The previous patterns lead to a more technical, system level pattern. They call for implementing some or all of the possible interactions below:
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There are many variations on how these integrations might be implemented. In this version, the demand system feeds the service request, project management, and continuous improvement systems, all of which in turn feed the consumption of employee time or indication of effort to the time tracking system.
This resource consumption is then replicated to the IT data warehouse and combined with other activity indicators that typically do not originate out of a demand management system: Change and Incident Management for activities that may not go through any demand qualification, and IT Finance and Capacity for resource views.
Having the Demand system drive Service Requests might surprise some Service Desk managers. This pattern does not preclude end users interacting directly with the service request system for prequalified services. But (as discussed in previous sections) if Agile methods imply a move away from formal Project management, it is reasonable that enhancement requests might be tracked as a pipeline of specialized Service Requests (methods such as Scrumban imply this, while not using the term Service Request Management per se). In such cases, these perhaps-discretionary requests do go through some form of demand qualification prior to acceptance.
Patterns like this illustrate how gray the boundaries between these systems can be. But whether it is called an Agile workflow system or a Service Request Management system, there is a common core of workflow and in the interests of parsimony this book sees them more the same than different.
