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

Policies

Policies represent the governance being applied to the request management process. A policy describes the rules and boundaries being applied to the process to ensure appropriate controls are in place. This ensures consistency and repeatability but also identifies the level of flexibility a practitioner has when executing the process, procedure, or work instruction. Policies will be discussed in more detail alongside examples in the following subsections.

Generic service request

A policy for a generic service request should be developed to establish the agreed response to a service request that has not been received before and is not currently part of the request catalog. A template or request should be developed to show the information necessary to respond to the request and how the request will be handled, the timeline for responding to the request, and where the request will be directed. This policy will provide guidance and set expectations for the customer on how...