This post is to do with putting together the Service Management Design & Strategy.

It follows on from the High Level 12 Point Service Management Checklist to transition, and the previous post as to how to set yourself up, discovery & due diligence or audit of the current state.

Planning can be time consuming, but you’re better off spending a bit of time at the beginning than a lot of time when you’re active and people are experiencing sub-par service because you weren’t prepared!

Here below is a list of questions to answer, which, if answered completely, will ensure that your Service Management Design and Strategy follows best practice.

1. What products or services need to be supported?
2. What are the critical components?
3. What does the new service and support model look like?
4. Are there additional staff required; what about rostering and after hours support?
5. Where is the first point of contact for your customers and what level of service will that first point of contact provide?
6. Is multi-channel support and self-service an option? What level of support will be available as self-service and at what point will a customer need to engage with a real person?
7. Who are the second level support teams and are they in-house or an external support agency?
8. Who are the partners? Are some to be dropped? Are new partners to be on-boarded? What is the scope of their roles and responsibilities?
9. What about monitoring, alerts and alarms, who’s responsibility is it to manage and maintain these?
10. What kind of reporting will be provided? Is there an executive dashboard to assist with report generation and does the final report make sense to the recipients?
11. Run a sanity check against the most recent service or customer transitioned through the project and ensure "lessons learned" is included in the report

Answering these questions should present you with a reasonable Service Management Map.

Done properly, this checklist and exercise should help you map very clearly, the roles and responsibilities, and the tasks per product or service mapped against each ITIL process.

Insight 1: Create a high level future state model, particularly if it is a significant departure from the current state.

Start with the end-user or customer, work your way down to the first point of contact, through to the internal and external second and third level support teams. This should cover incident management, and install, moves, adds, changes & deletes.

Work your way up again from those teams back to the end user customer for change management, release management, alerts & alarms.

Best to present this on a single page as an infographic.

Insight 2: Create the detailed matrix using ITIL processes as a base on one dimension, and the services to be delivered on the other dimension. 

Break the services into technical components, and for each technical component, for each ITIL process, assign a RACI.

Particularly useful for uncovering gaps, particularly useful in multi-sourced service models.

With this done, you are now set to move to the next stage...

Coming up: Commercials & Financials, Partners, Customers, People, Processes and Tools.

There are more than a few nuances as organisations undertake the journey to transformation, digital or otherwise. Service Management is a key component to success.

Sunit Prakash has had many successes in organisational transformation on a global and local scale.

More importantly he bears the battle scars from the many lessons learnt. Don’t be one of the walking wounded - or worse. Call him and head off some of the challenges before you even get to the pass.

Note: published 2nd Sept 2016 by the Institute of IT Professionals in their IITP Techblog