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

Accelerators for service management

There are some key factors to consider when initiating a service management capability and making it happen quickly; generating results that matter is very important. Some techniques can help accelerate the achievement of benefits, including, but certainly not limited to, Lean, Agile, and DevOps. In this section, you will get some exposure on what these techniques do to help move your service management efforts forward.

In our experience, one of the most important factors to consider when initiating or improving your service management capability is understanding your current state and what can be leveraged to make improvements. What is it that you are doing today that works well? How can you make incremental improvements to the things you are already doing to generate benefits? If you can identify some quick wins, this will help you achieve improvements that show value and benefit for the service management effort and generate momentum for making...