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

Customers don’t really care (and shouldn’t care) about the widgets behind the curtain (the supporting services) from the service provider. They care about what they need to interact with (customer-facing products and services) in order to create the business outcomes they seek. As part of systems thinking, the IT service provider integrates point solutions (much like the different stations in the kitchen of a restaurant coming together to produce a meal), so this is how products and services happen! Customer-facing products and services need to continue to evolve (or transform) in order for value to continue to be in place and for outcomes to be realized.

Whether the overall organization is in run mode, grow mode, or transformation mode, the IT service provider should always be in transformation mode. This is a key responsibility for formal service management. This presumes that the IT service provider wants to be perceived as a business partner and not just...