Agile Service Manager

What is an Agile Service Manager? The following is a definition from the University of California Santa Cruz for an IT Service Manager. “The Service Manager has overall accountability for defining the service, ensuring services meet the business need and are delivered in accordance with agreed business requirements and managing the service lifecycle – often in conjunction with a Service Team”. I also looked up some jobs offerings from around the globe that were described as Agile Service Management and took some pieces from them. Here are a couple of examples:

Has responsibility for defining and creating the global service, developing the reliability and performance of the services in line with the business requirements, and managing the overall service lifecycle within an agile environment. This includes stability, performance, capability, risk acceptance and analysis of the services.

Developing a deep understanding of what is important to the service, you will be prioritizing and driving improvements, key business initiatives and resolution of service related issues through established strong relationships with your key stakeholders and all the technical teams.

You see the similarities? The differences? Let’s start at the beginning and ask why all this talk about being Agile. In today’s IoT (Internet of Things) every business has become a technology business and every business decision triggers some type of IT event. Demand for innovation, reliability, automation and the capability to deliver these services and the underpinning technology quickly and on budget has become a critical success factor for all IT organizations today.

“Rapidly changing IT requirements require rapidly changing IT capabilities” (1)

Being Agile is not the incorporation of just one thing such as a framework like scrum into the way we manage the delivery of our services, but is the approach and perspective with which we can apply multiple frameworks, practices and principles always with the goal of increasing value to the business. “Agile Service Management ensures that ITSM processes reflect Agile values and are designed with “just enough” control and structure in order to effectively and efficiently deliver services that facilitate customer outcomes when and how they are needed.” (2)

An Agile Service Manager must ensure that:

Agile values and principles are embedded into the entire ITIL lifecycle
We improve ITSM’s entire ability to meet customer requirements faster
We are being Lean; not overly complex, both effective and efficient
We ensure scalability. Processes with “just enough” control and structure, ensuring the removal of constraints where capable and allowable.
We are communicative, always keeping an open eye and ear to the changing customer needs and requirements

How many of you already incorporate these items in what you do today? See, you're already on the journey to becoming Agile. Good Luck!

For a list of certification courses: www.itsmacademy.com/agile

For related webinars http://www.itsmacademy.com/webinar-archives/

(1,2) The Agile Service Management Guide

Four Service Characteristics

Recently I came across several articles by researchers and experts that laid out definitions and characteristics of services. ITIL provides us with a definition that can help drive the creation of value-laden services: A means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks. An area that ITIL is not so clear is in terms of service characteristics. Several researchers and experts put forth that services have four basic characteristics (IHIP): Intangibility—Services are the results of actions not things. They have no physical presence and represent a logical set of elements. One way to think of service is “work done for others.” Heterogeneity—Also known as “variability”; services are unique items because of the mechanisms used to deliver services, which is people. Because the people element adds variability, the service is variable. This holds true, especially for the value proposition—not eve...

What is the difference between Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner?

This article was originally published in 2015. With the Introduction of ITIL 4, some of the concepts have changed in ways that are described below. ITIL 4 has also introduced new roles, as explained in our blog ITIL 4 and the Evolving Role of Roles . Before we dive into the difference between these roles, let’s first look at a key update in ITIL 4 – the shift from processes to practices. ITIL 4 has evolved to focus on holistic practices vs. isolated processes. By definition, a practice is a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective. For example, the purpose of the incident management practice is to minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible. All organizations recognize the need to allocate resources to the management of incidents and mature their capabilities in that area. In ITIL 4, each practice includes resources based on the four ...

What Is A Service Offering?

The ITIL 4 Best Practice Guidance defines a “Service Offering” as a description of one or more services designed to address the needs of a target customer or group. As a service provider, we can’t stop there! We must know what the contracts of our service offering are and be able to put them into context as required by the customer. Let’s explore the three elements that comprise a Service Offering. A “Service Offering” may include: Goods, Access to Resources, and Service Actions 1. Goods – When we think of “Goods” within a service offering these are the items where ownership is transferred to the consumer and the consumer takes responsibility for the future use of these goods. Example of goods that are being provided in the offering – If this is a hotel service then toiletries or chocolates are yours to take with you. You the consumer own these and they are yours to take with you. ...

Search