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

Metrics and measures

When it comes to the assessment of the success or failure of a service management program, identifying, capturing, and analyzing the metrics and measures is an essential element of the overall program. Each process included in the program will need to be measured to identify how effective it is being executed according to the objectives and policies that were defined as part of the strategy. There are a variety of resources to identify metrics and measures that can be leveraged to determine the performance of a process, service, or resource. As your organization matures, additional or alternate measures may be considered to better align with the business outcomes.

It is important to review your current metrics to assess how effective they are in driving behavior. Remember the old adage: what gets measured gets managed. This suggests that measures influence the behavior of practitioners and can potentially drive the wrong behavior. For example, if service desk...