Chapter 25
Ten Service Management
Dos and Don’ts
In This Chapter
Balancing business objectives with service performance
Understanding business processes
Recognizing the importance of standards
Choosing the right starting point
This chapter carves out a few dos and don’ts. We want you to benefit from the mistakes of other people — including us.
Do Remember Business Objectives
If you want to deliver high-quality service, you need to satisfy your customers’ expectations. Sometimes, these expectations conflict with the policies and performance objectives of your business. Service management must find the right balance between optimizing performance/service delivery and meeting business objectives.
Service management needs to account for both customer satisfaction and business stakeholder requirements. You may spend too much money making customers very happy and lose money in the process, for example, so customer satisfaction needs to be balanced against costs to the company.
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Don’t Stop Optimizing after a Single Process
IT service management requires continuous process improvement. Although improving a single process may be satisfying, it won’t be enough. You have to look at the overall processes that make the business operate efficiently.
Do Remember Business Processes
You have to understand the processes for all things IT, from application management, system management, and performance management to service desk, network management, and database management. When you know how to optimize service delivery, you can take a proactive approach to service management, such as analyzing and documenting workflows, optimizing performance, and conforming to regulatory requirements.
Do Plan for Cultural Change
What is your corporate culture? How well do employees adapt to changes in everything from new technology to new processes? It’s common for employees to want to keep doing things the old-fashioned way. If you’re going to change the way your IT organization works, however, you have to change the way people think about their jobs.
Cultural change is an important part of creating a businesscentric approach to service management. Your IT team needs to work together in a new way if you want to move from fighting the latest fire to donning fire-retardant pajamas. The responsibilities and roles for your IT service providers probably will change; clarify expectations at the beginning of your change process. You should be able to redefine your service-level agreements and get better at responding to business priorities. If the members of your IT team measure their performance by the number of crises they solve, they need to redefine the way they look at their jobs.
Don’t Neglect Governance
IT governance is a combination of policy, process, controls, a stash of a consistent source of data about IT services, and the means to control those
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services — and it isn’t easy to achieve. You must balance your focus on the key performance indicators of the business with performance of all IT components. IT governance is successful only if you align it with overall corporate governance requirements. Think about how you’re going to get from where you are now to a well-coordinated approach that fits your corporate goals and objectives. This topic is an important one, so we refer you to Chapter 10 for more details on governance.
Do Keep Security in Mind
With all those services to manage, don’t lose sight of who gets access to what. Concern yourself with the security of data, hardware, software, and physical assets. The convergence of physical security with the security of IT systems (fingerprint identity and electronic passcodes) is becoming an important part of comprehensive service management. We provide a lot more details on security in Chapter 16.
Don’t Try to Manage Services without Standardization and Automation
You have a lot of smart people on your IT team. But if you have a lot of infrastructure components — and we expect that you do — no single person will know everything about all your servers or applications. The person who knows how to solve complicated service requests may leave the company someday. Improve standardization and automate processes to create a repeatable way to get the job done right.
Do Remember Industry Standards
and Best Practices
Don’t assume your requirements are so unique that you can’t benefit from looking at established standards and best practices. Following best practices that other companies have successfully implemented will help you implement your service strategy faster.
Education is a good first step for your business. Send your team members to become certified in Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) practices, which we cover in Chapter 5. Study best-practices models that
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have been designed for your industry. Chapters 4 and 5 provide a lot more information on standards and best practices, and Chapter 26 tells you where to find some great resources on these standards.
Do Start with a Visible Project
Make sure that your initial service management project is well defined and well confined. Go for the biggest bang for the buck. Initially, try something visible, such as a service catalog that documents information about IT services. Many organizations begin by implementing a service desk that helps focus on solving immediate problems. Prove your success with a project that’s achievable in a short time, with a significant effect on the business; then build incrementally.
Don’t Postpone Service Management
Service management is a journey, and the sooner you begin, the sooner you’ll get somewhere. Service management requires paying constant attention and balancing business priorities with available resources. A finely tuned and responsive IT service management approach drives business value.