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

Understanding assessment and desired state

Once you understand the vision, mission, goals, and objectives, you must determine the current state of the area you are targeting.

It is important to get a clear understanding of the current state of the service management initiative. Here, you are attempting to determine where the organization is, relative to the defined objectives for the initiative, what in the current state is good, and what potentially needs to be changed to achieve the objectives. These objectives represent the desired state that the organization wants to achieve. Once the current state has been established, you need to document a baseline. This baseline can then be used to demonstrate that progress has been achieved by comparing the results being produced to the baseline current state.

There are a variety of methods for performing a current state assessment. Some of these include the following:

  • SWOT analysis
  • Benchmarking
  • Maturity assessments
  • ...