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

BRM concept

Throughout this book, the words process, practice, and capability have been used, and largely interchangeably. A commonality across all three is the presence of activities—things that have to be done with a consistent approach and, in many cases, in a particular sequence. The same is true for BRM. When speaking of BRM, consider it from two perspectives: as a role and as a capability. With respect to a role, a person could be assigned to carry out related activities, whereas a capability, for instance, has more to do with how an organization uses the concept to further an organization’s strategy. It is not unusual to see BRM represented as a department (capability) with a number of BRMs (roles) assigned to different parts of the business. This chapter provides a fundamental understanding of the subject. As the many BRM pundits would support, there is an entire body of knowledge and associated publications, amounting to hundreds of pages, on this subject.

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