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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about continual improvement and how this enables an organization to effectively understand what is needed to produce an effective service management capability. We covered analyzing and documenting the vision, mission, goals, and objectives of the organization so that you can align your program with what is important to the business. We then reviewed the current state to understand what is good to keep, what needs to be discarded, and what needs to change. After, we looked at the desired state and defined the differences between the desired and current state to establish what needs to change and what measurable targets will be set. Once we had defined the current and desired state, we identified the projects that would be initiated to achieve the desired state. We then took action to implement the improvements we’d identified. As these improvements progressed and results were produced, we measured those results against the targets to see...