IT Service Process Management - ITSPM
IT Service Process Management Framework
IT Service Process Management is a cross-functional discipline for managing an IT service throughout all phases of its lifecycle. These phases consist of strategy & planning, design, transition, operate, improve and retirement. Service Product Management requires a comprehensive understanding of the key organizational, business, customer and market aspects. To govern and manage IT service through their lifecycles, ITSPM uses a series of toll-gates. A proper implementation of a framework as described in this whitepaper including the corresponding roles, processes and boards is crucial to evolve your ITD to as a business model.
Introduction
In order to achieve service orientation and centricity, the IT Service and Product Management (ITSPM) capability has been identified by experience as one of the areas with an immediate need for its target state to be defined and implemented.
The ITSPM process framework contains a complete set of processes that together deliver the ITSPM capability end to end across the Service Lifecycle. It includes supporting elements such as performance metrics, governance, tooling requirements and accountabilities and responsibilities as well as a view of the interactions with the line of businesses required to enable ITSPM to deliver its end to end customer outcomes.
ITSPM Value
Service orientation will achieve a number of key strategic goals:
- From an internal perspective, service orientation will improve service and cost transparency and enable collaborative, entrepreneurial decision taking within IT.
- From a customer perspective, service orientation will increase value add and customer satisfaction of the services being consumed from IT.
How ITSPM delivers value
The purpose of the ITSPM capability is to run IT Services like a business, ensuring that services offered deliver the expected customer outcomes. ITSPM manages service outcomes, not the people delivering services.
From a customer’s perspective, this translates into:
- The portfolio of IT services available provides the complete set of capabilities required by the business.
- The IT services are easy to find, understand and consume.
- The quality and price of the services is as agreed and represents value for money.
In addition to the processes, ITSPM relies on a series of service development tollgates to control the service moving through its lifecycle stages.
For a successful outcome, a set of enablers need to be in place with ITSPM:
| Governance | Metrics | Tooling |
| A well-defined governance framework is required to oversee and provide support to the ITSPM capability. A set of key governance forums has been identified for ITSPM as part of this project. | A selection of performance metrics have been chosen to capture the degree to which the processes are embedded and /or the achievement of outcomes by these processes. | Tooling is required in order to execute the defined ITSPM processes in an effective manner. Key sets of tooling requirements have been identified for each process as part of this project. |
The ITSPM process overview
Key roles within ITSPM
The IT Service Manager and IT Service/Product Manager are the key roles responsible for end-to-end management of IT services.
| IT Service Portfolio Manager | IT Service Product Manager |
| The Service Portfolio Manager takes ownership and responsibility for a service portfolio, including its design, objectives and progression, delivery and service level management for customers. | The Service / Product Manager takes ownership and responsibility for one or more services or service components including design, objectives and progression, delivery and service level management for customers. |
ITSPM process definitions
| L2 Process | Definition | Description |
| Service Strategy Definition | The process of agreeing, documenting and updating the strategy for individual services and for the overall portfolio in line with the Business and its divisional strategies. | The service strategy document addresses the question of “Why this service” and provides an early indication of “when the service will be available” by aligning the service to the business needs so that the service’s contribution to the business objectives is understood. The service strategy elevates the role of IT services from the domain of operational management to the domain of strategic business outcomes. |
| Service Roadmap Definition | The process of documenting the service’s capabilities to be delivered against a delivery strategy, timeline and cost. | Roadmaps provide stakeholders with a lifecycle view of the service, which brings context to decisions around investment, costing and consumption. |
| Service Development Management | The process of overseeing and managing the design, build, test and transition of a service into operations from a service perspective. | Having service focused input into the project ensures that the integrity of the service strategy. The outcomes set out within it are achieved by the project/s that will bring the service to live. This in turn enables the achievement of customer outcomes. Note: this definition applies to Services. For Products, refer to the Software Development Lifecycle (out of scope). |
| Service Lifecycle Management | The process of proactively managing a service’s lifecycle stages, influencing consumption of services. | Proactively managing a service throughout its lifecycle is critical to ensure the service fits the customers’ needs and that customers are timely and successfully transitioned to the services that deliver the best outcomes for the customer (such as better performance or reduced cost). |
| Service Financial Management | The process of managing the service’s total cost of ownership (TCO), charging model and recoverability position. | Effective service financial management brings the cost conversation to the aggregate service level, which is what the customer understands. This enables decisions on IT investment and cost to be had in terms of consumption and cost vs quality trade-offs. Transparent costing enables the IT organization to benchmark against industry to seek improvements in value for the business. |
| Service Catalog Management | The process of managing a customer-centric single source of consistent information on all of the live services (operational and being prepared for release into operations), providing information such as costs and interdependencies across services. | The service catalog provides the business-facing view of the portfolio of IT services that IT provides, including their cost and value to stakeholders, in order to set the expectations for the service quality that is to be delivered by IT. This way, the service catalog is the place where the required/enabling technologies and services are mapped together to provide "complete IT services." |
| Service Performance Management | The process of reviewing all aspects of the performance of a service (include financials and service levels) against the strategy outcomes as well as the industry on a regular basis to identify opportunities for improvement. | This allows ITSPM to identify when improvements or changes to a service need to be made in order to ensure that they meet the customers’ needs. Without this a service may become out of date or irrelevant to the needs of the business, resulting in the IT service offerings not being fit for purpose and decreasing the business’ trust in IT. |
| Vendor Product Management | The process responsible for overseeing and influencing the identification and selection of a vendor product that is part of a service and managing the performance of the vendor from a service perspective. | Ensuring that the selection of a particular vendor-offered product fully reflects the service requirements defined by the service strategy is key to increase the chances of the service delivering the value-add promised to customers. |
| Continuous Service Improvement | The process describing the end to end improvement cycle from setting strategically aligned improvement objectives to implementing and tracking improvement initiatives for each service and for the portfolio of services as a whole. | TA methodical process to implement continuous service improvement will result in increased customer satisfaction and the perceived value of IT by the business. IT’s use of innovation to continually improve the service will ensure that the business continues to consume a service that is relevant to their needs and in the context of the industry environment. |
| Service Continuity Management | The process of supporting the Business Continuity Management process by ensuring that the required IT services can be resumed, reducing the risk from disaster events to an acceptable level and planning for the recovery of IT services. | Continuity of operations is vital to maintain business confidence in IT. By addressing BCM from a service perspective across the entire service supply chain (with sufficient planning, co-ordination and testing) any potential negative impacts to the customer are minimized. |
Using ITSPM Tollgates to Govern the Service Lifecycle
ITSPM toll-gates description
