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 applied to the SLM process. A policy describes the rules and boundaries applied to the process to ensure that the 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 with examples later in this chapter.

Service levels

Service levels are policies that describe the different levels of service that will be offered in your organization. These service offerings represent differing levels of service that a customer can agree to pay for and receive. Service levels to consider could be mission-critical, high availability, or standard. There are a number of examples of differing service levels in common services used by different people and organizations. For example, a car dealership may offer a premium level of service for an additional cost, such as offering...