IT Service Management

Welcome Back
ITIL 4 Edition

Gvantsa Davitaia
5.2 Service Management Practices

General management practices Service management practices Technical management practices

Architecture management Availability management Deployment management
Continual improvement Business analysis Infrastructure and platform
management
Information security management Capacity and performance Software development and
management management
Knowledge management Change control
Measurement and reporting Incident management
Organizational change management IT asset management
Portfolio management Monitoring and event management
Project management Problem management
Relationship management Release management
Risk management Service catalogue management
Service financial management Service configuration management
Strategy management Service continuity management
Supplier management Service design
Workforce and talent management Service desk
Service level management
Service request management
Service validation and testing
5.2.13 Service design

Key message
The purpose of the service design practice is to design products and services that are fit
for purpose, fit for use, and that can be delivered by to organization and its ecosystem.
This includes planning and organizing people, partners and suppliers, information,
communication, technology and practices for new or changed products and services, and
the interaction between the organization and its customers.
Service design practice

Service design practice should ensure that the customers journey from demand through to value
realization is as pleasant and frictionless as it can be, this is achieved by focusing on customer
experience (CX) and user experience (UX)
Adopting and implementing a service design practice focused on CX and UX will:
 Result in customer-centered products and services that include stakeholders in design activities
 Consider the entire environment a product or service
 Enable projects to estimate the cost, timing, resource requirements, and risks associated with
service design more accurately
 Result in higher volumes of successful change
 Make design methods easier for people to adopt and follow
 Enable service design assets to be shared and re-used across projects and services
 Increase confidence that the new or changed product or service can be delivered to specification
without unexpectedly affecting other products, services or stakeholders
 Ensure that new or changed products and services will be maintainable and cost-effective
Service design

Designing and delivering new or changed product or service should not be done in
isolation, but should consider the impact it will have on:
 Other products and services
 All relevant parties, including customer and suppliers
 The existing architectures
 The required technology
 The service management practice
 The necessary measurement and metrics
Service design

Service design supports products and services that:

 Are business-and customer-oriented, focused and driven
 Are cost-effective
 Meet the information and physical security requirements of the organization
and any external customers
 Are flexible and adaptable, yet fit for purpose at the point of delivery
 Can absorb an ever-increasing demand in the volume and speed of change
 Meet increasing organizational an customer demands for continuous operation
 Are managed and operated to an acceptable level of risk
5.2.13.1 Design thinking

Design thinking includes a series of activities:

 Inspiration and empathy, thou the direct observation of people and how they
work or interact with products and services as well as identifying how they
might interact differently with other solutions.
 Ideation, which combines divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent
thinking is the ability to offer different, unique on variant ideas, while
convergent thinking is ability to fined preferred solution.
 Prototyping, where these ideas are tested early, iterated, and refined.
 Implementation, where the concepts are brought to life.
 Evaluation (in conjunction with other practices, including project
management and release management) measures the actual performance of
product or service implementation to ensure acceptance criteria are met.
5.2.13.2 Customer and user experience

Lean user experience (Lean UX) is a mindset, a culture, and a process that embraces
Lean-Agile methods. It implements functionality in minimum viable increments, and
determines success by measuring results against an outcome hypothesis. Lean UX is
incredibly useful when working on projects where Agile development methods are
used. The core objective is to focus on obtaining feedback as early as possible so that
it can be used to make quick decisions.
Typical questions for Lean UX might include. Who are the customers of this
product/service and what will it be used for? When is it used and under what
circumstances? What will be the most important functionality? What are the biggest
risks?
There may be more than one answer to each question, which creates a greater
number of assumptions that it might be practical to handle. The team will then
prioritize these assumptions by the risks they represent to the organization and its
customer.
Heat map of the contribution of incident
management
Plan

Design and
Transition

Demand Engage Deliver

Products
Value
and services
Obtain/
and
build
support

Improve
Service design practice value chain
activities
 Plan The service design practice includes planning and organizing the people, partners and
suppliers, information communication, technology, and practices for new or changed
products and services, and the interaction between the organization and its customers.
 Improve The service design can be used to improve an existing service as well as to create a
new service from scratch. Services can be designed as a minimum viable service, deployed,
and then iterated and improved to add further value based on feedback.
 Engage Service design incorporates CX and UX, which are quintessential examples of
engagement.
 Design and transition The purpose of service design is to design products and services that
are easy to use, desirable, and that can be delivered by the organization.
 Obtain/build Service design includes the identification of products, services, and service
components that need to be obtained or built for the new or changed service.
 Deliver and support Service design managed the users full journey, through operation,
restoration, and maintenance of the service.
5.2.14 Service desk

Key message
The purpose of the service desk practice is to capture demand for incident resolution and
service requests. It should also be the entry point and single point of contact for the
service provider with all of its users

 Service desk provide a clear path for users to report issues, queries, and
requests, and have them acknowledged, classified, owned and actioned.
Service Desk Organizational Structure
III Line
Operation Development

Service Desk
II Line
APP Admins IT Support

Incident Problem
First Line Manager Manager
Key aspect of service desk

 A key point to be understood is that, no matter how efficient the service desk
and its people are, there will always be issues that need escalation and
underpinning support from other teams. Support and development teams
need to work in close collaboration with the service desk to present and
deliver a “joined up” approach to users and customers.
 Service desk has a major influence on uses experience and how the service
provider is perceived by the users.
 Understanding of wider business context, business processes an users.
Channels for access

Service desks provide a variety of channels for access, these include:

 Phone calls, which can include specialized technology, such as interactive voice response (IVR),
conference calls, voice recognition and others.
 Service portals and mobile applications, supported by service and request catalogues, and knowledge
bases.
 Chats, though live chat and catboats.
 Email for logging and updated and for follow up surveys and confirmations.
 Unstructured emails can be difficult to process, but emerging technologies based on AI and machine
learning are starting to address this.
 Walk-in service desks are becoming more prevalent in some sectors, e.g. high education where there
re high peaks of activities that demand physical presence.
 Text and social media messaging, which are useful for notification in case of major incidents and for
contacting specific stakeholder groups, but can also be used to allow users to request support.
 Public and corporate social media and discussion forums for contacting the service provider and for
peer-to- peer support.
Supporting technologies

A centralized service desk requires supporting technologies such as:

 Intelligent telephonic systems, incorporating computer-telephony integration,
IVR, and automatic call distribution
 Workflow systems for routing and escalation
 Workforce management and resource planning systems
 A knowledge base
 Call recording and quality control
 Remote access tools
 Dashboard and monitoring tools
 Configuration management system
Service desk staff competences

Service desk staff requires training and competency across a number of broad
technical and business areas. In particular, they need to demonstrate excellent
customer service skills such as empathy, incident analysis, and prioritization,
affective communication and emotional intelligence.
Heat map of the contribution of incident
management
Plan

Design and
Transition

Demand Engage
Deliver
Products
Value
and services
Obtain/
and
build
support

Improve
Service desk practice value chain
activities
 Improve Service desk activities are constantly monitored and evaluated to
support continual improvement, alignment, and value creation. Feedback
from users is collected by the service desk to support continual improvement.
 Engage The service desk is main channel for tactical and operational
engagement with users.
 Design and transaction The service desk provides a channel for
communicating with users about new and changed services. Service desk staff
participated in relies planning, testing and early life support.
 Obtain/Build Service desk staff can be involved in accruing service
components used to fulfill service requests and resolve incidents.
 Deliver and support The service desk is the coordination point form managing
incidents and service requests.
5.2.15 Service Level management

Key message
The purpose of the service level management practice is to set clear business based
targets for service levels, and to ensure that delivery of services is properly assessed,
monitored, and managed against these targets

Definition: Service level

One or more metrics that define expected or achieved service quality
Service Level management

Servile level management provides the end-to-end visibility of the organizations

services. To achieve this, service level management:
 Establishes a shared view of the services and target service levels with customers
 Ensures the organization meets the defined service levels through the collection,
analysis, storage, and reporting of the relevant metrics for the identified services
 Performs service reviews to ensure that the current set of services continues to
meet the needs of the organization and its customers
 Captures and reports on service issues, including performance against defined
service levels

The skills and competencies for service level management includes relationship
management, business liaison, business analysis, and commercial/supplier management
5.2.15.1 Service Level agreements

Definition: service level agreement

A documented agreement between a service provider and a customer that identifies both
services required and the expected level of service

Some of the key requirements for successful SLAs include:

 They must be related to a defined ‘service’ in the service catalogue, otherwise they are simply
individual metrics without a purpose, that do not provide adequate visibility or reflect the service
perspective
 They should relate to defined outcomes and not simply operational metrics. This can be achieved
with balanced bundles of metrics, such as customer satisfaction and key business outcomes.
 The should reflect an ‘agreement’, i.e. engagement and discussion between the service provider
and the service consumer. It is important to involve all stakeholders, including partners, sponsors,
users, and customers.
 They must be simply written and easy to understand and use for all parties.
The watermelon SLA effect

Traditional SLAs have been based on

individual activities such as incidents
resolution times, system availability,
and volume metrics (number of
incidents or requests handled).
Without a business context these
metrics are often meaningless. For
example, although a system
availability of 99.6% is impressive, this
still needs to align with key business
requirements. The system may have
an acceptable unavailability of 0.4%.
Service Level management

Service level management involves collating and analyzing information from a number of sources,
including:
 Customer engagement This involves initial listening, discovery and information capture on which to
base metrics, measurement, and ongoing progress discussion. Consider asking customers some simple
open questions;
 Customer feedback This ideally gathered from a number of sources, both formal and informal
including:
 Surveys
 Key business related measures
 Operational metrics These are the low level indicators of various operational activities and may
include system availability, incident response and fix times, change and request processing times, and
system response times
 Business metrics These can be any business activity that is deemed useful or valuable by the customer
and used as a means of gauging the success of the service. These can vary from some simple
transactional binary measures such as ATM and POS terminal availability during business hours or
successful completion of business activities such as passenger check-in.
Heat map of the contribution of incident
management
Plan

Design and
Transition

Demand Engage
Deliver
Products
Value
and services
Obtain/
and
build
support

Improve
Service Level management practice
value chain activities
 Plan Service level management supports planning of the product and service portfolio and
service offerings with information about the actual service performance and trends
 Improve Service feedback from users, as well as requirements from customers, can be a
driving force for service improvement.
 Engage Service level management ensures ongoing engagement with customers and users
through feedback processing and continual service review
 Design and transition The design and development of new and changed services receives input
from this practice both through interaction with customers and as part of the feedback loop in
transition
 Obtain/build Service level management provides objectives for components and service
performance as well as for measurement and reporting capabilities of the products and
services
 Deliver and support Service level management communicates service performance objectives
to the operations and support teams and collects their feedback as an input for service
improvement