Monday, May 26, 2008
About Service Design
When you read the service design book, there are two major things to consider. The first relates to the processes involved in this phase of the lifecycle. The second relates to designing services. The two are entertwined of course but the proceses are also invloved in the ongoing management of services.
What is meant by designing a service? For one it means that when we look at a brand new service or mofification to an existing service we must look at five major aspects. They are:
■ Service solutions, including all of the functional requirements, resources and capabilities needed and agreed
■ Service Management systems and tools, especially the Service Portfolio for the management and control of services through their lifecycle
■ Technology architectures and management architectures and tools required to provide the services
■ Processes needed to design, transition, operate and improve the services
■ Measurement systems, methods and metrics for the services, the architectures and their constituent components and the processes.
(See Service Design book section 3.2 Design Aspects page 30)
An other aspect of designing services applies to the servies that your organization already offer; you need to reverse engineer them. By this I mean that you need to apply the concepts of service design to what you already do. In previous entries in this blog, I have provided explanation about the resources an capabilities, the utilitiy and warranty of a service ans the types of services.
It is not an easy exercise to do but it should be done and will be very useful to not only design your service catalog but change the culture of the organization to be more service centric as opposed to technology centric.
The processes from all five phases of the lifecycle are necessary to properly design services. But we don’t have all rpocesses in place you may say. I would challenge this. All organizations perform the activities of all processes in some way, shape or form. They simply are not done the way ITIL proposes or recognizable as such or have a different name or are part of a procedure instead of a process. The opportunity and the time and the resources to develop or redesign the processes “à la ITIL” will present themselves later.
There is a lot of talk about assessments and implementing ITIL-based processes. Start by reading up on the various processes and map the activities to the functional groups that you have. I know this is not the the perfect way of doing things but it is a start. Get the proverbial ball rolling, do something. Once you have the processes identified, see if any needs immediate attention.
Then look at the service you already ofer. For this talk to the business and ask them to identify the services they belive they are receiving from IT. Then ask IT what they think they are providing as services.
That’s a start. It is not the whole story. It will not be easy. But you need to start eventually so it might as well be noow (or as soon as humanly possible based on your resources and needs.
Stay tuned.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Manager Bridge Course In Malaysia
This week I am delivering a Manager Bridge course in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In the group we have people from Malaysia (of course), Australia, India, Thailand and Indonesia. Let me tell you that they were ecstatic to hear the exam is multiple choice.
It is great to see that there is a lot of interest about V3 and the Manager Bridge certification. It is also good to hear that other training organizations are delivering this course and the Foundation course in the area and all over Asia actually.
The only troubling thing I find is that there are rumors that the exam for the Manager Bridge is unbelievably difficult and the pass rate is dismal. The truth is otherwise. Yes the exam is difficult; it’s not supposed to be easy. I should know; I did it twice (and passed both times). It made me think and no I did not get perfect scores. As I am a senior examiner with APMG I can not tell you the pass rate at this time (non-disclosure agreement obliges) but I can tell you that we were informed that the pass rate is very satisfactory.
APMG and the examining institutes will eventually publish pass rates but for now, please ignore the rumors.
until next time