on October 25, 2017
| Title | Lessons Learned in Intelligent Swarming |
|---|---|
| Author | Adamo Maino |
| Date | October 25, 2017 |
| Link | https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lessons-learned-intelligent-swarming-adam-maino/ |
"When my Director and I first had a conversation about Intelligent Swarming it went a little like this..."
📹 Aligning DevOps and IT Support in the Enterprise, Through Intelligent Swarming by Jon Stevens-Hall on November 20, 2017
| Title | Aligning DevOps and IT Support in the Enterprise, Through Intelligent Swarming |
|---|---|
| Author | Jon Stevens-Hall |
| Date | November 20, 2017 |
| Link | https://youtu.be/r_tUa4oBo4o |
"As enterprises transform around software-led innovation, DevOps teams start to need to deal with customer support at scale, while IT Service Management needs to adapt to a new, fast-moving reality of increased developer autonomy and collaboration. One significant challenge is that ubiquitous multi-tiered structure of support team organisation, which, this presentation argues, is fundamentally incompatible with the DevOps philosophy. We propose its replacement with Swarming, a methodology that harnesses and enables the benefits of DevOps, while doing so on an Enterprise support scale."
📖 Support is too often a customer’s and company’s headache by Sébastien Le Roy on Apr 10, 2018
| Title | Support is too often a customer’s and company’s headache |
|---|---|
| Author | Sébastien Le Roy |
| Date | Apr 10, 2018 |
| Link | https://blog.serenacapital.com/its-time-to-switch-from-basic-technical-support-to-intelligent-swarming-4ebb58768b |
"Maintaining a good customer experience required something different. That’s why they decided to abandon the traditional support model to try a smarter and more efficient process. ... We are really glad to share with you some insights on their experience to switch from a traditional 3-level support to Intelligent Swarming, a smarter and more efficient process. Before starting, we would like to make it clear that we are talking about technical support, not generic support."
📖 Swarming vs Tiered Support Models Explained by Jon Stevens-Hall on May 17, 2018
| Title | Swarming vs Tiered Support Models Explained |
|---|---|
| Author | Jon Stevens-Hall |
| Date | May 17, 2018 |
| Link | https://www.bmc.com/blogs/swarming-support-tiered-support-differences/ |
"What is Swarming Support? It’s a reaction to the perceived shortcomings of a ubiquitous ITSM practice: the tiered support model."
📖 A nice example of Swarming in support of a Service Desk by Jon Stevens-Hall on October 21, 2018
| Title | A nice example of Swarming in support of a Service Desk |
|---|---|
| Author | Jon Stevens-Hall |
| Date | October 21, 2018 |
| Link | https://jonstevenshall.medium.com/a-nice-example-of-swarming-in-support-of-a-service-desk-7bdbe8e9890c |
"This particular service desk has implemented an interesting type of swarming, which I had not seen before. The front-line support agents are permitted to put the customer "on hold" by asking them to wait for up to three minutes. While the conversation is paused from the point of view of the consumer, the support agent is able to join one of a set of open text chat "channels"."
📹 The Problem of Becoming 3rd-Line Support Team (and Why Swarming Works Better for DevOps) by Jon Stevens-Hall on October 23, 2018
| Title | The Problem of Becoming 3rd-Line Support Team (and Why Swarming Works Better for DevOps) |
|---|---|
| Author | Jon Stevens-Hall |
| Date | October 23, 2018 |
| Link | https://youtu.be/8yGpf2QyJQs |
"As DevOps grows in large enterprises, its practitioners often get drawn into the traditional “3 tier” support structure. Here they find queues, silos and overworked heroes. This talk describes a growing alternative, “Swarming," and explains why it is a far better fit for enterprise DevOps."
🖥️ ITSM, DevOps and Swarming by Jon Stevens-Hall on March 26, 2019
| Title | ITSM, DevOps and Swarming |
|---|---|
| Author | Jon Stevens-Hall |
| Date | March 26, 2019 |
| Link | https://www.servicedeskinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Jon-Hall-Swarming-Devops-for-ITSM.pdf |
"Swarming involves removing the tiers of support, and calling on the collective expertise of a "swarm" of analysts"
📖 Are there drawbacks to Swarming? by Jon Stevens-Hall on May 3, 2019
| Title | Are there drawbacks to Swarming? |
|---|---|
| Author | Jon Stevens-Hall |
| Date | May 3, 2019 |
| Link | https://medium.com/itrevolution/are-there-drawbacks-to-swarming-b42309e7541c |
"Where I have seen it implemented, Swarming has generally been considered a success. However, having promoted it so enthusiastically, it feels fair that I should share and explore some of the negative experiences and concerns that I have observed in, and discussed with, practitioners and advocates of Swarming."
📹 How Swarming Transforms Enterprise Support to Work Better with DevOps by Jon Stevens-Hall on July 5, 2019
| Title | How Swarming Transforms Enterprise Support to Work Better with DevOps |
|---|---|
| Author | Jon Stevens-Hall |
| Date | July 5, 2019 |
| Link | https://youtu.be/AS6DBiOM-3k |
"This presentation explores the issues being encountered by DevOps teams as their output becomes more significant in enterprises, particularly where they are drawn into traditional support structures which often conflict with the principles of DevOps. We will discuss the ongoing emergence of Swarming as an alternative to 3-tier support structures, showing the latest examples from a diverse range of industries including software, telecommunications, and automotive."
"The presentation will show how Swarming enables smarter interaction between DevOps teams and established ITSM functions, and will show – using the Cynefin framework as an example - how Swarming enables provision of adaptive support for complex distributed systems in a way that tiered support can’t."
📖 Introduction to Intelligent Swarming by Stephen Watts on Aug 26, 2019
| Title | Introduction to Intelligent Swarming |
|---|---|
| Author | Stephen Watts |
| Date | August 26, 2019 |
| Link | https://www.bmc.com/blogs/intelligent-swarming/ |
"Intelligent swarming is the idea that one support person will work on a trouble ticket from start to finish, without escalations. This means that the support person will seek the proper resource, working towards a resolution instead of escalating it to a higher level. This is potentially aggravating to customers who have become used to speedy resolutions. By not escalating, the person working towards the resolution “swarms” with other peers around a problem until that issue is resolved."
🖥️ Swarming, Cynefin, & avoiding the problems of becoming a 3rd-line support team by Jon Stevens-Hall on November 7, 2019
| Title | Swarming, Cynefin, & avoiding the problems of becoming a 3rd-line support team |
|---|---|
| Author | Jon Stevens-Hall |
| Date | November 7, 2019 |
| Link | https://www.slideshare.net/JonHall7/velocity19-berlin-swarming-cynefinand-avoiding-the-problems-of-becoming-a-thirdline-support-team |
"Discussion of Swarming and Cynefin as means to better align devops functions into enterprise support channels."
📹 CCMA Ask the Expert Sun Life Service Desk Intelligent Swarming the next step in CX Delivery by Laura Ryan & Nelson Cassells on July 31, 2020
| Title | CCMA Ask the Expert Sun Life Service Desk Intelligent Swarming the next step in CX Delivery |
|---|---|
| Author | Laura Ryan & Nelson Cassells |
| Date | July 31, 2020 |
| Link | https://youtu.be/3h5ME-NB0BM |
"On this webinar Laura Ryan Associate Director of the Service Desk and Nelson Cassells Technical Support Services Senior Analyst will host a session on what Intelligent Swarming is and how the Sun Life Service Desk implemented & continued to grow Intelligent Swarming since January 2019.
- What is Intelligent Swarming?
- Benefits of Intelligent Swarming
- The growth of Intelligent Swarming during COVID-19
- Challenges of Intelligent Swarmin
- How we capture our Intelligent Swarming data"
📖 Transforming Support for the Digital Enterprise by Imran Khan on June 16, 2021
| Title | Transforming Support for the Digital Enterprise |
|---|---|
| Author | Imran Khan |
| Date | June 16, 2021 |
| Link | https://www.bmc.com/blogs/transforming-support-for-the-digital-enterprise/ |
"Traditional support is structured in tiers—typically Levels 1, 2, and 3. In this model, users contact the service desk, Level 1, where agents are skilled to handle routine issues, but not much more. To reach in-depth expertise, you have to wait for Levels 2 and 3, but you have to go through Level 1 first. The new SaaS model makes the most experienced and skilled agents the first point of contact for end users by leveraging three key elements:
- Dispatch swarming
- Automation
- Self-help"
📖 Using Swarming For Incident Response by Leah Brown on June 17, 2021
| Title | Using Swarming For Incident Response |
|---|---|
| Author | Leah Brown |
| Date | June 17, 2021 |
| Link | https://itrevolution.com/using-swarming-for-incident-response/ |
"In the new Prepare/Respond/Review Incident Management Framework, we advise against using this tiered ticketing system and moving toward incident swarming.
Swarming provides a mechanism to remove queues and handoffs for major incident handling and to quickly bring responders and dependent responders together. Incident swarming focuses accountability to drive reduction in recovery time and to share knowledge about the incident rapidly."
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