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

Pragmatic Application of Service Management

In this chapter, we will explore the nature of continual improvement. There are a variety of organizations and individuals that have described what continual improvement is and how to be successful in applying it to large strategic initiatives and incremental operational improvements. This discussion will look at the activities involved in continual improvement with the intent of explaining the reasoning and value of applying this approach to establishing and executing a service management initiative. It will help you understand the necessity of following a consistent and repeatable approach to initiating and sustaining a service management program.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:

  • Delving into the vision, mission, goals, and objectives
  • Understanding assessment and desired state
  • Exploring planning and execution
  • Comprehending measures and reports
  • Examining rinse and repeat, or do...