A post by our guest editor, John Worthington.

We've tried to balance efficiency and effectiveness for decades, but how we’ve approached that balance has been deeply flawed
.makes me wonder if the only thing that’s changed are the buzzwords.

Why the ITSM World Still Struggles to Balance Effectiveness with Efficiency

We’ve been trying to balance efficiency and effectiveness for decades. ITIL told us. COBIT diagrammed it. Lean Six Sigma tattooed it on our foreheads. But let’s be honest—maybe the only thing we’ve balanced well is buzzword inflation.

“Doing things right and doing the right things.” That’s the mantra. Has been for years.

Today’s hype cycle brings us XLAs (Experience Level Agreements) and HumanisingITℱ (and now AI). These are not fads—they’re smart responses to a stale obsession with SLAs, checklists, and tool worship. They remind us of something we’ve always known deep down:

“People don’t care how fast you closed the ticket. They care how you made them feel.”

That’s not fluff. That’s effectiveness, empathy, and actual outcomes.

But here’s the rub: We’re still spinning in circles trying to ‘mature’, while customer value quietly bleeds out in the background. Meanwhile, generative AI has crashed the party and stolen the mic.

🚧 The Risk: Surface Change, Systemic Stagnation

Much of the buzz around XLAs and HumanisingITℱ still rests on the same fractured foundations:

  • No shared service logic
  • No universal management system
  • No consistent process architecture
  • No separation of process from practice
  • No integration with governance

So what happens?

  • Experience becomes another dashboard.
  • Another “journey map.”
  • Another siloed initiative duct-taped onto a misaligned system.

It’s experience theater. Teams smile in chatbots while the same broken workflows churn in the background. Surveys ask, “How did we do?” without fixing what’s behind the curtain. XLAs get signed without ever defining the service.

It’s not the fault of the HumanisingITℱ or XLA movements—it’s what happens when you bolt new language onto old logic.

Without a system underneath, we’re just hanging empathy on a broken skeleton. That’s like duct-taping a compass to a shopping cart and calling it a GPS upgrade.

🔧 The Thing That’s Been Hiding in Plain Sight

This is where USM walks in—like an engineer at a poetry reading. Uninvited. Slightly annoyed. Holding a whiteboard marker.

USM doesn’t follow trends. It doesn’t sell six-step transformation packages. It just gives you the system you didn’t realize you were missing:

  • A logically repeatable service specification
  • Five generic, non-redundant processes
  • Three universal roles
  • Eight standard workflows to handle all service interactions

That’s it. No fluff. Just a clear, structured foundation.

USM separates process from practice, so you can innovate at the edges without trashing the core. It doesn’t kill empathy—it makes it sustainable. And it embeds learning loops directly into the system, turning every failure into forward motion.

🎯 Why the XLA and HumanisingAI Movements Need USM

Now imagine HumanisingAIℱ built on top of USM:

  • Experience metrics tied to actual, agreed services
  • Feedback loops that flow directly into the IMPROVE process
  • AI assistants operating within a defined governance model

You don’t lose the emotion. You enable it. You don’t drown empathy in bureaucracy. You give it structure.

AI becomes more than a gimmick—it becomes a reflective surface. XLAs evolve from feel-good dashboards to contracts with context.

đŸ—ș Where This Is All Going

This isn’t about frameworks fighting each other.

  • ITIL isn’t wrong.
  • COBIT isn’t dead.
  • XLAs aren’t fluff.
  • HumanisingAIℱ isn’t naive.

But without a management system to hold it all together, we’re just running faster inside the same hamster wheel.

USM doesn’t replace these movements. It makes them work—consistently, coherently, repeatably.

🧘 Final Thought on a Hot, Melting Day

You don’t fix a broken machine by upgrading the paint job. You fix it by understanding how it was built.

And if you’re feeling like you’ve been rolling uphill lately—pushing value, pushing clarity, pushing empathy against the gravity of complexity—maybe it’s time to stop pushing



and start building.

With structure. With logic. With USM.

The water’s fine. The method is simple.

🧭 Questions? Heatstroke? Want to argue about ITIL or maturity models? My inbox is open. 🔁 Repost if you’ve ever been burned by a mature process that delivered zero value.

==/==

If you enjoyed John's post and it made you think about improving your own organization, please check out his USM Professional profile and his personal website, or better: contact John for a free consultation.
John has posted this blog earlier in his USM method News LinkedIN newsletter. If you want to read his posts when they're published - subscribe to John's channel.