ITIL Life Cycle – SERVICE STRATEGY

During Service Strategy, the relationships between the business customer and application support team are identified and defined.  The IT Organization must become familiar with the business needs and goals in order to develop an understanding of how the application support team can achieve the required objectives while minimizing risk of service disruption.

In the Service Strategy phase, the Service Package is produced and is used to define the services and environment that will be managed by the application support team.  The service package also documents the service level expectations for the team as well as the financial plan that is the budget funding the team’s activity. Continue reading “ITIL Life Cycle – SERVICE STRATEGY” »

ITIL Life Cycle – SERVICE DESIGN

In the Service Design phase, new or changed services that are aligned with the business goals (defined in Service Strategy) are designed and developed for introduction into the production environment.  The processes that govern the management and delivery of services are also developed in this Life cycle phase.

This phase starts with a set of new or changed business requirements and ends with the development of a service solution designed to meet the needs of the business.

SERVICE DESIGN VALUE

Service Design ensures that service organizations can deliver quality, cost-effective services and meet all of the business’ requirements for the planned services.  It also provides the following benefits:

• Improved consistency of service
• Easier implementation of new or changed services
• Improved service alignment with business needs
• Improved IT governance
• Improved quality of service [i]

ITIL Life Cycle – SERVICE TRANSITION

Service Transition is the phase where new or changed services are “transitioned” into Service Operations. During Service Transition it is important to control the risks of service failure and business disruption.  Activities performed within this phase include:

• Planning and managing the capacity and resources needed to package, build, test, and deploy a release into production
• Evaluating the service capability and risk profile prior to release
• Creating repeatable software installation mechanisms that can be used to deploy releases into test and production environments
• Ensuring that services can be managed, operated and supported in accordance with requirements established in Service Design

SERVICE TRANSITION VALUE

Effective Service Transition adds value to the business by:

• Ensuring that all changes comply with business and governance requirements
• Using contingency plans to manage the level of risk during and after the service implementation (for example, service outage, service disruption)
• Improving the consistency and quality of the implementation process for new or changed services [i]

ITIL Life Cycle – SERVICE OPERATION

Service Operation is where the value of the services being provided is first realized by the customer.  During Service Operation, the day-to-day operation of the processes that manage the services takes place.  It is also where performance metrics for the services are gathered and reported.

Service Operation is where these plans, designs, and optimizations are executed and measured.  From a customer viewpoint, Service Operation is where actual value is seen.

The Service Operation phase provides the environment for:

• The maintenance and stability of Service Operations while allowing for changes in design, scale, scope, and service levels
• Decision making in areas such as managing the availability of services, controlling demand, optimizing capacity utilization, scheduling operations, implementing changes, providing technical support to the users, and fixing problems. [i]

SERVICE OPERATION VALUE

Each stage in the ITIL Service Lifecycle builds value for the business and culminates in Service Operations.  For example:

• In Service Strategy, the service is modeled
• In Service Design and Service Transition, the service is designed and developed, and the cost is predicted and validated
• In Continual Service Improvement, the measures for optimization are identified

ITIL Life Cycle – CONTINUAL SERVICE IMPROVEMENT

During the Continual Service Improvement phase (CSI), IT services are continually aligning to the changing needs of the business.  CSI identifies and implements improvements to IT services that support business processes.  These improvement activities support the Lifecycle approach through Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, and Service Operation.  In effect, CSI is about looking for ways to improve process efficiency and cost effectiveness throughout the entire service Lifecycle.

CONTINUAL SERVICE IMPROVEMENT VALUE

With Continual Service Improvement, organizations can identify and implement improvements to IT services and realize many benefits, including:

• Better information about current services (and possibly about areas where change would bring increased benefits)
• Improved service reliability, stability, and availability
• Improved resource allocation and utilization
• Improved metrics and management reporting
• Clearer view of current and future IT service capability
• Better working relationships between customers and IT organization
• Enhanced customer satisfaction [i]