Book Image

A Practical Guide to Service Management

By : Keith D. Sutherland, Lawrence J. "Butch" Sheets
4 (1)
Book Image

A Practical Guide to Service Management

4 (1)
By: Keith D. Sutherland, Lawrence J. "Butch" Sheets

Overview of this book

Many organizations struggle to find practical guidance that can help them to not only understand but also apply service management best practices. Packed with expert guidance and comprehensive coverage of the essential frameworks, methods, and techniques, this book will enable you to elevate your organization’s service management capability. You’ll start by exploring the fundamentals of service management and the role of a service provider. As you progress, you’ll get to grips with the different service management frameworks used by IT and enterprises. You'll use system thinking and design thinking approaches to learn to design, implement, and optimize services catering to diverse customer needs. This book will familiarize you with the essential process capabilities required for an efficient service management practice, followed by the elements key to its practical implementation, customized to the organization’s business needs in a sustainable and repeatable manner. You’ll also discover the critical success factors that will enhance your organization’s ability to successfully implement and sustain a service management practice. By the end of this handy guide, you’ll have a solid grasp of service management concepts, making this a valuable resource for on-the-job reference.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Importance of Service Management
6
Part 2: Essential Process Capabilities for Effective Service Management
18
Part 3: How to Apply a Pragmatic, Customized Service Management Capability
Appendix B: SLR Template

Process inputs and outputs

Releases are created when the policy dictates combining one or more changes/releases into a release for deployment into the production environment. The following list identifies many of the inputs for release and deployment management, but it is not all-inclusive:

  • Authorized change requests to be included in a release
  • Plans for developing, building, testing, deploying, and implementing a release
  • Configuration information about the target environments
  • Back-out plans and remediation information
  • Configuration baselines
  • Testing information and evaluation results
  • Training and communication plans

The following is a list of release and deployment outputs:

  • Approval or rejection of the release
  • New or updated CIs, services, and information
  • Results from the post-implementation review(s) of the change
  • Training and communication
  • Schedule for releases
  • Authorizations for release and deployment plans
  • ...