Trends such as mobile computing, consumerization (also known as bring your own device (BYOD), and cloud computing are having a dramatic impact on the service desk. These trends are prompting many organizations to evaluate and improve their existing service management processes , or implement new processes where needed, and to rethink the role the service desk plays in implementing, executing and improving these processes. It would be easy to look at these trends and think of them only as the deployment of new technologies but there are bigger considerations at stake. What services are these technologies enabling? What business processes do these services underpin? How is the business impacted when these services are interrupted? An important key performance indicator (KPI) for service catalog management is whether the service desk has the information that it needs about those services and their associated interfaces and dependencies. This is because the service desk plays

When I teach ITIL foundation classes and we start talking about aligning IT strategy with business strategy, I usually see some puzzled looks on the faces of my students.   So I thought I would give some basics on what we are trying to establish here. The purpose of strategy management for IT services is to create a process for defining and maintaining an organization's perspective, position, plans and patterns related to its services and the management of those services.    The purpose of a service strategy is to communicate how a service provider will enable an organization to achieve the desired business outcomes and establish the criteria and mechanisms to decide which services will be delivered, to whom they will be delivered to and to establish the most effective and efficient way to manage these services. The objectives of strategy management for IT services are: Analyze the internal and external environments in which we (the service provider) exist and to identify

Designing and documenting a process enables an organization to move from the initial level of the ITIL Process maturity Framework (PMF) through the repeatable level to the defined level.   To undertake this task without adequate resources can be quite daunting especially given the fact that it must I dentify needed changes to job descriptions Develop and document work procedures Identify work requirements Establish the data to be collected and the format to report accomplishments D ocument the necessary vocabulary to be utilized within the process The following ten process design and improvement steps can be used to create an easy to use and repeatable approach to help move your organization from one level to the next.   The ten steps are grouped into four phases.   Each phase will produce a deliverable that serves as an input to the follow phase. Phase: Requirements Definition.    Output: Requirements Definition Document. 1.     Determine the management’s vision and level

Service Level Management (SLM) is the process that is responsible for the overall agreeing and documenting Service Level Targets (SLT) and the responsibilities within Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Requirements (SLRs) for every service and related activity within IT. The SLA is effectively a level of guarantee or warranty with regard to the level of service quality delivered by the service provider for each of the services supplied to the business.   The accuracy of the SLAs, SLRs and SLTs and the overall success of SLM is very dependent on the quality of the service portfolio and service catalogue and their contents because they provide the detailed information on the services to be managed within the SLM process. With that said the purpose of the SLM process is to certify that all current and planned IT services are delivered in accordance with agreed achievable targets.   This is normally accomplished by SLM through a continuing cycle of negotiations, agreem

I was recently asked "Do you have an average for the service desk of first call resolution?  We are trying to set a target for the team and I cannot find any data which gives me any indication what a good target would be."   First call resolution (sometimes called "first contact resolution" or FCR) is an industry recognized metric for the performance of the Service Desk.   Analysts are measured on their ability to restore service to a user and close an incident during the first call or contact.     This is a difficult metric to benchmark across all organizations and all incidents.   Factors such as incident complexity, service desk skills and empowerment,  outsourcing and remote control capabilities can influence the ability (or inability) to restore service during the first contact. While ITIL acknowledges FCR as an important Service Desk metric, it steers clear of offering a target or benchmark.  Industry experts generally accept a FCR range of 65 to 80 %.

The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) is a well written, meaningful, asset-rich framework that is often overlooked in favor of its higher profile cousins ITIL, Cobit and ISO/IEC 20000.   Unfortunately, the big "M" that stands in front of the framework has created the perception that MOF is only relevant to Microsoft environments.  Nothing could be further from the truth - Microsoft has invested a great deal of resource and effort in creating MOF intellectual property and assets - giving it all away for free for anyone, in any environment, that is interested in learning more.  In fact, Microsoft considers you a Microsoft customer if you are working at a desktop or laptop running a Microsof operating system. Microsoft's goal in developing MOF was to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of IT service providers, thereby enabling those providers to get a better return on their infrastructure, applications and tools.   Here are six good reasons to consider learning

When we think about ITIL® we think about being able to manage the delivery of value-laden IT services to customers. But are there other, less obvious ways we can use and gain from the best practices and ideas contained within ITIL®? One of the areas that ITIL® and ITSM can help us with is by making conversations and meetings more effective and efficient. One of the ways that ITIL can help us with meetings is by using the concepts embedded in RACI. Traditionally the ideas of being responsible, accountable, consulted and informed have been for use with process activities and levels of authority and accountability. However, once we identify those levels and assign them to roles we can use them to help us establish the proper attendance at a meeting. When sending out a meeting announcement or invite we can indicate that the meeting is for those roles holding particular levels within the RACI models. In this way we have the appropriate roles and individuals at the meeting. Another wa

Part 1 of this series introduced the idea that a community of practice (CoP) is group of people who are bound together by similar interests and expertise . CoPs are an extension of the blended learning strategy being adopted by many organizations that combines formal, informal and social approaches to learning. Like service management, communities have lifecycles – they emerge, they grow, and over time they become institutionalized. Also like service management, the plan-do-check-act cycle can be applied to each of these stages. Plan involves identifying the audience for the CoP and defining its purpose. It is also critical to ensure the needs and goals of its members are understood and that its purpose and goals are tied to the vision, mission and values of the greater organization. For example, you could have a service management CoP that brings together all of the practitioners in your organization, or you could have CoPs that focus on individual lifecycle stages but occasi

What do you think would happen if everyone who attended an IT service management (ITSM) class – ITIL, ISO/IEC 20000, MOF – went back to work and talked to the person who sits next to them about how their organization could apply best practices? Or, what if everyone shared their ideas with just the people in their work groups. Those organizations would see tremendous benefit. Even small steps – think plan-do-check-act – can reap large benefits over time. But why stop there? Many organizations have people in different departments and locations, perhaps even in different parts of the world, who must work together to realize the true benefits of a consistent, integrated approach to ITSM. A community of practice can be used to bring these people together. A community of practice (CoP) is group of people who are bound together by similar interests and expertise. Members are active practitioners who come together to share information, experiences, tips and best practices. Members prov

Techniques used to measure employee satisfaction include informal one-on-one discussions, focus groups and periodic surveys. As with customer satisfaction surveys, for accurate and reliable results, employee satisfaction surveys should be created with care by people who understand how to develop questions that produce unbiased information. In other words, ask your HR folks for help! So what questions should you ask? "How satisfied are you with your job?" is a good place to start. A question such as: "Compared with a year ago, how would you describe your overall job satisfaction?" can provide additional insight.  You can also ask employees to rate their satisfaction with areas such as: Reward and recognition programs Career development and advancement opportunities Education and training  Supervision, coaching and feedback Teamwork Availability of resources needed to do the job Ability to contribute to organizational goals  And in the spirit of co

I have often been asked about how to implement a good design coordination process.   My response is have you ever thought of implementation of a new process from a CSI approach?   First let’s understand what the purpose and objective of a design and coordination process should be.   Ensuring that the goals and objectives are met by providing and maintaining a single point of coordination and control for all activities and processes within the design stage of the lifecycle.   If we approach this from a Continual Service Improvement perspective the first question to ask is: What’s the vision?    Come to an accord among key stakeholders about what it is you want to create and what the underpinning critical success factors should be in support of the defined goals and objectives of the organization.   Will they ultimately support the long term mission and vision of the business leadership? Where are we now? Set that baseline starting point about the current condition of where yo

Implementing the guidance provided by ITIL is very much like cooking. If you have ever cooked something using a recipe (even if it is the directions from the package) you know that although you can vary somewhat from the recipe or directions, you cannot change the recipe substantially and expect the stated results. When cooking cakes or sweets, if you add too many eggs or too little oil or too much sugar or leave out an ingredient, what will result will probably not be what you intended. Recipes (and package directions) are best practices just like ITIL. Package recipes especially have been formulated to achieve the optimal results each and every time you make the food. But we must follow the recipe to get the results. This is not to say you cannot adjust (or “adapt”) the recipe based on your own tastes or even serving suggestions from the package. Adjusting or adapting does not mean rewriting the recipe or completely ignoring the package directions because you do not agree or like

ITIL has always emphasized the need for clearly defined roles for Process Owners and Process Managers. ITIL also speaks to the role of Service Owner, an individual who is accountable for and represents the the end-to-end service.    Within each process, there may also be roles that are designed to carry out certain process activities. Successful service management dictates that specific individuals are assigned to specific roles with specific responsibilities for one or more processes.     But what about the rest of us?      Where do we fit into the service management program?   What role do we play?   ITIL defines a key role for anyone that executes any activity within any process – the Process Practitioner.         The Process Practitioner Carries out one or more process activities Understands how his or her role adds to value creation Works with other stakeholders to ensure contributions are effective Ensures inputs, outputs and interfaces for activities are c

In order to create a successful foundation for our implementations of ITSM and ITIL® we can take lessons from the study of languages. The foundation of the service management best practices is a language that needs to be understood, mastered and used, just like you would learn a foreign or native tongue. When learning a new language there are two basic approaches one can take. You can study the grammatical theory and structure or you can do immersion learning. Language experts tell us that both are necessary actually to master or become fluent in a language. Immersing yourself in a language (such as ITIL) provides a conversational or daily usage basis. Think of this as having insight as to “how” the language works. Studying the theory and structure of a language (such as ITIL) provides for an understanding and knowledge basis. Think of this as having insight as to “why” the language works. Without theory there would be no usage since you would be unable to form new sentences, only

Over my years of teaching and training I have found that some of what I once knew and learned has slipped away due to age (as it does to most of us!) and due to learning new pieces of data, information, knowledge and especially wisdom (D-I-K-W). So many years ago I began to put together a collection of D-I-K-W that I thought was excellent to keep but just could no longer store in my brain. I bought a sturdy, blank, lined journal to begin putting together what has become my “Wisdom Journal”. I began to collect techniques, approaches, bulleted lists, terminology, tables, tools, methods and anything else that I thought might be useful at some point in the future. I did not really seek out particular information I simply “collected” it as I came along it in my research, class preparation or reading. Examples of the D-I-K-W I collected included information on paradigms, requirements gathering, RACI, organizational change methods, business process re-engineering, reasoning (induction

Dr. Michael Hammer and his co-author James Champy wrote the groundbreaking work Re-Engineering the Corporation. Dr. Hammer has long championed the concepts of using processes to accomplish work outputs and outcomes. Dr. Hammer spoke of three categories of work (or process output). Because a service can be defined as "work done for others," we can equate the types of work described by Hammer with the categories of services described by ITIL. The three categories of work according to Hammer are: ·     Value-Add (ITIL Core services) : This type of work (or services) provides direct value in the form of utility and warranty to the customers and users. Customers pay directly for this work or services. This work generates the revenue of your organization. This is "why you exist" and "what you do" as a business. ·     Non Value-Add (ITIL Enabling and Enhancing services) : This type of work supports, underpins and enables your Value-Add work or Core Servic

I often get asked when discussing operational activities or event management about how we should monitor our environment.   There are several methods to accomplish this depending on what you’re monitoring, what resources you have available and the criticality of what you’re monitoring.   Defining these elements will then help you choose one or more of the following methods. Active monitoring: Ongoing device interrogation to determine its status. Resource intensive. Usually used proactively for critical devices or systems Passive monitoring: Transmits event to a listening device. Most commonly used method Requires good definition of events and instrumentation of systems being monitored. Reactive Monitoring: Requests or triggers action following an event or failure Used for exceptions and normal operations Can be used to diagnose which device is causing the failure and under what conditions. Proactive Monitoring: Used to detect event patterns that can indicate

The purpose of Business Relationship Management (BRM) is to establish and maintain a business relationship between the IT service provider (SP) and the customer.   This relationship needs to be based on an understanding of the customer and their business needs (what services the customer needs now and in the future).   BRM must also help to establish an understanding of the requirements (utility & warranty) a customer is going to expect and to insure the service providers ability to meet those expectations. The customer portfolio is a database used to record all customers of the IT service provider.   It is used by many processes but is defined and maintained in the business relation management process.   It provides insight into the customer and is developed from the point of view of the business relationship manger.   It allows the service provider to understand who the customers are and make the distinction between customers and users.   This enables the BRM to be able to

One of the lesser utilized yet powerful ideas in ITIL is the concept of systems or feedback loops. ITIL defines a system as A group of interacting, interrelated or interdependent components that form a unified whole, operating together for a common purpose. There are two types of systems: ·          Open-loop systems – value of outcome has no influence on input; performs a specific activity regardless of environmental conditions ·          Closed-loop systems – value of outcome influences input; responds to changes in the environment Using these concepts we can establish a powerful approach for managing and improving the ITIL processes we have implemented. One technique is called the Monitor-Control Loop. The loop consists of a set of steps that produces feedback to help improve individual process steps, the process as a whole, the stages of the lifecycle and the lifecycle as a whole. ·          Begin the loop by conducting an individual process step by taking inputs and

Both the Service Design Package (SDP) and the Service Catalog are produced in the service design stage of the service lifecycle and to some extent both drive the activities that happen in all subsequent stages of the service lifecycle.   The SDP will detail all aspects of a service and its requirements throughout the entire lifecycle.   A service design package is produced for all new services, major changes to an existing service or the removal of a retired service.    From a high level the service design package will contain the following: ·     Business requirements ·     Service applicability requirements (how/where used) ·     Service contracts ·     Service functional requirements ·     Service and operational management requirements ·     Service design and topology (including service definition and model ·     Organizational readiness assessment ·     Service Program (timescales and phasing of transition, operation and improvement of the new s