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

Key definitions

There are many key definitions and best practices that you will need to be familiar with. We will look at each of these beyond the simple definition, defining why these terms are important to the best-practice guidance available and how they would be applied in the implementation of best practices.

One of the more important definitions in service management is the definition of value. Value is defined as the perceived benefits, usefulness, and importance of something. One of the key characteristics of value is the element of perception. As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so too is the value as perceived by the recipient of the product or service. The recipient of the product or service will want to determine, does this result satisfy my need, does it produce the result expected, and is the cost reasonable for the result achieved? A no to any of these questions and there will be concern that the value is not there. The need is characterized by the stated requirements...