1. Service Transition & Planning Service Validation & Testing
Process Assessment
Process Scoring
1 Ineffective. Basics not in place. Major exposures.
2 Tasks defined; Weaknesses identified; plans in place for improvement.
3 Process conforms to requirements.
Competitive process. Moving towards improved effectiveness and efficiency; is adaptable to changing business requirements.
Superior performance. Effective, efficient and adaptable to changing business requirements.
Service Transition & Planning
Goals and Objectives
Plan and coordinate the resources to ensure that the requirements of Service Strategy encoded in Service Design are effectively realized in Service Operations
Identify, manage and control the risks of failure and disruption across transition activities.
Plan and coordinate the resources to establish successfully a new or changed service into production within the predicted cost, quality and time estimates
Ensure that all parties adopt the common framework of standard re-usable processes and supporting systems in order to improve the effectiveness and
efficiency of the integrated planning and coordination activities
Provide clear and comprehensive plans that enable the customer and business change projects to align their activities with the Service Transition plans.
Service Validation & Testing
Goals and Objectives
Assure that a service will provide value to customers and their business.
Provide confidence that a release will create a new or changed service or service offerings that deliver the expected outcomes and value for the customers within the projected costs, capacity and constraints
Validate that a service is ‘fit for purpose’ – it will deliver the required performance with desired constraints removed
Assure a service is ‘fit for use’ – it meets certain specifications under the specified terms and conditions of use
Confirm that the customer and stakeholder requirements for the new or changed service are correctly defined and remedy any errors or variances early in the service lifecycle as this is considerably cheaper than fixing errors in production.
Evaluation
Goals and Objectives
Set stakeholder expectations correctly and provide effective and accurate information to Change Management to make sure changes that adversely affect service capability and introduce risk are not transitioned unchecked
Evaluate the intended effects of a service change and as much of the unintended effects as is reasonably practical given capacity, resource and organizational Constraints
Provide good quality outputs from the evaluation process so that Change Management can expedite an effective decision about whether a service change is to be approved or not.
Over…

2. Availability Management Configuration Management
Incident Management
Goals and Objectives
To record, classify, diagnose and resolve incidents as quickly as possible
To ensure all necessary data required for incident resolution is gathered at the time the call is received.
To log all incidents in a central repository where the information can be shared with other processes
To provide the client with work-arounds that will enable business operations to continue
To escalate incidents to higher levels of support as required
To route incidents of unknown cause to the Problem Management process
To keep clients informed on the Status of their Incidents
To monitor open incidents to ensure that appropriate actions are being taken to resolve
To close Incidents upon confirmation of the resolution from the client
Problem Management
Goals and Objectives
To identify all problems within the central, distributed and network environments.
To quickly resolve or circumvent all problems once identified
To log all problems in a central repository where the information can be shared with other processes
To ensure all necessary data required for problem resolution is gathered at the time the problem is reported.
To assign problems to the correct group and track status through to closure.
To identify root causes of problems
To keep all parties informed of problem status.
To identify trends and report information to management.
To provide general reporting capabilities against the repository of problem data
Change Management
Goals and Objectives
To ensure successful implementation of changes with minimal disruption to the business through:
A standardized approach to identifying and documenting all changes
The logging of all changes in a centralized repository where the information can be shared by other processes
The assessment of all changes based on their potential impact on the business
The scheduling of all changes based on the requirements of the business, the availability of appropriate resources and in consideration of other changes being deployed
Ensuring that all changes are appropriately tested and certified and that the appropriate implementation and roll back plans are available
The communication of plans and schedules as well as the status of all changes throughout the IT organization
Release Management
Goals and Objectives
To enable customers to make business plans based on a published Release schedule
To reduce business disruptions caused by individual change implementations - by combining these into Releases
To improve consistency in the deployment of Releases
To ensure consistency across hardware platforms and software environments
To provide a complete audit trail of all Releases
To provide the ability to build & control software used at remote sites
To reduce the likelihood of wrong, illegal or unauthorized copies of software in use at any location within the organization
Capacity Management
Goals and Objectives
To ensure that the necessary resources are available to support both the current and future demands of the business units (the development of the Capacity Plan)
To monitor and tune existing systems to ensure service levels are being met and that IT resources are being utilized efficiently (performance and capacity)
To periodically research and assess new technology that may address future capacity, performance and availability requirements
To be responsive to short-term / cyclic demands requiring immediate deployment or reallocation of resources
To maintain capacity data repositories and produce reports as required by the process and other Systems Management disciplines
Availability Management
To translate business requirements into availability requirements
To develop and publish agreed targets of availability, reliability and maintainability for the IT Infrastructure
Engineering for availability (based on business requirements)
To monitor and report on availability obtainment
The development and execution of availability plans
Configuration Management
To create standard configurations based on business requirements
Mainframe , server, router, desktop, …
To document individual configurations and show the inter-relationships
Network diagrams, hardware configurations, software component listings, …
To monitor / enforce adherence to standard configurations
To update a common configuration repository via automated interfaces with other processes (Change Management, Problem Management, Release Management, etc.)
To provide configuration information to other processes
To provide general reporting and online query capabilities
Service Level Management
To maintain and improve IT service quality, through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring and reporting upon IT service achievements
To instigate actions to eradicate poor service that are in line with business or cost justification – a Service Improvement Program (SIP)
To develop and maintain a Service Catalogue detailing the ownership and nature of all services (and levels of service) that the organization is willing and able to offer to its customers
To define the Operating Level Agreements (OLA’s) and Underpinning Contracts (UC’s) to support all Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) with customers