What is Service Management? 

IT Service Management is a life-cycle approach based on defined processes that is intended to ensure the IT Department is providing value to the business. The value comes from understanding what the business wants delivered and therefore by necessity, ITSM is about building relationships with the business to understand what they want to achieve. This process needs to be a partnership, it cannot be achieved by the business dictating what IT will do. So part of the process is to define what the services are (service catalogue) and what level of services to be provided. Whilst IT will manage the specific costs and risks, without such agreements the business could have the perception that high quality service is always available at no cost.  

Why use service management?

Service Management frameworks such as ITIL are seen by some as a fad. This in part is because they are often implemented by using a few process names like incident and problem management and then not much changes. A few years later another framework is adopted and the same cycle is repeated, nothing really changes.  

Service Management can not be escaped, all IT departments are by their nature service providers and the business their customer. The business doesn't see the world in terms of servers and applications but in terms of what is it they are provided. 

But you can't get away from providing a service, you can only pretend you don't have customers for so long before they come and remind you they expect service from you. Like it or not the world isn't all about servers and applications, you'll need to understand what your services are and the processes you use to deliver them. To deliver good service you'll need to have a good understanding of how those processes deliver value, you'll need to refine and improve them, and understand how they improve the service to the business. To understand that you'll need to measure what you're doing, but there is no point just measuring CPU cycles and then thinking you've cracked it, you need to understand how what you do enables the business to provide service better to it's customers.

Service and Process - services are what you provide to the business, they aren't just and application, or some hardware, they are the totality of the experience you provide including the help and support you provide for the service. You can get the technology right but still provide a poor service in the customers eyes, stay focused solely on the technology and you may not see that the customers has wait weeks for an answer when they report a fault. Refining process and procedures is how you add value over time, aligning what you do to what the business want

Benefits

Service management include

• Move from being reactive and firefighting to adding value through service delivery
• Less disruption to IT Services and therefore less to the business processes
• Improvement in cost effectiveness and efficiency
• Better management information and control
• Improved end-user satisfaction
• Documented processes and procedures that can be audited 

So How Can It Go Wrong

• Lack of ownership or definition, made one person or one teams job to change the world
• Unclear what priorities are, no initial benchmark to know understand maturity levels  
• Unclear what you want to achieve, don't know what benefits you want to have
• Lack of management commitment
• Lack of resources - people, tools, time or investment
• No acceptance by IT or business of need to change, accept how it is
• Not focused on end service, take an overly bureaucratic approach
  
• Assume processes take care of themselves, not reviewing or improving them  
• Have no SLA's or assume that having them will solve the problems of engagement with the business
• Assume focusing on technology and looking after machinery will be enough
• Thinking that giving the business shiny new toys like iPads will be enough

Avoid Common Mistakes

As you'd expect, a lot of people get into Information Technology because they either like developing code or like tinkering with computers. Surprisingly to some, the general population doesn't share this fascination with technology, but it is always handy to have a family member who knows how to fix the family computer or as is often the case these days, the ever expanding home network. At work the technology focused worked gets to play with code, computers and gadgets, gets paid well for the privilege and doesn't have to think about the wider world until one day they're considered so good at the technology bit they're promoted to the lofty rank of manager. 

Chance are they haven't had training in customers, people management and process improvement, and all too often they won't get offered that training either as the IT Department looks after the machinery after all. So along comes the business who don't aren't really much interested in servers and code, but want to get a job done more efficiently or ore effectively using technology. To the business the IT department should work just like that home network, you shouldn't have to worry about how it works, you just say jump when something goes wrong with it. Oh if you could get a dollar for every time you find out it is your home network if it fails, but you get no acknowledgement whatsoever when it runs flawlessly for months on end.

So the new IT Manager all too often thinks that good customer service is say yes to the customer and either create the new thing they want or repair the old thing when they say jump. The key to good customer service become saying yes, saying it enthusiastically and then trying to find a way to make it happen. As it become more complex in delivering, there may be some thought given to process, planning and service management, but all too often it is actually putting more work down a pipeline, throwing more resources to get to the deadlines that were promised. Good customer service becomes promising a lot and then trying heroically to deliver the promise by throwing more resources at it to deliver on the promise.. But the more promises you deliver on, the more requests the business throw at you, you try to fend them off with some shiny toys to play with, but eventually the weight of promise mean you can't deliver on the promises, so you are left with fudging it, non-delivery or huge expense to deliver the programme. It all seemed so easy, you only got into it because you loved technology. 

Then one day you hear about service management, and chances are you go on a foundation course and learn the names of some processes. You rally the team back at the office, we can change all this if we use the names of some processes I heard on my training course. So we get an incident manager, a problem manager and a change manager and announce we are "doing ITIL", we then tell the business that we're up with the modern thinking and go back to looking at what shiny toys we can find to placate the business for a little longer. But the business is no longer wowed by the shiny toys, in fact they expect them by now. They want their business transformed by the delivery of technology solutions, everyone is so hard to please Ok so it might not exactly go like that for everyone, but the IT department that adopts service management as a few jingo words to throw around but make no real change is all too common.

So What To Do

work out who your customers are

Determine what their services/business processes are

Determine how your services/processes and procedures deliver value

Agree with the business what services you will provide and at what cost.

Improve what you do, access maturity and  levels (independently) and decide where improvement focus needs to go.