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

Defining design thinking in terms of service management

In previous chapters, we have discussed formal service management as being a specialized organizational capability (an internal consultancy, of sorts, on how best to provide products and services). Service management frameworks, though having some scientific aspects, are far more of an art form than a science, given that it is the people, the culture, and the governance that are all critical to the success of the service provider. Recall that any service management framework on its own is not enough, and not intended to be the only ingredient, to foster an optimized service management capability. It is the integration across multiple approaches that makes the difference – hence, the concept of design thinking.

For clarity, understanding the difference between design thinking and systems thinking (the subject of the next chapter) makes sense. Systems thinking, as a holistic approach, is used to analyze the relationship...