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

Policies

Policies represent the governance being applied to the incident management process. A policy describes the rules and boundaries being applied to the process to ensure appropriate controls are in place. This ensures consistency and repeatability but also identifies the level of flexibility a practitioner has when executing the process, procedure, or work instruction. In some instances, a policy could be applied to more than one process, and in the case of policies within incident management, this is true. Some incident management policies include categorization, prioritization, impact, urgency, incident record content, and reporting. Each of these policies will be discussed in more detail with examples ahead.

Categorization

Categorization is one of those policies that will be used by other processes (i.e., change management, request management, or problem management). Categorization is very important to understand what service is failing, what configuration items make...