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 activities

Service asset management activities involve maintaining a record of all IT assets in use and their financial information. These activities will identify the assets, manage the life cycle of the assets, and ensure that when their useful life has expired, they will be disposed of appropriately and sustainably.

Identifying IT assets

Identifying IT assets occurs when a service request or request for change is initiated to acquire a new IT asset, move or change the IT asset, or retire and dispose of an IT asset. The CFO or IT governance team will have identified what constitutes an IT asset as part of the service asset policy described earlier. When an IT asset is identified, the IT asset manager will capture the appropriate information about the IT asset and record the information in the IT asset database. The information that’s recorded is described in the policies for the IT asset record, depending on whether it is a hardware or software asset. Once the...