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

Distinguishing between frameworks, methods, standards, and movements

In discussing the difference between frameworks, methods, standards, and movements, it is important to define each of them and also support those definitions with familiar examples. One of the related factors is the concept of systems thinking, where an IT service provider leverages a number of these based on their strategy and level of current maturity. The fact is that no one framework, standard, methodology, or even movement on its own would be enough to implement and maintain a thriving service management capability. The analogy would be that a favorite meal, or any meal, requires several ingredients to be part of the recipe. In keeping with the concept of systems thinking, a generally accepted definition of architecture is the interrelationship between systems (for example, business architecture, supported by IT service architecture, supported by application architecture, and so on) with systems simply defined...