Gökhan Tuna
In our previous blogs we explained why IT needs an alternative for ITIL, and introduced a Best Practices for Service Management (BPSM) to help you simplify your processes and improve your services. Here, we’re explaining how to implement BPSM step by step.
1. Determine which services you can offer in a Service Catalogue
A service catalogue is your foundation for good service management. Because how can you improve your services if you and your users aren't exactly sure what they are? Yet, many organizations aren’t clear about the products and services they offer. The lack of clarity makes it harder to plan, prioritize and budget. It’s also confusing for your customer, since they have no clue what to expect.
Setting up a service catalogue grants more insight into the products and services you provide. And with service, we mean everything your customer needs to get his or her work done. Not just a laptop with an OS installed, but also all necessary applications and the information who to contact when they have question. This improves your department’s transparency and communication with the customer.
2. One process for supporting your standard services: Reactive Management
When your service catalogue is in place, the next thing you need is a process for all questions about the standard services you support. We call this Reactive Management. Its purpose is to provide the best and fastest possible service to customers. No more agonizing over process choices: does it really matter whether something is an incident or a request?
Instead of working with complex definitions, our Reactive Management process simply asks: what does the customer want? In BPSM, you appoint one process manager whose main concern is customer satisfaction. Every choice the process manager makes should be aimed at improving customer satisfaction.
3. One process for supporting your non-standard services: Relation Management
When you’ve defined your service catalogue, it won’t be long before you get questions about services you don’t support. For this, you set up a Relation Management process. The goal of relation management is to find out how you can help your customers best when they’re asking for a service that’s not in your service catalogue.
This process, too, is pretty straightforward. All you need to do is find out what the customer really wants – which is not always the same as what he asks for, mind you – and work out the best solution you can offer. And who knows, you may even get questions about things you’d like to introduce as new standard services. Which brings us to the next step…
4. Set up a process for changing you service catalogue: the Change process
As a result of customer requests or your own ideas for innovation, you’ll want to make changes to your service catalogue and remove, add or adjust some of your standard services. To make sure the implementation of a new or adapted service is done right, make sure you set up a change process for this and appoint a change manager.
This process concerns what ITIL would call ‘non-standard changes’. When you’re conducting a standard change, you’re simply delivering a service you provide. This best practice treats standard changes and incidents the same. With ‘change’, we mean a change in your service catalogue.
5. Follow-up: preventative management and implementing changes
When you’ve defined your service catalogue and set up processes for reactive management and relation management, you’ve laid the foundation for a well-functioning IT department that’s efficient and customer-friendly. Now it’s time for the proactive part: maintaining your services and carrying out improvements in your service catalogue.
Most organizations feel they don’t spend enough time on this, since they have enough trouble managing the reactive process. And that’s OK. It’s the most vital part of your services. However, by having your reactive processes in order you also free up time to work on improvements.
Want to know more about Best Practice Service Management?
Download our free e-book Best practice Service Management. In here we dive into the details of how you can organize your IT according to Best Practice Service Management.
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