Category Archives: ITIL

ITIL, ITIL 4, ITIL 4 Foundation

ITIL 4 Foundation an Introduction to a New Way of Thinking

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I’ve long been a proponent of ITIL and the best practices it engenders within organizations. The concepts of change management and release management are ideas I’ve eagerly grasped and implemented to help me solve real-world problems. I’ve used the basic information and guidance provided in the foundation modules to help grow and mature my incident and problem management team, helping improve resolution times and quality, directly impacting the overall customer experience. To say I’m a fan of ITIL doesn’t give my feelings justice.

With the advent of ITIL 4 and its revisions to the ITSM service model, I was curious to find out what changed and what stayed the same. While the world has changed radically since ITIL 3 was released, how have these changes impacted how we work?

Digital Transformation

ITIL v3 was released in 2007 and updated in 2011. As you can well imagine, a decade in the technology industry is an enormous span of time. Over that period, an area that’s come to have significant prominence is digital transformation.

Digital transformation involves using digital technology within a business, changing how the organization operates and delivers value to its clients. Digital technology is not simply limited to technology — it also impacts a company’s culture and underlying procedures and processes. This shift requires companies to continually experiment and challenge the status quo. Failure is acceptable if it helps teach and lead to eventual success.

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The pace of digital transformation is not uniform around the world. According to the McKinsey Global Institute‘s Industry Digitization Index, Europe is currently operating at 12% of its digital potential, while the United States is operating at 18%.

An excellent example of digital transformation is the growth of SaaS and cloud computing. For businesses, using cloud hardware and software removes the reliance and upfront cost of purchasing. The businesses providing SaaS solutions guarantee uptime and regular maintenance, further reducing internal IT expenses.

Digital transformation lets companies leverage the changes made available through modern technology to work more efficiently and effectively. ITIL 4 talks about this new way of working and helps detail practices for IT service management that place an emphasis on aligning IT services with an organization’s business needs.

IT Service Management

Within the context of ITIL, the phrase service management has a specific definition and discusses how organizations use their capabilities to provide value to customers through using services. The keyword here is – value, but the word itself has many different meanings based on the individual.

To some, it is the cost of an item, while for others it is the quality of the item itself or the benefits it provides. There is no one simple definition of value as to a large extent it varies based on the needs and expectations of the customer. One way that this has been seen is the increasing “value” organizations are placing on customer experience and how a more personalized journey can drive growth.

It is important to understand that the value of something varies based on an individual’s needs and requirements. ITSM or IT Service Management is how service management and value generation are applied to IT service. Improving efficiencies and removing risks, as well as the creation of new opportunities, can increase value.

Understanding Value

In life, it isn’t always possible to have everything despite the best of intentions. You might have heard the phrase – “Fast, Cheap or Good? Pick Two.”? If this seems at all familiar to you’ll understand that doing it all requires sacrifice and choices. It’s essential to pick the two that are most critical and to be flexible with the third.

  • Quick + Cheap = Inferior Quality or Less Features
  • Quick + High Quality = Not Cheap
  • High Quality + Cheap = Not Quick or Not Possible

From the point of view of value, the criteria are Quality, Cost and Speed.

  • Quality is built around the customer’s expectations and requirements. Quality is about the service that the business delivers to its customers and includes how the customer uses the service and its overall performance.
  • Cost is not always a matter of how much something is. It also encompasses time and resources and is measured by how much the customer is willing to pay.
  • Speed is all about how fast a service needs to be delivered to customers. The speed at which customers expect to receive their service is only increasing, adding pressure to businesses.

Cost, Speed, and Quality need to be weighed equally based on an organization’s capabilities and the customer’s needs. Cost may be a crucial dimension during an economic recession or to a customer experiencing financial hardship. In contrast, quality may matter more to a financially stable customer or when the economy is good. Value is something that has customers at its core. 

Service management is a set of specialized organizational capabilities for enabling customer value in the form of services. ITSM applies service management… and involves an understanding of the nature of value, the nature and scope of the stakeholders involved, and the approaches that enable value creation through services

ITIL has always emphasized the importance of the customer, but they now give the customer even more weight. I’ve long believed that customers and customer experience are a key differentiator for businesses, so it’s really nice to see that this is being reflected and acted upon in a more concrete manner.

ITIL, Leadership, Management, People Management

Who Moved My Cheese? – A Review and Analysis of an Amazing Little Book

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I was recently invited to attend a leadership change seminar which considering the current climate is very appropriate! Now I have quite a bit of Change Management experience through my time learning ITIL. In fact, one of the earliest “fixes” I did at my current employer was the institution of a CAB process for all of the regular weekly changes.

However, a CAB process is only one part of change and while an understanding of change management is important for everyone, I thought that there might be a better introduction I could provide to my own team on what change is.

Luckily there was – namely the book Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson and Kenneth Blanchard.

Now you might remember both of them from another older book called The New One Minute Manager which was published quite a few years ago? In the One Minute Manager, some basic guiding principles for management were discussed. These were simple truths like providing feedback in private instead of calling out an employee in public.

I’ll probably explore that book in more depth in a future post, to be honest as while it is somewhat dated, it has some excellent lessons for new managers and is presented in a very easy to understand manner.

Who Moved My Cheese is presented in a similar manner but this time instead of teaching us management lessons explains how four characters deal with a love of cheese while living in a maze.

The Characters of Who Moved My Cheese

Our key players in this book are a bit of a mixed cast. We have Scurry and Sniff – two mice and Hem and Haw – two humans. While all of the characters share a love for “cheese”, how they choose to go about finding it on its loss is what makes the characters distinctive and interesting. When the cheese is moved Scurry and Sniff immediately search it out and start navigating the maze. Hem and Haw however spend lots of time simply bemoaning their fate and wondering why this change happened.

Cheese is a metaphor for what you want to have in life. It could be a good job, a loving relationship, money, or health. The very core message of the book is this: things constantly change so we must adapt. The quicker we adapt a change the more satisfied we will be with ourselves and life.

The Lessons To Learn

Who Moved My Cheese is a very simple book and one that is extremely easy to read. It is in fact a book my whole family read on a beach holiday and made for some very interesting conversations afterward! While the book is easy, there are some very powerful lessons that it delivers which are worth understanding.

Change Happens

They keep moving the cheese. Companies constantly change products and services based on changing customer demands and competition. Regardless of your role either as a consumer or employee, bemoaning your fate will not change it.

Anticipate Change

If you know that change is inevitable, it is much easier to be prepared to deal with changing circumstances. While the current COVID19 situation might be something no one could anticipate, other situations can be planned for. Even in this circumstance, possible disaster recovery scenarios could be considered which can minimize the overall impact on yourself and your business.

And the next time that times are a-changing? Reflect on your previous mistakes and don’t let those changes surprise you! Recall that no matter how secure something feels, you should always expect change to happen.

Because when you expect change (both gradual and sudden) to happen, you’ll better monitor and anticipate it early. And when you monitor and anticipate change early, you’ll find it easier to adapt to it quickly.

Monitor Change

Smell the cheese often so you know when it’s getting old. Understand and monitor the status of your business and operations through dashboards and reports. If you do not have this capability look at tools like HubSpot and their free CRM products to get started. Once this has been implemented, look at 80/20 (Pareto principle) analysis of your customers, their cases and issues, and even your sales to see where you need to focus.

Adapt to Change

The quicker you let go of old cheese the sooner you can enjoy new cheese. Simply remaining focused on what was will not get you to what can be. It is important to step away from an analysis and purview about the grass being greener, but rather deal with the current situation.

Change

Move with the cheese and come up with new and innovative solutions for problems. While this might sound simpler than it is, as you perform each of the previous steps to future changes you’ll find that this step comes simpler.

Enjoy Change

Once you’ve gotten used to changing with changing circumstances, you’ll actually be in a new paradigm. One where you actually start to embrace and enjoy change.

When change happens, the first thing to realise is that how you react is your choice. The biggest barrier to change is inside you.

The second thing to realise is that the best way to deal with change is to keep things simple, be flexible and move quickly. When change comes along simply change with it.

Ask yourself:

  1. “Where am I likely to find the best opportunities, fighting this change or embracing it?”
  2. “What could my life look like if these new circumstances led to something even better than the ones that I’m leaving?” and
  3. ”What would I do if I wasn’t afraid I might fail?”

The Lessons to Take Away

Who Moved My Cheese is a simple book but one that is quite interesting and informative. Its ultimate conclusion? Change is inevitable. Anticipate it, adapt to it, learn to embrace and enjoy it. Do so and you won’t just suffer less stress and unhappiness, you’ll enjoy more success and fulfillment in every part of your life and your work. I’d definitely pick it up as it’s not that expensive and while its a very short read, the lessons you take away from it, will last you for years.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library, ITIL

Why You Need CSI in Your Business

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If you have been following our blog for a while then you might have come across a term called ITIL. If you haven’t, then it’s fine as well. We’ll explain it to you in a moment. But first, let’s focus on CSI. CSI stands for Continual Service Improvement and you might have heard this term a lot in connection with ITIL. If you’re confused right now, or never really understood what this term means that you have come to the right place! In this article, we’re going to talk about CSI and why it is necessary for you to enforce it if you’re using ITIL to grow your business. But before we go there, let’s recap ITIL.

What is ITIL?

ITIL stands for IT Infrastructure Library and it is basically a framework used to help enforce the best practices you’ll need to successfully deliver quality IT services. This generally covers a broad area. It can be system maintenance, customer experience and so much more. Naturally, a lot of people confuse the different things that come up under the umbrella of ITIL so don’t be sad if you happen to find yourself in those shoes. That’s why we’re here- to help you understand exactly what ITIL is.

As you can imagine, due to the sheer amount of information that comes under ITIL, it is a very broad subject to cover and we’ll do that in future posts. For now, we’re going to focus on CSI.

What is CSI?

CSI, as mentioned, stands for Continual Service Improvement. Once you’ve started using ITIL to impact the performance of your team, you’ll be looking for a way to maintain the kind of bar you’ve set. The last thing you need is to start using ITIL for a while, get your business organized, maybe grow it and then be slumped with deadlines because you can’t put them through.

Believe it or not, but businesses who begin using the ITIL model but then leave it halfway and fail to continuously implement them fail horribly. And you don’t want that. So, in order to make sure that you continue using ITIL services and maintain the quality of your services, it is very important that you use CSI.

CSI allows you to process useful methods that will ensure that you maintain the quality of your work. This includes management quality as well. It keeps managers on their feet so that the entire team does not fall apart.

The ITIL CSI cycle- as it is known- combined will help you continue to maintain the quality of your processes as well as improve effectiveness, efficiency, and output of all the IT services that your company has to offer.

Why Businesses Should Use ITIL CSI?

Now that you know what ITIL CSI is used for, let’s talk about why businesses need them. Several companies delude themselves into thinking that just because they’ve made improvements once, they don’t need to do it again. However, in order to stay on top of things, you need to continuously employ methods to improve your business. Below, we’ll give you a list of reasons why your business should apply CSI.

Improving Quality of Operations

CSI helps you look at your business as a whole so that you have a better understanding of how your business operates. You will be able to look at the whole functioning process of your business, providing you with the bigger picture. This gives you the advantage of knowing how each and every service operates, the various work cycle levels, delivering services and more, making it easier for both you and your team.

Improves Staff Productivity

Since by using CSI practices, you are learning about the entire service lifecycle of your company, it will become so much easier for you to identify staff performances as well as practices which will make your staff more effective. Additionally, it will also help you learn more about the more easily disposable applications and services that are rendering your business ineffective. Sometimes, you need the bigger picture to show you how one or more extra components of your business are affecting others and so you can make sure that all of your business processes are helping you grow your business and not harm it. With this knowledge, you can also look at your workforce and regroup them in ways that will benefit your business.

Keeping Things In Check

One of the biggest advantages of using the ITIL CSI system for your IT services is that you can keep an eye on everything- from accounts to processes to the eventual output and delivery of service. This helps you keep in check with your budget so that you’re on top of your deadlines and can help your staff with issues they may be facing. CSI helps to fix the server errors and issues you may be facing in some IT services so that you can maintain your services accordingly and deliver quality problem.

Conclusion

As you can see, you need ITIL CSI to help you manage and maintain your business. It additionally helps you improve efficiency and make sure that you don’t fall behind the competition. With these practices, you will be able to keep your balances in check, so that you can continue to grow your business and satisfy your customers. We hope you found this article useful! Let us know what you think about this.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library, ITIL, Management

What is ITIL CSI?

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If you’ve heard about ITIL CSI and have been wondering what it’s good for, or alternatively, if you’ve been looking at all these professionals recommending CSI and stressing on its importance without ever knowing what it is for sure, then you’re in luck. In this blog post, we’re going to talk about ITIL CSI and what it is. So if you’re a bit confused about what its functions really are or if you’re not sure if you should implement it, then you have come to the right place. In this blog post, we’re going to tell you exactly what ITIL CSI is and what you can hope to achieve from it.

So, What Is It?

ITIL CSI or Continual Service Improvement is a module that provides guidance in creating and maintaining value for customers through better strategy planning, design and operation, and presentation of services. It is basically combing the principles of the firm, practices of the firm and the methods it uses from quality management, change management, and capability improvement. ITIL refers to the management of the firm’s IT services. Whereas, CSI has two main stages. These are

  • service review and
  • process objective.

Service review refers to the reviewing of business services and infrastructure on a regular basis. Whereas, process objective refers to the reviewing of the processes used by the firm on a regular basis. This includes identifying areas where the targeted process metrics are not reached and holding regular benchmarking, audits, maturity assessments and reviews.

Many business analysts believe that ITIL CSI is best practices for a smaller firm. It best fits the practice framework of most small firms and should be used by all. Small firms have smaller resources than larger firms. Due to these small firms often believe that they cannot reach out to the best practices that are otherwise used by larger firms.

Large firms have a lot of resources. They have the capacity to deal with risks and try on newer firm practices. They can use ITIL and CSI as this framework needs resources and its implementation is complex. However, this is not the case. Smaller firms are flexible, adaptable and have improved relationships with their customers. This provides them an edge in implementing the ITIL CSI.

ITIL CSI as a Tool for Small Businesses

Through ITIL CSI, small firms can easily find out where they are lagging behind as compared to larger firms. They can manage and optimize on their IT department much more efficiently using ITIL. It is much easier to detect an online bug found in the company’s server. It is also much easier to mitigate the risk and improve on the performance of their IT services. Small services often search for a steady IT service and they aim towards delivering services to customers. It is true that since smaller firms have lesser resources, ITIL CSI can be implemented more efficiently as smaller firms need to check out the challenges that they need to overcome or face.

Apart from this, ITIL CSI can help small businesses to expand. For smaller firms to expand successfully a clear-cut strategy is often needed. In order to do this, the resources of the firm need to be accounted for, stakeholders need to consult for any concerns assuaged and quantifiable goals need to be set in. The ITIL Service Cycle helps firms achieve this aim. Once the initial goals have been set or reached by smaller firms, the ITIL CSI helps it expand since each new strategy is introduced, experimented and then implemented,

The Framework

The ITIL CSI is a tailorable framework. It is often referred to as the silver bullet solution. This leads to the organization implementing the ITIL as a whole. ITIL causes hindrance in larger firms. However, with smaller firms, they are able to prioritize what is most pressing. The ITIL not only helps them identify the problem that is there within a firm but it also, helps them improve upon it effectively and efficiently. The ITIL CSI also condenses the roles in a firm. For instance, the roles of the incident manager and problem manager can be taken on by one individual. They can take responsibility for minimizing issues before they escalate.

Moreover, the ITIL is not just about processes it’s about people. A company’s good service depends on the dedication of staff who take ownership of their role. ITIL helps promote a culture of responsibility as each staff is assigned a task which they must fulfill at a particular time. The ITIL soon becomes a part of a company’s culture.

Despite improved and increased efficiency, the ITIL CSI has many other benefits which can be very useful for smaller firms. The use of ITIL CSI reduces costs for a firm. The firm no longer has to spend huge sums of money on hiring Professional advisors. It can help develop a strategy without having to hire a great number of Professionals. It also condenses the roles of individuals in the firm which means that less number of workers are hired. It even increases the productivity of workers as roles are condensed making each and every worker of the firm to work effectively. There is high interdependence between workers which again contributes to the productivity of the firm. ITIL CSI also increases customer satisfaction. Since the ITIL provides predictable processes and a set framework, it is easier to meet customer satisfaction, as well as monitor and measure incidents.

As a result, smaller firms should make use of the ITIL CSI in order to function effectively and efficiently.

Conclusion

As you can see, regardless of the kind of business you run, you will find that ITIL CSI is very important for businesses everywhere. Not only can help you understand how to use your resources effectively within a given budget, but it also helps you understand the need for diverting resources or restructuring your business model. A lot of business owners today depend on this to take care of various departments such as logistics and customer service. Given the competition, you should not fall behind and use this opportunity provided to you and implement this method to further your business.

ITIL

Why Should You Care About Continual Service Improvement?

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If you have been following our blog for a while then you might have noticed that I’m a fan of something called ITIL. If you haven’t, then it’s fine as well. We’ll explain it to you in a moment. One of the modules of ITIL is CSI. CSI stands for Continual Service Improvement. If you’re confused right now, or never really understood what this term means that you have come to the right place! In this article, we’re going to talk about CSI and why it is necessary for you to enforce it if you’re using ITIL to grow your business. But before we go there, let’s recap ITIL.

What is ITIL?

ITIL stands for IT Infrastructure Library and it is basically a framework used to help enforce the best practices you’ll need to successfully deliver quality IT services. This generally covers a broad area. It can be system maintenance, customer experience and so much more. Naturally, a lot of people confuse the different things that come up under the umbrella of ITIL so don’t be sad if you happen to find yourself in those shoes. That’s why we’re here- to help you understand exactly what ITIL is.

As you can imagine, due to the sheer amount of information that comes under ITIL, it is a very broad subject to cover and we’ll do that in future posts. For now, we’re going to focus on CSI.

What is CSI?

CSI, as mentioned, stands for Continual Service Improvement. Once you’ve started using ITIL to impact the performance of your team, you’ll be looking for a way to maintain the kind of bar you’ve set. The last thing you need is to start using ITIL for a and then stop after implementing some improvements.

Believe it or not, but businesses who begin using the ITIL model but then leave it halfway and fail to continuously implement them fail horribly. So, in order to make sure that you continue using ITIL services and maintain the quality of your services, it is very important that you use CSI.

CSI allows you to process useful methods that will ensure that you maintain the quality of your work. This includes management quality as well. It keeps managers on their feet so that the entire team does not fall apart.

The CSI cycle- as it is known- will help you continue to maintain the quality of your processes as well as improve effectiveness, efficiency, and output of all the IT services that your company has to offer.

Why Businesses Should Use ITIL CSI?

Continuous improvement

Now that you know what ITIL CSI is used for, let’s talk about why businesses need it. Several companies delude themselves into thinking that just because they’ve made improvements once, they don’t need to do it again. However, in order to stay on top of things, you need to continuously employ methods to improve your business. Below, we’ll give you a list of reasons why your business should apply CSI.

Improving Quality of Operations

CSI helps you look at your business as a whole so that you have a better understanding of how your business operates. You will be able to look at the whole functioning process of your business, providing you with the bigger picture. This gives you the advantage of knowing how each and every service operates, the various work cycle levels, delivering services and more, making it easier for both you and your team.

Improves Staff Productivity

Since by using CSI practices, you are learning about the entire service lifecycle of your company, it will become so much easier for you to identify staff performances as well as practices which will make your staff more effective. Additionally, it will also help you learn more about the more easily disposable applications and services that are rendering your business ineffective. Sometimes, you need the bigger picture to show you how one or more extra components of your business are affecting others and so you can make sure that all of your business processes are helping you grow your business and not harm it. With this knowledge, you can also look at your workforce and regroup them in ways that will benefit your business.

Keeping Things In Check

One of the biggest advantages of using the ITIL CSI system for your IT services is that you can keep an eye on everything- from accounts to processes to the eventual output and delivery of service. This helps you keep in check with your budget so that you’re on top of your deadlines and can help your staff with issues they may be facing. CSI helps to fix the server errors and issues you may be facing in some IT services so that you can maintain your services accordingly and deliver quality problem.

Summary

As you can see, you need ITIL CSI to help you manage and maintain your business. It additionally helps you improve efficiency and make sure that you don’t fall behind the competition. With these practices, you will be able to keep your balances in check, so that you can continue to grow your business and satisfy your customers.

ITIL

The Impact To Your Business of “Unplanned Work”

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You can’t feel it, you can’t see it, you can’t touch it, but unplanned work is silently killing your business. How many times have you finished your day at work, very exhausted yet unable to cross anything off your list of high-priority to do things? This can make you feel robbed. It is impossible to tell where your time went to. This is a sign that you are falling victim to unplanned work.
 
Unplanned work is not evident in our metrics of performance, so it is difficult to analyze. However, the impact of unplanned work is great. It can mask dependencies and block and stall important priorities. Risk will accumulate across your system if you receive more work and start it late. The risk will continue to yield more risks in the form of unknown dependencies, neglected work, too much WIP and conflicting priorities. This can jeopardize the ability of your organization to deliver predictably.
 
 

Effects of Unplanned Work

You can encounter unplanned work in 2 different flavors:
  • The requirements that you have to change in the middle of a project
  • The defects you find during testing. 

You can deal with both of them if you have an agile team that is run well. It is important to understand the cause of unplanned work if you want to make your project cheap and predictable.

 
It is also important to understand that unplanned work steals valuable time from planned work. Most people see unplanned work as a norm instead of seeing it as a significant problem. 

When solving a problem, you should ensure that the problem will not occur again, but if you solve the symptoms of a problem rather than the problem, then the problem is likely to occur again. The main problem that is left unattended will lead to more issues which will lead to the allocation of more resources, and this can worsen things.
 
Every organization, department, team, and individual should measure the amount of unplanned work that is being performed. You can even forget about solving problems that come later and get a sense of how much time is allocated to work that isn’t adding any value to the business and rather spent on fighting the status quo. 
 
Let us consider release management as a concrete example to explain unplanned work. You take a piece of software and deploy it to the market and spend a lot of time trying to diagnose why a certain release didn’t work as expected. The time you spend trying to diagnose the problem is unplanned work. You can easily solve some of these issues through deployment, continuous integration and automated testing. You can be proactive and resolve a lot of (future) unplanned work as you try to diagnose and debug why things didn’t work as you had expected.
 
It is difficult to get rid of unplanned work, but we can easily learn how to plan for it. The only concern is how to plan and tackle unplanned work. Before we go deep and discuss how you can handle and mitigate unplanned work, it is important to discuss incident management, problem management, and post-mortems because they can help plan for the unplanned.
 

Incident Management and Problem Management

Problem management and incident management are key components of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library service model, and they have been created to provide a more streamlined service to consumers.
 

Incident Management

Incidents are things related to customer contacts. They can be account updates, information request, and issue reporting. There are different methods that incidents can be reported through, and this includes email, phone, and chat. Incidents can also be generated by automatic monitoring tools. There are different incidents that come through/from different sources. They would get routed to your tool for incident management. This could be something simple for smaller teams, but larger teams may need enterprise level tools or in-house customer-built applications.
 
Your business should have the responsibility of reviewing information about different incidents and check if there is a solution available to the customer. An example of an incident is when a customer wants to change their account password. The helpdesk will receive the incident, get the necessary information and make sure the customer has passed all the security checks, facilitate the changing of the password and inform the customer that the password has been changed and then close the incident. Some incidents can be managed with automatic tools while others have to be managed manually.
 

Problem Management

Incident management is repetitive in nature and can get tedious. This can exhaust the more skilled employees in your organization so if you have such employees in your organization, consider moving them into managing problems.
 
Problem management is deeper than incident management. This is where a single problem causes multiple incidents from multiple clients or customers. Problem management needs the best people. The role of these people is to find out why a certain problem happened and find the best ways to fix it and prevent the problem from happening again.
 

Post-mortem

A post-mortem is usually performed after a project has been concluded. The process helps to determine and analyze different elements of the concluded projects that were successful or unsuccessful. The main purpose of project post-mortem is to inform improvements in processes to mitigate future risks. This helps to promote best practices in an organization. Post-mortem helps to manage risks in an organization.
 

Mitigating unplanned work

As we had already seen, unplanned work is time-consuming, expensive and can negatively impact other projects in your organization. 
 
It can also drain all your skilled resources. This can be the rarest and the most important resources you have in your organization. This is why unplanned work hurts more. Two main methods you can use to mitigate unplanned work are:
  • Widening the bottleneck to moving configurations down and upstream without having to tie down your constrained skill base.
  • Increasing communication flow between producers and developers to relevant changes.

 

When you widen the bottleneck, it turns hours of work into a few minutes. If something goes wrong, you can always roll back and mitigate the impact of unplanned work. You can widen the bottleneck by creating a build of configurations, automating activities of migration of configurations and creating other jobs.
 
When the flow of communication is increased, your developers will know any changes to production that impacts their activities directly. They will be able to run comparisons instantly against critical systems and see if they have to consider specific changes as they perform their work. This helps to prevent failed deployments or reduce the likelihood of failed deployments. 
 

Customer relationship management

This is somewhat self-explanatory. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategy used by a business to execute business objectives and meet the requirements of their customers. 
 
The service strategy can be used to improve the customer relationship strategy within a business and ensure that the business can create value for its shareholders and customers by contributing to the value. The strategy ensures that businesses are able to organize their operations in an appropriate manner to deliver services that will enable the success of customers. 
 

Document Objectives

 
The business objectives are the results you want to maintain and achieve as you run your business. Every business should have clear and attainable goals. 
 
The goals may include productivity, profitability, customer service, core values, employee retention, growth, change management, marketing, maintain financing, competitive analysis and more.
 

Document Requirements

If you want to arrive at a solution that will ensure the continuity of your business, you need to map out every application; server, data, and software solution set in your environment. You should assign a downtime tolerance that is business-driven for each of the requirements. Map out the application interdependencies as you do this.
 
 

Test Your DR Planning

 
Disaster Recovery is never a onetime event. This is a constant process, and it is important for disaster recovery to keep up with the changes in the environment and evolving service-level agreements. The truth is that the data center is rapidly changing and it is almost impossible for the change control processes and operations to keep up. It is also very hard to conduct disaster recovery tests with enough frequency to be meaningful. This leads to most companies considering disaster recovery and tools for monitoring to allow analysis that is a near-real-time of the disaster recovery processes and setup.
 

 

Every business should conduct disaster recovery tests to determine the people who need more training and also know the disaster recovery processes that need to be refined. Some of the main disaster recovery things that a business should have include monitoring, environment awareness, hardware, and software independence and work from a knowledge base. 
ITIL, Service Catalog, Service Design

ITIL Service Catalogs

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By this point, you hopefully realize that I’m a bit of an ITIL and process junkie! The ITIL Service Catalog is part of the ITIL Service design module, but while it seems very focused on the design side, it has implications in many other areas. Basically, its aim is making sure reliable, accurate information from all aspects of operations are easily available and understandable by others.



What is the ITIL Service Catalog?


If you’re unfamiliar with the ITIL Service Catalog, you should know that, at its very center, IT service delivery includes a list of services from the IT portfolio that are accessible for client usage. Inside this IT list, you will locate a digital summary of the majority of the IT benefits that your organization gives – from resetting forgotten passwords to the more complex, financial requirements of the system.


The ITIL system has been created based on the fundamental concepts of Service and Customer Care. Therefore, the Service Catalog is at the center of these essential ideas. Numerous IT companies are able to deliver a Service Catalog as a major aspect of their ITIL Service Level Management. Others see the chance to use the Service Catalog as the point of focus for cooperation among IT and the business, as endorsed in the latest ITIL Business Perspective catalog. Wherever you are in your ITIL activity, the Service Catalog is fundamental to progress, providing the establishment with key defining points and business material.


To be compelling, the Service Catalog must be comprehended, grasped, and utilized by the business. However very frequently, IT divisions contribute innumerable hours to make Service Catalog documentation that only a couple of clients will ever use. The greater part of these Service Catalogs are infrequently observed or perused by either clients or business leaders – and in this way have practically zero effect. With the end goal to guarantee an effective and client cantered ITIL activity, IT associations can pursue three rules for their Service Catalog:

Prioritizing the Customer


The Service Catalog ought to be made with a relentless spotlight on client needs. The most well-known misstep IT associations make is to explain their work from an IT point of view. Clients would prefer to be explained these processes in a way which they can easily understand. Fruitful Service Catalogs are characterized from the client’s perspective rather than from an IT standpoint.


A Service Catalog should resemble web-based customer inventories, with straightforward depictions and an instinctive retail interface with accessible services available for the clients to look at. A powerful Service Catalog additionally provides clients who may get to the list – regardless of whether it’s the clients or specialty unit executives – and gives distinctive substance dependent on capacity, jobs, needs, areas, and privileges.


This client-centered methodology guarantees that the Service Catalog is embraced by clients, and gives the premise to a reasonable, business-level discourse on administration quality and cost exchange offs with business chiefs.




It Should Be Usable


Next, the Service Catalog ought to be something beyond a static archive of data. A shopper seeing an online index of things expects that when they find something they like they can interact with it. This means that they can view it, separate from the catalog, view it and then if it meets their expectations, then they can order it. Moreover, the Service Catalog for clients ought to be providing similar features – with a web-based shopping basket for online purchases (if you’re operating an e-commerce website) such that it empowers end clients and allows them to use services in a way that satisfies them and allows them to keep track of their activities and so on.


Also, specialty unit officials should have their own one of a kind perspective of the Service Catalog that gives more straightforwardness into the IT spending things, benefit levels, and the business effect of each service that IT gives.


The IT service is important to workers when they need to update their workstation or when they have to include their email inbox. IT makes a difference to business officials when they are looking into spending plans or when they get their IT bill. It is at these times that the Service Catalog should be accessible and significant.


To guarantee success, the Service Catalog must turn into the single passage that clients will turn to for all their IT service deliverance, and promptly accessible whenever your business clients need to understand what IT does and how well it is.


Empowering a Record System


At last, a significant Service Catalog must fill in is that of record system that empowers IT benefit associations to be overseen like a business inside a business. The Service Catalog can give access to oversee client request, delineate procedures for each administration, guarantee benefit level consistency and drive process efficiencies.


No service sector business can flourish without such operational and financial information available and effectively accessible. By giving inside the main issue for asking for administrations, IT can use this information to all the more successfully control utilization.


With institutionalized and recorded information, IT groups can implement repeatable and quantifiable service delivery applications that eventually results in solid service quality.


Conclusion


The Service Catalog is the foundation for accomplishment in any ITIL activity. By characterizing and distributing a standard arrangement of business-significant administration contributions, IT can all the more adequately advertise its esteem and set up a system for correspondence with the business. Also, by making the Service Catalog operational and value-based, IT activities can help institutionalize benefit satisfaction forms, oversee utilization, and drive ceaseless enhancement.


Services that are not frequently used can be suspended. Delivery applications for high volume services can be streamlined. Key execution markers can give more insight to control costs, guarantee ideal administration quality, and support planning discussions with IT chiefs.


With a significant and client-centered Service Catalog set up, IT associations can genuinely work as an administration arranged supplier to adequately address the issues of their business clients.

Benchmark, CSI, ITIIL, Tools

CSI & Benchmarking

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As an IT professional, it is incumbent upon you to continue developing your skills and knowledge as that is the only way to ensure that you are current with what is considered “best practice”.

After all – while you might think of your skills at work as being similar to Wolverine’s, you’ll realize that he didn’t get that way without continuous and ongoing training in the Danger Room to ensure that he was able to meet and surpass any situation!

Now you might wonder about why I’ve gone into this tangent about comic book hero’s and their struggles, but I assure it will all make sense.  In my own personal life I’m currently working on my ITIL Intermediate set of certifications so that I can eventually have an ITIL Expert designation.  

The one that I’m currently on which I’d like to share with you is called CSI (Continual Service Improvement) and while some people might consider that acronym to refer to Crime Scene Investigations and the host of shows that have followed that theme, in reality, it’s not about looking at a problem after it’s happened (the crime) but rather proactive planning and organizing to ensure that the problem never happens in the first place!

CSI is a very large and complicated subject – in all honesty, so far its the one I’ve had the most difficulty with in my ITIL Expert journey – and it has quite a few different elements.  

As an IT Professional, ITIL generally makes a lot of sense to me and in most cases, I’ve implemented or worked on quite a few areas that are covered in the ITIL guides.  

In fact without boasting, many times I find that the ITIL books seem to be quoting something I’ve said!



One part of ITIL that I’ve not really explored or covered in my career, however, is that of benchmarking.  

Simply put – 

Benchmarking is a comparison of a specific element or process in your organization with that of other external companies/parties that have similar processes and products. 


Comparing your support responsiveness for example (Average Speed of Answer) if you’re a manufacturing company versus a bank doesn’t really work.  You need to (as much as possible) compare apples-to-apples.

How to Benchmark – some ideas!

  1. Focus on your key business drivers. These are the processes that underpin the success of your firm and will vary from sector to sector and business to business. If you provide a service, customer care is likely to be a key business driver; if you are a high-volume manufacturer, production-line speed will be a key business driver.
  2. Decide who to benchmark against. Your local Business Link or trade association should be able to suggest benchmarking partners. Pick firms of a similar size and with similar objectives to help work out industry yardsticks, but also compare with firms outside your sector who excel in areas you want to measure – importing their approach could help you leapfrog competitors.
  3. Assess the efficiency of your processes. Look at the mechanics of your business – the production techniques, quality controls, stock management and so on. How effective are they? How well are you using your technology? Are other businesses benefiting from new ways of doing things?
  4. Analyze your allocation of resources. Are you putting resources into the same areas as your benchmarking partners? Do they have more employees or fewer? In which parts of the business? Have they invested more in IT and other equipment? Are they spending more on marketing?
  5. Calculate sales per employee. This will provide a straightforward measure of productivity and efficiency. If your sales are comparatively low, investigate the reasons; you might find the problem is not with your sales staff but your product, or that you are pitching to the wrong market.
  6. Measure your customer service standards. Customer service is a key battleground for businesses with similar products or services. Working out the proportion of sales accounted for by returning customers will give you a picture of your service levels, as will the number of complaints you receive and the time it takes to fulfill an order.
Now is benchmarking always a hallmark of success?  Stay tuned for a subsequent post discussing why you shouldn’t benchmark!
Helpdesk, Incident Management, ITIL, KPI, Problem Management, Service, SLA, Teams

WHAT IS A HELPDESK?

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OK, to start with it’s not a desk that helps people! A help desk is a team of individuals (generally support staff) that provide solutions and resolutions to customers experiencing problems. Generally working at the 1st tier of the support model they are responsible for Incident reporting and resolution vs. Problem Management (I shall discuss those terms in greater depth below).


What is an Incident?
Simply put, an Incident is anything related to customer contact (Incidents are also reported by automatic means via monitoring tools and I will discuss those types of incidents in greater depth in later posts). Incidents related to customers can be anything really – Information requests, Account Updates, Issue reporting are all examples of Incidents. Incidents can also be reported through a variety of different methods – this could include the phone (probably the most common), email (a close 2nd) and even chat. As mentioned previously, automated monitoring tools can also generate incidents.


All of these different Incidents coming from/through different sources would get routed to your Incident Management tool. For smaller teams, this could be something as simple as a spreadsheet but in larger organizations either in-house customer-built applications or enterprise level tools prevail.



Incident Management (in a nutshell)
Your helpdesk is responsible for reviewing the information in each of these incidents and checking if there is an appropriate solution already available to the customer. For those instances for example where the customer wishes to update their Account Information, the helpdesk would look at the Incident, obtain the correct new information (& assuming that all appropriate security questions had been reviewed) log into the customers account and update the information. Once the information had been updated, they would inform the customer and then close the Incident. This is probably one of the simpler examples of an Incident from start to finish.


If the customer is reporting a problem or an issue, the Helpdesk staff are responsible for updating the Incident with all the relevant details as supplied by the customer. If the customer’s issue matches a known fix they are able to inform or supply that fix to the customer, however, if that is not the case they would need to escalate the issue to the Problem Management team. The simplest way to think of the Incident Management (Helpdesk/Tier1) team and the issues they resolve is that if a “band-aid” exists they can apply it. If more drastic attention is required they will need to call the Doctor!



Problem Management
Problem Management is where the interesting work really happens. Incident Management due to its repetitive nature can get tedious and is definitely a drain on the more skilled staff in your organization … if you have people like that, think about moving them into Problem Management if you have such a team or create one if you don’t! Problem Management is more in-depth. It’s where more often than not a single Problem is the cause of multiple Incident’s from multiple customers … as such you want your best people at this level. Generally, you would consider this Tier 2 or Tier 3 from an escalation and staffing perspective and dependent on your product or service you would have some very technically oriented people there. Their goal is not to just provide a band-aid, but rather to find out why the problem happened in the first place and fix it. Ideally, they should be looking at ways to fix it in such a way as to ensure that it doesn’t happen again!!



KPI’s
Now each of these teams would have different metrics in place. Obviously, your Tier1 team (Incident Management/Customer Service/Helpdesk) needs to get back to the customer in a timely manner. Their goal as already mentioned is to fix it, fix it fast and move on. A band-aid will not always reattach the finger though, so it’s up to the Tier2 team to ensure that the surgery goes smoothly which obviously takes a lot more time as you don’t want the surgeon doing a shoddy job!
Response Time – So with that analogy in mind … you want to have an aggressive goal set for your Helpdesk – try to work with the 80/20 rule … 80% of incidents responded to in 20 seconds (If you have the resources, otherwise maybe 20 minutes? Or 20 hours (that’s less than 1 day so might still be good – especially if you’re doing email support)? Or 20 days ß well that’s probably not really worthwhile) but hopefully you get the point? You want to set a specific goal for measuring how quickly your customers are getting a response.
Resolve Time – notice that I have separated these out. As much as you’d like to be able to resolve 100% of issues at that first contact, it’s not always going to be possible. However, you can have another measurement in place that tracks this which is the Resolve Time (sometimes called MTTR (Mean Time to Repair)). The Goal here is also to get that band-aid on as quickly as possible so you need to ensure that your Incident Management system has some sort of a knowledge base which helps your staff find the solution to commonly placed issues/questions. If they have the answer every time, then a 100% resolution at 1st contact is achievable! If not, however … it gets a bit more complicated because all of a sudden your Incident Management team becomes the customer and the team they go to is the Problem Management team. Guess what? They have a different measurement for Response Time and Resolve Time too!


Problem Management Response Time – now as previously mentioned these are generally your more senior staff and as much as you’d like them to be available 24/7 unless you have an extremely large organization this is probably fairly unlikely. So you are going to have built or determined some relevant response times based on their availability. In addition, as these escalated issues are generally issues that cannot easily be resolved, your resolution time is going to be extended also. Pick some appropriate intervals that meet your customers SLAs. Your main goal for this team (in addition to resolving the problem of course) is communication, communication, communication!!! They must inform your customer-facing agents what the issue is, what they are doing to resolve it and when they expect to have it resolved. If they cannot provide an estimated resolution time, they MUST provide your Tier1 team with an estimated update time.
Information Technology Infrastructure Library, IT service management, ITIL, Outsourcing, Service Strategy, Sourcing

TO SOURCE, OR OUTSOURCE … THAT IS THE QUESTION!

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Continuing our discussion about ITIL Service Strategy, lets start talking about Sourcing.  Sourcing is about analysing how to most effectively source and deploy the resources and capabilities required to deliver outcomes to customers. A sourcing decision is key in determining the best combination of suppliers (internal vs. external) to provide the most cost effective and efficient delivery of services.

Outsourcing

I’ve spoken about outsourcing at some length in the past (here, here and here), but those posts were focused more on whether or not you should outsource.  Lets talk here about what outsourcing is and why some businesses utilize it.
In a nutshell Outsourcing is using another company/organization to perform services on your behalf for your customers.  Now you could outsource lots of different things – HR Functions for your own internal team, IT Support for your customers etc… – what makes the decision on whether or not you should outsource is the question of value.  Are you able to provide more value to your customers and shareholders by outsourcing vs. doing the activity in house?  Generally speaking this question of value has been driven by financial considerations, unfortunately, most financial analyses do not include all the costs related to sourcing options, leading to difficult relationships with service providers, involving unexpected costs and service issues.  

What should you outsource?

Generally speaking you should outsource anything that is non-critical to your business.  By focusing on your core strengths you can be more successful and removing tasks that are only peripherally related (if that) to your business will allow your organization to focus even more on the things that make you successful.
Once candidates for sourcing are identified, the following questions can be used to clarify matters: 
  • Do the candidate services improve the business’s resources and capabilities? 
  • How closely are the candidate services connected to the business’s competitive and strategic resources and capabilities?
  • Do the candidate services require extensive interactions between the service providers and the business’s competitive and strategic resources and capabilities?

Dependent upon the answers to those questions a decision needs to be made on whether or not to outsource some or all of a service.  If the responses uncover minimal dependencies and infrequent interactions between the sourced services and the business’s competitive and strategic positioning, then the candidates are strong contenders – conversely however if the answers show a strong relationship with the business’ competitive or strategic position, then care must be taken.

Sourcing vulnerabilities

When outsourcing – especially in the instances where outsourcing a key service, care must be taken to ensure that businesses do not get impacted negatively.  Some of the key vulnerabilities that might be experienced are:
  • Substitution:  ‘Why do I need the service provider when its supplier can offer the same services?’ The sourced vendor develops competing capabilities and replaces the sourcing organization
  • Disruption:  The sourced vendor has a direct impact on quality or reputation of the sourcing organization.  This is of significant concern for those organizations that have outsourced their support or engineering and design organizations.
  • Distinctiveness:  The sourced vendor is the source of distinctiveness for the sourcing organization. The sourcing organization then becomes particularly dependent on the continued development and success of the second organization  

One key concern/issue with outsourcing is responsibility.  Outsourcing does not mean that a service or its performance are no longer important. In most cases, it often means that the service is so important that it should be provided by a service provider that can do a better (or more cost-effective) job. Just because a service has been outsourced does not remove the responsibility from the vendor. While a 3rd party could be providing technical support on a product or service, the customer always has recourse to organization that they purchased the original product/service from..

Other types of Sourcing

While most people consider Outsourcing (& Insourcing) as the only two options, there are in actuality a variety of different ways that services can be sourced.
  • Insourcing – internal parts of the organization do the work.  Clearly defined departments with specific responsibilities.
  • Outsourcing – a 3rd party that specializes in a specific role, provides that service to an organization through a well defined plan with specific deliverable’s, KPIs and SLAs.
  • Partnership – a formal arrangement between 2 or more parties to work together on a specific role or responsibility.  The focus here tends to be on strategic partnerships that leverage critical expertise or market opportunities.
  • Co-sourcing or multi-sourcing – a mix of insourcing and outsourcing where a number of external organizations work together to design, develop, transition, maintain, operate and/or support a portion of a service.
  • Business process outsourcing (BPO) – a growing trend (especially among the larger multinationals) where an entire business function (customer service, technical support, accounting, HR etc…) is provided by a 3rd party.
There are a host of other common (Application Services, Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO), Cloud etc…) and uncommon ways of sourcing services, in fact the only real distinction is that businesses will do what makes sense for the business!

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Information Technology Infrastructure Library, IT service management, ITIL, Service management, Service Portfolio

SERVICE PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

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The Service Portfolio describes the commitments and investments made by a service provider to its customers across all market spaces.  In a nutshell, it states what the company is able to do and how it will do it while also accounting for previously agreed upon commitments.  The Service Portfolio also talks about new products and services as well as ongoing service improvement projects and other third-party services which are utilized by the business in providing their service.  The Service Portfolio is the defacto guide to what the business can and cannot do.


Ensuring that the Service Portfolio is accurate is one of the important roles of Service Portfolio Management (SPM).  This role ensures that new services are added only after funding has been approved an appropriate financial plan is in place for recovering costs and/or showing a profit.  This is sometimes called a rally point process or other similar names but in essence its a way of ensuring that the business always has a pipeline of new products and services available to meet current and future demand.  The service portfolio should have the right mix of services in the pipeline and catalog to secure the financial viability of the service provider since the service catalog is the only part of the portfolio that lists services that recover costs or earn profits.  You can find a lot more detail on Service Catalogs at either of the links provided below.

The service pipeline, similar to a sales pipeline, list perspective, and future projects and services – i.e. those products that are currently being considered or thought about, but are not yet available to the consumer.  The service pipeline is a future looking document that provides guidance to senior leaders and while elements of this might be made available to the customer (for future prospects generally), it is not normally published as that tends to give the competition too much of an insight into the organization’s future plans and strategies.

The service catalog, however, is different … this document is generally published (& publicized) quite widely as it is the single place where all information about products, prices, ordering and request processes are documented.  It defines and communicates the policies, guidelines, and accountability required for the service provider to deliver and support services to its customers. The service catalog details each service and shows the service components that make up each one. It also provides an overview of the assets, processes, and systems involved in each service.

While you might consider the service catalog to be just that … a catalog of services, it can also be used to identify gaps in services and linkages between services.  This information can be used to realize new services and products for future exploration and exploitation by the business.

Retiring Services

While the common thought is that the latest and greatest is always the best (look at the mobile phone market if you don’t believe me or understand what I’m saying) the service catalog should maintain a place for retired services also.  These are services that while no longer as “popular” (in call center and tech support worlds that would translate to “getting fewer calls”) still have value to the business for a variety of different reasons including:
  • The replacement service might not meet all requirements, and it is important to be able to fall back to the previous service 
  • There is a significant portion of the market made up of the planned to retire service which will still need future support and/or maintenance
  • When defining a new service, service portfolio management might discover that some functionality is available from a retired service. This might result in the service being reinstated as part of a new service 
  • There might be regulatory requirements to maintain archived data that can only be accessed using the previous service, in which case information is exported to a read-only database for future use
It is the job of Service Portfolio management to determine how long a service should remain in the Service portfolio – and while this is often determined based on time, in many cases other reasons are utilized to make this decision.

Service Portfolio Launch

Service portfolio management is guided from strategy management for IT services via strategic plans which provide details of new business opportunities and which services are required to fulfill those opportunities.  SPM is responsible for reviewing each opportunity and determining the required investment level and also whether or not the opportunity is achievable (regardless of the potential profit that “might” be realized).

The role of Improvement in determining a Portfolio

Continual Service Improvement (CSI) has some input into SPM also, specifically:


  • Opportunities to improve the performance or service level achievements of services in the portfolio
  • New opportunities within the current strategy, or gaps in the current portfolio of services
  • Opportunities for overall improvements in cost, mitigation of risks etc.  
By taking into account perceived deficiencies in the Service Portfolio, CSI is able to make recommendations for improvement, however, it is still the responsibility of SPM to evaluate these suggestions and determine whether or not the potential improvement warrants the investment.

Define 

The creation of a Service Portfolio follows several clearly defined (no pun intended) steps as shown in the diagram to the right.  The Define step talks about desired business outcomes and opportunities as well as what services are needed to realize these opportunities and the investment required.

Any new strategy or change to an existing strategy should be submitted to Service Portfolio Management. This will be in the form of strategic plans, identified market spaces and outcomes, priorities and policies. These will be used to identify specific service opportunities and the stakeholders that will be consulted in defining the services.

The role of SPM at this stage is to define the service based on the information provided:
  • The purpose of the service (what it must achieve)
  • The customers and consumers of the service
  • The major inputs and outputs of the service
  • High-level performance requirements (for example, when it needs to be available)
  • What business activity will it support, and is that activity stable or dynamic?
  • Does the service need to comply with (or enable the business to comply with) any regulatory or legal requirements?
  • Are there any standards that need to be applied to the service?
  • What are the actual business outcomes that the service will be supporting, and who is responsible for these outcomes?  
  • Are there any other stakeholders that need to be involved in defining and evaluating this service? 
  • The anticipated level of investments and returns. Although these will not be known, the customer will know what type of return they need, and how much they are prepared to spend to achieve it 
  • Are there any constraints that need to be considered (e.g. budget, resources)?
The role of SPM is to understand how all of the different components fit together and complement each other and also to define the boundaries of the service as well as the technical stakeholders.  Based on this analysis, the impact on the Service Portfolio can be determined and this will provide information on the following areas:
  • The current business outcomes 
  • Investment levels 
  • Service Level Agreements and contractual obligations 
  • Warranty levels 
  • Existing required Utility (for example, changing an existing service may benefit one customer, but it might negatively impact another) 
  • Is there another existing service that can be combined with this service to deliver the required Utility or Warranty? 
  • Patterns of business activity, and levels of demand on the service

Analysis

The analysis of each service moving through the Service Portfolio Management process is performed by linking each one to the Service Strategy. For external service providers, this will be a linkage to the organization’s overall strategy. For internal service providers, it will mean linking to the IT strategy and the strategies of the other business units.
ITIL, Service Providers, Service Strategy

TYPE I, II AND III PROVIDERS

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Service Provider Types 

Although most aspects of service management apply for all types, it is important to differentiate between them. The domains of customers, contracts, competition, market, income, and strategy have a slightly different meaning for the different types.

Type I- Internal Service Provider : 

Type I is a service provider that is embedded within a business unit and provides IT service exclusively for a specific business unit.  They are often considered a cost center and are an integral part of the business’s operation.  They are dedicated to specific business units and as such, they are required to have an in-depth knowledge of the business and its goals, plans, and operations. They are usually highly specialized, often focusing on designing, customizing and supporting specific applications, or on supporting a specific type of business process.

Type II – Shared Service Unit : 

Type II is an internal service provider that provides shared IT services to more than one business unit.  A good example of this would be IT in fact.  In most businesses, IT provides services to many other parts of the organization (sales, operations, marketing etc…) and this is considered an SSU (Shared Service Unit).

Type II can offer lower prices compared to external service providers by leveraging corporate advantage, internal agreements, and accounting policies. They can standardize their service offerings across business units and use market-based pricing to influence demand patterns.

Type III – External service provider : 

Type III is a service provider that provides IT services to external customers.  A good example of this is B2B Technical Support … most companies that are selling a product or service manufactured by a 3rd party, will require support on that product if/when they run into any issues.  While they may develop some capabilities in-house, they will definitely need more advanced support for difficult or complex installations and in those instances, they might need to access the support operations from the manufacturer directly.  The motivation may be access to knowledge, experience, scale, scope, capabilities, and resources that are either beyond the reach of the organization or outside the scope of a carefully considered investment portfolio.

Choosing the Right Type of Provider

Each provider type has benefits and drawbacks. Services, infrastructure, applications etc. may be sourced from each type of service provider with decisions based on possible transition costs (costs of migrating from one operating mode to another, or between service providers), and transaction costs (costs of finding a suitable provider, negotiating, defining requirements, agreements, relationship management, changes, disputes, etc.).



Whether customers keep a business activity in-house (aggregate), separate it out for dedicated management (disaggregate) or source it from outside (outsource) depends on answers to the following questions:

  • Are highly specialized assets required? 
    • Are those assets going to be idle after the required activity is done?
      • If yes – it’s recommended to outsource it. 
    • Are those assets going be obsolete, or lose a significant proportion of the value over time?
      • If yes – it’s recommended to outsource it. 
  • Is the activity required performed sporadically?
    • If yes – it’s recommended to outsource it. 
  • Is the activity simple enough without any major changes within the activity over time? 
    • If yes – it’s recommended to outsource it. 
  • Can you define good and satisfactory performance? 
    • If no – it’s recommended to keep it in-house. 
  • Can you measure what constitutes good performance? 
    • If no – it’s recommended to keep it in-house. 
  • Is the activity tightly connected with other activities and processes, where in case of separation a new layer of complexity would be added? 
    • If yes – it’s recommended to keep it in-house. 

Customers can decide to switch between types of service providers based on the answers to those simple questions. Of course, the answers to the questions themselves may change over time, depending on new economic conditions, regulations, and technological innovation – with the latest being inevitable. 

Types of Services 

I’ve covered this already in a previous post, but it bears repeating as it definitely applies in the context of the conversation we’re having here.

Core Services : 

Core Services are services that deliver the basic outcomes desired by one or more customers. Core services anchor the value proposition for the customers and provide the basis for their continued utilization and satisfaction as they represent the value that the customers want and for which they are willing to pay. 

Enabling Services: 

Enabling services are services that are needed in order to deliver a core service. Enabling services may or may not be visible to the customer, but the customer does not perceive them as services in their own right. 

Enhancing Services: 

Enhancing services are services that are added to a core service to make it more exciting or alluring to the customer. They are not essential to the delivery of a core service and are added to a core service as ‘excitement’ factors, which will encourage customers to use the core service more.
ITIL, Service Strategy

THE 4 P’S OF SERVICE STRATEGY

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Competition is extremely fierce in the world of business, only a handful survive, and some can barely keep up with the demands of the times. That’s why it is necessary to have an idea of what it takes to be successful and an integrated strategy to help maintain excellent service results.

ITIL discusses at length the four “Ps” of strategy– perspective, position, plan, and pattern, each of which represents a different way to approach your service strategy. Brief summaries are provided here:

  • Perspective – This is basically the vision statement of an organization.  Why is it in business, why is it doing what it is doing?  What are the plans and ideas for the future and how does the organization interact with its customers?  A perspective cements a service provider’s distinctiveness in the minds of the employees and customers
  • Positions – What is the competitive landscape and how will the organization compete with other similar providers?  What is the key distinction between them and other businesses in the marketplace and what are the capabilities that set them apart?  Positions are not just a description of different processes and resources … it could be as simple as cost.
  • Plans – This is the big one … it takes into account the vision and the current position and talks about the future.  How will the provider move from one space to a future space?  What activities need to be done and how will they be done?
  • Patterns – Hum, drum day-to-day … what does the organization or business do, how does it do it and what will it continue to do to be successful?  This is the housekeeping stuff that needs to be completed correctly for an organization to meet its strategic objectives.
The thing that I’ve always liked about ITIL is that it isn’t esoteric or anything like that.  It is simple common sense and the 4 P’s are a perfect example of this
Definition of Services, Information Technology Infrastructure Library, ITIL, Service Owner, Service Strategy

ITIL DEFINITION OF SERVICES

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I think you all know that I’m a big fan of ITIL but sometimes I think it does get overly complicated (despite what I’ve said in previous posts).  Take the definition of services for example:

Internal vs. External

OK now, I know its not rocket science by any means, but Internal services are those delivered within a business (for example IT services to a specific business unit) whereas External services are those delivered to external organizations (hence the name) … I’m assuming you’re with me so far, as this is not the overly complicated part (although it is important to recognize that internal services have to be linked to external services before their contribution to business outcomes can be understood and measured).
Where I think it goes into too much detail is in its definition of Core, Enabling and Enhancing services.
ITIL’s definition of each is as follows:
  • Core Services – deliver basic outcomes that represent something a customer is willing to pay for (basically the bread and butter of the service).
  • Enabling Services – these are the nuts and bolts that let you deliver the core service (support, administration, operations etc…)
  • Enhancing Services –  not needed to deliver the core service … this is something that can give the core service a “wow” factor but is not necessary.  The problem with enhancing services however is that over time they become core and/or enabling services as they become the expected norm.
Now I don’t necessarily have a problem with how they’ve defined each of these … in itself they each make sense … my question however is more couldn’t you combine enabling and core?  Enabling by itself simply doesn’t do anything as there is no service for it to enable and core by itself similarly cannot be successful as it needs the other groups/services for it to actually work.  Personally I think Enabling Services ARE Core Services and should be included in the same list.  If they were – IT services might be looked at differently from a budgeting perspective that’s for sure!

Service Definition Process

Continuing this discussion, the next step is determining how you define a service.  There are five key questions that you can use to help you with this:

  1. What is the service, and how do I get it? (Service Description) 
  2. How do I get help? How do I use the service? (Help and Self-Service) 
  3. What Does It Cost? (Service Cost and Pricing) 
  4. How is the service supported? (Service Support) 
  5. How is the service delivered? (Service Delivery)

The role of the Service Owner

One thing that I do 100% agree with however is the definition of a Service Owner.  I have seen too often businesses role out fabulous new ideas and plans, and not have any idea who is actually responsible for ensuring that it is done correctly and responsibly.
The Service Owner is responsible for the service REGARDLESS of where the underpinning technology components, processes or professional capabilities reside.  Basically the Service Owner is the SPOC (Single Point of Contact) for that Service and owns it.  The Service Owner is responsible to the customer for the initiation, transition and ongoing maintenance and support of a particular service and accountable to the IT director or service management director for the delivery of the service.

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ITIL, Service Strategy

SERVICE STRATEGY – AN INTRODUCTION

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Perhaps somewhat self-explanatory, but Service Strategy is the strategy used by a business to execute its business objectives and meet the customer’s requirements.  Utilizing Service Strategy within a business ensures that the business is able to create value for its customers and shareholders by contributing to the value and not just the costs of the organization.  Service Strategy ensures that organizations are able to organize themselves in an appropriate manner to deliver and support services that will enable a customers’ success and will help to achieve a positive ROI in services.  Through a variety of different tools (service catalog and Service Portfolio Management for example), Service Strategy is able to ensure a consistent understanding of what is required by a business and ensures that these services are provided in an efficient and effective manner. Get a free ITIL Service Strategy Financial Management Assessment here.

This is a document that we use to assess process maturity, tools usage, and organizational structure in managing IT Financials. This questionnaire will allow for an assessment to be performed using a hybrid of the Capability Maturity Model for Service Management and the ITIL Best Practices for Service Support and Service Delivery. The overall structure of the effort will come from the ITIL best practices of the IT Service Management definition. Rankings within each area will conform to a modified version of the CMM scoring. This modified version will provide a greater degree of granularity in evaluating the various factors involved in each service area, and has its basis in the ITIL standard. The objectives of Service Strategy include providing:

  • A clear identification of corporate objectives and the products and services available as well as the requirements of the customers that use them.
  • The ability to define how value is created and delivered as well as the ability to prioritize projects and opportunities based on their value to the business.
  • A means to identify opportunities to provide services and how to exploit them as well as the ability to develop market spaces and drive the implementation of strategy through the service lifecycle.
  • A clear service provision model, that articulates how services will be delivered and funded, and to whom they will be delivered and for what purpose 
  • The means to understand the organizational capability required to deliver the strategy 
  • Documentation and coordination of how service assets are used to deliver services, and how to optimize their performance
  • Processes that define the strategy of the organization, which services will achieve the strategy, what level of investment will be required, at what levels of demand, and the means to ensure a working relationship exists between the customer and service provider.

Other components of the Service Lifecycle are also involved and at a high level here are there responsibilities:

  • Service Design
    • Turns a Service Strategy into a plan for delivering the business objectives
    • Covers design principles and methods for converting strategic objectives into portfolios of services and service assets
  • Service Transition
    • Ensures that the value(s) identified in the Service Strategy, and encoded in Service Design, are effectively transitioned so that they can be realized in Service Operation 
  • Service Operation
    • Strategic objectives are ultimately realized through Service Operation, therefore making it a critical capability
  • Continual Service Improvement
    • Provides guidance on creating and maintaining value for customers through better strategy, design, transition and operation of services 
    • Describes best practice for ensuring that the service portfolio continues to be aligned to business needs
    • Provides guidance for linking improvement efforts and outcomes with Service Strategy, design, transition and operation 

Service Strategy is responsible for meeting customer business objectives while ensuring that their own organizational goals and plans are not negatively impacted.  They are responsible for ensuring that these objectives are met in an increasingly competitive world and they must understand the trade-offs involved in making those strategic decisions.

The goal of a Service Strategy can be summed up very simply:

superior performance versus competing alternatives.

When people talk about Project Management, their first thought is often Microsoft Project.  In a similar manner when considering Service Strategy people often think of Strategic plans.  However just like Project is not the whole answer, so to, a strategic plan doesn’t really get you where you need to go.  Service Strategy is forward-looking but with the increasing pace of change in the world today (especially in IT services), a Strategic Plan is often obsolete before it’s been published!

A Service Strategy resolves big issues so that staff can get on with the small details – how best to provide services, for example, rather than debating what services to offer. But focusing on a strategic plan impedes the organization’s ability to respond to changing conditions.

Incident Management, ITIL, Problem Management

The Difference Between Incident Managment and Problem Management

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Incident Management and Problem Management are both key components of the ITIL service model and have been defined and created in an effort to provide a better and more streamlined service to consumers.

ITIL itself stands for the – Information Technology Infrastructure Library – and comprises of the following books:

  • ITIL Service Strategy 
  • ITIL Service Design 
  • ITIL Service Transition 
  • ITIL Service Operation 
  • ITIL Continual Service Improvement
Incident Management and Problem Management are both elements of the fourth volume – ITIL Service Operation, which tries to define the best practice for dealing with interruptions to a customers service.

What is an Incident?

An incident is a single – unique – issue impacting one specific customer and their service. While there can be many similar incidents impacting multiple customers, each of them are in their fashion unique and need to be logged and treated as such.

An example of an incident is you losing your home Internet connection. While the underlying root cause could be related to a fiber cut impacting hundreds of houses, your individual issue is one specific incident as it is unique to you. 

What is the objective of the Incident Management team?

The Incident Management team is the group responsible for dealing with your issue. Now they could be called by a variety of different names – Helpdesk, Service Desk, Technical Support Team etc… – their primary role is to get your service restored in as timely a manner as possible. They are basically there to put a “band-aid” on your problem and not necessarily resolve the root cause.

How are Incidents Tracked?

Incidents are tracked and responded to through a variety of different automated and manual tools. The ideal function of the Incident Management team is to resolve the issue before it has an impact on your business/life and they track these issues through a variety of different alarms and monitoring tools.

The worst type of reporting is one in which a manual report is needed. If a customer has been impacted, then in some fashion they have already failed in one of their primary roles!

What is a problem?

In the context of Incident Management, a Problem is one that comprises multiple incidents. If you take into account my previous example of an Internet failure at your home, the problem, in this case, would be the actual fiber cut which is the root cause of the issue.

As such, this “problem” would have multiple incidents attached to it.

What is Problem Management?

In contrast to Incident Management, Problem Management is a lot more than just slapping a band-aid on an Incident. With Problem Management the underlying root cause of an issue must be discovered and steps are taken to ensure that similar issues do not occur in the future. Problem Management is a significantly more involved process and takes quite a bit more time and resources to achieve correctly.