Generally, when we think of “relationships,” we immediately think of the people aspect. In ITSM, we are referring to the relationships between third-party vendors, suppliers, customers, and many other stakeholders necessary to deliver the optimum service. It is mandatory to manage those relationships at the appropriate level. One way to understand the “organization and people” involved in those relationships is to understand the constructs of a “Service Relationship.” ITIL provides us this model. Starting from the bottom of the diagram and moving up, let's discuss the critical elements of a Service Relationship: Resources – All resources including people, process, and technology. In ITIL terms, that includes resources from all Four Dimensions: People and Organizations Information and Technology Partners and Suppliers Value Strea

When we think about what services we are going to offer we immediately think of the Service Catalog.  We must also consider what agreements go along with the delivery of those services.  What levels of utility and warranty are going to be expected over the life of our services?   What about services that will be supplied by external service providers; who is going to manage those?  Let’s take a look at which ITSM processes we will need to engage to ensure that we are able to strategize, design, deliver and maintain services that will meet our customers’ needs over the lifetime of the services. In Service Offerings and Agreements (SOA), we look at Service Portfolio Management (SPM), Financial Management (FM), Demand Management (DM) and Business Relationship Management (BRM).  These are all processes within the Strategy stage of the Lifecycle.  We also explore Service Catalog Management (SCM), Service Level Management (SLM) and Supplier Management (SM) processes within the Design st

Service Portfolio Management (SPM) is a process that is defined by ITIL best practices in the Service Strategy Lifecycle Stage.  The initiation of activities for Service Portfolio Management is often a result of changes to strategic plans or the identification of a service improvement plan and are triggered by a proposal that must have executive approval to proceed.   For existing services, Service Portfolio Management considers investments that have already been made along with new investments required.  The combined may result in the service being too expensive for what the business will achieve.  Investment decisions will need to be made.  There are many possible procedures and workflows to fulfill all the details of this process but overall the activities can be clearly understood with four high level process activities. Define – In this stage of the process SPM must document and understand existing and new services.  Every proposal for a new or changed service must be accompa

Every business has become a technology business.  Let that one sink in for a moment.  With the internet of things ever increasing it has become ever more imperative for us to make wise decisions about how to move forward on which IT services we should be delivering into the future (pipeline), how long we should continue to deliver our current (catalog) and when should we retire them (retire).  We literally could be an app away from becoming irrelevant. It is no longer enough to satisfy our customers, we must now delight and excite them.  They have to be able to enjoy the experience of how they receive these services along with the knowledge and comfort that the service provider of choice can continue without interruption to deliver this level of performance and functionality and even deliver new capabilities swiftly and often. By engaging in DevOps principles & practices (Scrum and Agile) at the strategic level we can begin to prioritize new and changing customer require

As most of us are already aware, the business of IT has become even more critical in ensuring the overall success of an organization.  In today’s fast pace and fluid environments the statement that “every business decision triggers and IT event” is becoming increasingly true for those of us who operate in the world of ITSM. One of the most valuable tools that we can employ is our service catalog.  In a mature ITIL organization we can have two views of this catalog. The first being the Business/Customer catalog where we connect our customers/users to the standard IT services that we offer, deliver and support.  The second view is the Technical/Supporting service catalog, which when appropriately maintained is a very powerful tool that allows us to relate IT services to our supporting services and the underlying supporting infrastructure.  It is this second view that we will review here. Our service catalog provides us with a central source of information on all of the IT servi

What is the difference between a Business Service Catalog and a Request Fulfillment Catalog?  One clear way to distinguish the type of service catalog that is required is to ask yourself, who is your audience?  I have found that when a lot of IT organizations say that they have a Service Catalog many are talking about a service catalog for end users.  Another very important service catalog is one that is mapped to your business customer needs.  In this blog I will briefly discuss some characteristics of service catalogs for these very distinct audiences and for the purpose of clarity I will refer to them as Request Fulfillment and Business Service Catalog. Request Fulfillment Service Catalog Service providers today are striving to automate the first line support for user request fulfillment by providing self-help and also more importantly self-serve end user request fulfillment catalogs.  This self-serve catalog is the most common and allows users to fulfill requests directly fro

About two years ago I wrote a blog on the four “Ps” of Service Strategy.  Today we going to expand on Perspective, the 1 st of the four “Ps” of Service Strategy.   Perspective is the vision and direction for the services you will provide, and is realized through conversations with your stakeholders.  A well-defined vision and mission statement allows a common goal to be pursued by both the business and IT. This enhances the organizations ability to focus on the customer perspective and the business outcomes that the customer desires, and to implement a continual service improvement approach so that you are regularly enhancing and differentiating the services you provide. In this way the business stays relevant to the changing business environment. The perspective describes what the organization is, what it does, who it does it for, how it works and enables this to be communicated easily to both internal and external stakeholders.  It defines the overall direction for the organiza