IT Service Management Starts with?

According to Mark Schouls, the three processes that IT Service Management starts with are Change Management, Configuration Management and Release Management.

Release Management – Proper release management, which defines the process of building and releasing software, results in a greater success rate in the provisioning of software and hardware to the business, and perhaps more importantly, results in a perceived improvement in the quality of service. Bringing consistency and documented processes to software and hardware releases minimizes downtime, reduces support costs, improves resource utilization and increases confidence across all levels of management.

Configuration Management – Enacting configuration management processes gives organizations a single view of all corporate assets, including their dependencies and interrelationships. Having one federated repository as a point of reference ensures accuracy and eliminates time-consuming duplication of efforts.

Change Management – Codifying change management practices helps organizations better align IT services to business requirements. With rigid processes in place, they eliminate rogue changes, thereby reducing risk and improving user productivity. To undertake change management initiatives, businesses must first accurately assess risk, understand the impact due to any change, analyze resource requirements and make adjustments to align resources as required. At that point they can enact a formal method for approving changes.

Read more of this article on ITSMwatch here.

I would also put Incident Management in this list. IT has to exist in the organization in some form or the other right from the start. Incident Management is one of the key bridges between the IT and its users. It gives a first hand information about the issues which are being faced by the users and would be a key driver for a lot of changes that would be done to restore services.

DITY – Selling ITIL to the top

Hank Marquis in this edition of the DITY newsletter writes about some points to follow while planning to sell ITIL to the top management of an organization. Here are the points

Identify your unique business or mission drivers

Determine ownership

Identify audit and control requirements

Identify stakeholder relationships

Create a stakeholder map

Translate

Repeat

For more read the online version of the newsletter here, or download it here.

Balanced Scorecards and Metrics for Service Support

In this article by Rob England he provides a point of view on the some not so desirable metrics for Service Desk and an approach towards a Balanced Scorecard. What I really admire about Rob’s approach is his different point of view on the usual norms and the way he would force you to validate your thinking and provide a different point of view.

In this article he has written about too much focus on Abandoned Calls undesirable. While it might be ok for an in-house service desk to not give too much focus on Abandoned Call Rate, more often than not SLAs which are written between third party/external service providers and customers have Abandoned Call Rate as an important statistic. This is something that is an indicator of the service to customers and drives customer satisfaction. Rob mentions that too much focus on ACR might force Service Desk agents to finish the calls in a rush, and a similar situation would occur with focus on AHT (Average Handle Time) for calls. I personally feel that these two metrics are an important indicator of the Service Desk quality and need to be measured. Some of the actions which need to be taken with these numbers going up could be

1. Identify a trend in Call Abandon Rate and staff Service Desk agents to handle those volumes (most call centers do that)

2. Identify agents which high AHT and identify reasons for high AHT. This might trigger a need for some training to be imparted to those agents

In my opinion, its not possible to reach a conclusion on these metrics unless a deeper analysis is done on them and over time a consistent performance should take these down the priority list.