When Strategy Meets Chaos… You Need a Value Chain
Over the past three weeks, we’ve:
- Argued (successfully, I hope) that ITSM isn’t dead; it’s your competitive advantage.
- Introduced the Service Value System, a more innovative way to connect strategy to execution.
- Last week, we tackled the myth that governance must feel like molasses poured over a Gantt chart.
But let’s be honest, even with clarity of purpose and the best-intentioned guardrails in place, delivery still breaks down when teams aren’t moving in sync.
That’s where the Service Value Chain comes in.
This week, we’re diving into the engine room of ITIL 4, the operational playbook that shows how work actually gets done, how it flows between teams, and how to prevent value from leaking out at every handoff.
Because most failures aren’t from bad strategy … they’re from bad handoffs, missed feedback loops, and “I thought someone else was doing that.”
Let’s fix that.
In Week 4, we’re putting the Service Value Chain to work, showing how Engage, Plan, Build, and Support come together to keep your operations moving with purpose.
Why Most Workflows Break Down
Great ideas fizzle out without a shared delivery model
- Everyone agrees on the goal, but each team takes a different road to get there.The result? Misaligned timelines, duplicated work, and a whole lot of “I didn’t know that was happening.”
Teams operate in isolation
- Product ships without a support plan.
- Infrastructure builds without talking to users.
- Security finds out after deployment.
- Everyone’s doing their job, but no one’s delivering the outcome.
Handoffs get messy
From “we should” to “we did” to “now we support it,” the baton gets dropped.
Because no one has mapped the journey, no roles, transitions, checkpoints, just wishful thinking and crossed fingers.
Sound familiar? The Service Value Chain fixes this by giving every team a place in the process, and every step a purpose.
What Is the Service Value Chain (SVC)?
If the Service Value System is the “why,” the Service Value Chain is the “how.”
It’s the engine room of ITIL 4. It’s a flexible, modular framework that outlines how work flows from idea to outcome, across any team, function, or delivery model.
But here’s the key: it’s not linear. These activities aren’t a checklist. They’re building blocks, mixed, matched, and connected differently depending on what you’re delivering.
Whether you’re launching a new mobile feature or deploying infrastructure to 800 locations, the Service Value Chain gives you a shared playbook to get it done.
The SVC is made up of six interconnected activities:
1. Plan
This is where vision becomes a roadmap.
- What are we trying to achieve?
- What resources do we need?
- Who needs to be involved? Whether you’re a CIO aligning OKRs or a project manager building a timeline, this is the strategy checkpoint.
2. Improve
Improvement isn’t a phase, it’s a constant.
- What did we learn?
- What can we do better? From sprint retros to CSI logs, this is where organizations evolve instead of just repeat.
3. Engage
The front door to the business.
- What do our users, partners, and stakeholders need?
- What are they telling us? Think support conversations, stakeholder meetings, feedback forms, even vendor escalations … all value starts here.
4. Design & Transition
This is where ideas become services.
- How should this work?
- How do we build and prepare it for prime time? This is the blueprinting and coordination phase, where developers, architects, QA, security, and business analysts make sure it’s real and ready.
5. Obtain/Build
Here’s the construction zone.
- Are we building new infrastructure?
- Coding new features?
- Integrating new platforms? Whether you’re a full-stack dev, a cloud engineer, or a vendor, this is where stuff gets done.
6. Deliver & Support
The service is live! Now we keep it alive.
- Is it running as expected?
- Are we monitoring and supporting it effectively? From alerting and incident management to end-user support and ongoing SLAs. This is where the value becomes visible.
The real beauty of the SVC? It doesn’t care what your org chart looks like. It flexes.
- Agile team? It fits into your sprint cycles.
- Waterfall project? It guides you through each milestone.
- Support-heavy environment? It scales with your ticket volume and user feedback.
The Service Value Chain gives everyone, from the CTO to the service desk, a clear view of where they fit, how their work contributes to outcomes, and what needs to happen next.
It’s not about enforcing control. It’s about enabling collaboration.
And when you get it right? Your teams stop asking, “Who owns this?” and start asking, “How do we move it forward?”
How Engage, Plan, Build, and Support Work Together
You don’t need to memorize all six SVC activities to see the impact. Most day-to-day service delivery can be boiled down into a powerful loop of four:
Engage → Plan → Build → Support
Get these right, and you’ve already solved 80% of where value leaks usually happen.
1. Engage: Open the Front Door
This is where value starts. You talk to users, stakeholders, vendors, and partners, listening, capturing, and clarifying.
But here’s the trap: many orgs skip this or fake it.
- Feedback is vague or filtered through layers
- Stakeholders are consulted too late
- Teams “engage” after the work is done
When done right:
- End-users help shape the service before it’s designed
- Ops teams are looped in during feature planning
- Vendors, franchisees, or partners are active participants in new rollouts
If you wait until go-live to engage support, you’ve already missed the mark.
2. Plan: Build the Road Before Driving
This is where strategic intent meets reality. We turn what we learned from Engage into a plan aligning people, resources, and timing.
This isn’t just scheduling. It’s ensuring:
- There’s a shared understanding of what is being delivered
- The effort fits within capacity, compliance, and business readiness
- Teams aren’t tripping over each other because no one coordinated
When planning is absent or siloed:
- Infrastructure gets built before the design is done
- Product launches happen during code freezes
- Projects stall midstream because of missing approvals or misaligned dependencies
A good plan saves time. A great plan gets buy-in, makes tradeoffs visible, and gives teams the space to move confidently.
3. Build: Turn Intent into Output
This is the execution phase. Obtain/Build + Design & Transition rolled into one practical stage. It’s where the real work happens.
Whether you’re:
- Writing code
- Ordering and configuring hardware
- Designing architecture or workflows
- Coordinating releases
Build is where siloed work becomes service-ready.
But here’s the nuance: building alone isn’t enough. You need transition, knowledge transfer, runbooks, change records, and support prep.
If your team is great at building but throws it over the wall to support, you’ve got a launch, not a service.
4. Support: Keep the Promise
Once the service is live, support is where the value lands.
- Is the user experience smooth?
- Are issues resolved quickly?
- Are we learning from what breaks?
Support isn’t just a helpdesk or NOC, it’s a feedback engine. It tells you what you missed, what to improve, and how reliable your value delivery is.
The strongest organizations treat support as a product partner, not a postscript.
If your service shines in the demo but breaks in the wild, no one remembers the roadmap … they remember the outage.
Pulling It Together
Engage brings people in. Plans set the course. Build creates the solution. Support ensures it thrives.
It’s a value stream—a loop. A rhythm your teams can rally around.
The Service Value Chain didn’t reinvent how services work. It just gave you the language and structure to make the flow visible, repeatable, and improvable.
Practical Takeaways
Here’s how to make the Service Value Chain more than a diagram:
✅ Map one real initiative across the value chain: Pick something in flight, a product launch, an infrastructure upgrade, a vendor transition, and walk it through the six SVC activities. You’ll find the weak spots fast.
✅ Empower service owners to define their flow: No two services are alike. Let your service or product owners define their Engage, Plan, Build, and Support configuration so the model reflects reality, not just theory.
✅ Use the SVC to align infra, dev, support, and business teams: Introduce it as a shared operating model. If every team understands the flow of work and value, you’ll eliminate 90% of your miscommunications before they even happen.
✅ Make planning and engagement visible in every delivery cycle: Sprints. Waterfall phases. Releases. Standups. Planning and engagement shouldn’t be side notes; they should be center stage. Create space for them, track them, and inspect them just like code or tickets.
Actionable Questions to Take Back to Your Team
- Which stages of the Service Value Chain do we skip and why? If “Support” is always reactive or “Plan” is just a spreadsheet, call it out.
- Are we planning in isolation or actually engaging the right people early? Involve support before go-live. Pull in stakeholders during backlog grooming. Ask your devs what they wish they had known earlier.
- When a service goes live, are we ready to support it, or just hoping for the best? What’s the playbook if something breaks? Does support have context? Is monitoring in place? If not, you’re launching blind.
Coming Up Next: Guiding Principles as Decision Filters
Ever felt stuck between “move fast” and “do it right”? Between following the process and bending it for the right outcome?
That’s where ITIL 4’s Guiding Principles come in.
Next week, we’ll explore how seven deceptively simple ideas, like Focus on Value and Progress Iteratively with Feedback, can help teams at every level make faster, smarter, and more aligned decisions.
From sprint planning to executive prioritization, these principles are the Swiss Army knife your teams didn’t know they needed.
The best part? They work, whether you’re launching software, resolving an incident, or designing a new onboarding workflow.
If you’ve ever said, “What’s the right move here?” … next week’s issue will give you the answer.
Final Thought
Most teams aren’t missing talent. They’re missing alignment.
The Service Value Chain gives you the structure to connect people, plans, platforms, and priorities into a single, repeatable rhythm.
It doesn’t care what tool you use. It doesn’t care what framework you follow. It cares that you engage the right people, plan with purpose, build what matters, and support it like you mean it.
Because in the end, a well-run operation isn’t about chaos you can tolerate … it’s about flow you can trust.
When every team knows where they fit and what comes next, the real magic happens: work moves, value flows, and delivery feels like progress instead of pushback.
See you next week.
