Continual Improvement
● The purpose of the continual improvement practice is to align the organization's practices ang services with changing business needs through the ongoing identification and improvement of services, service components, practices or any element involved in the efficient and effective management of products and services.
● What is Practice?
o A practice is a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective.
o Each practice:
▪ Supports multiple service value chain activities
▪ Includes resources based on the four dimensions of service management
Categories
- General management practices
- Service management practices
- Technical management practices
General Management Practices
● General Management Practices
o General management practices have been adopted/adapted for service management from general business management domains.
o There are 15 General Management Practices:
▪ ** Continual Improvement
▪ * Information Security Management
▪ * Relationship Management
▪ * Supplier Management
▪ Architecture Management
▪ Knowledge Management
▪ Measure and Reporting
▪ Portfolio Management
▪ Organizational Change Management
▪ Project Management
▪ Risk Management
▪ Service Financial Management
▪ Strategy Management
▪ Workforce and Talent Management
o Practices with (**) must be known in-depth for the exam
o Practices with (*) are recall only
o Practices without a (**) or (*) are not covered by the exam
● ** Continual Improvement
o The purpose of the continual improvement practice is to align the organization's practices ang services with changing business needs through the ongoing identification and improvement of services, service components, practices or any element involved in the efficient and effective management of products and services.
o Key activities:
▪ Encouraging continual improvement across the organization
▪ Securing time and budget for continual improvement
▪ Identifying and logging improvement opportunities
▪ Assessing and prioritizing improvement opportunities
▪ Making business cases for improvement action
▪ Planning and implementing improvements
▪ Measuring and evaluating improvement results
▪ Coordinating improvement activities across the organization
o A continual improvement register (CIR) is a database or structured document to track and manage improvement ideas from identification through to final action.
● * Information Security Management
o The purpose of the information security management practice is to protect the information needed by the organization to conduct its business.
o Includes understanding and managing risks to:
▪ Confidentiality
▪ Integrity
▪ Availability
▪ Authentication
▪ Non-repudiation
● * Relationship Management
o The purpose of the relationship management practice is to establish and nurture the links between the organization and its stakeholders at strategic and tactical levels.
● * Supplier Management
o The purpose of the supplier management practice is to ensure the organization's suppliers and their performance are managed appropriately to support the provision of seamless, quality products, services and components.
o This can include creating closes, more collaborative relationships with key suppliers to uncover and realize new value and reduce risk of failure.
Service Management Practices
● Service Management Practices
o Service management practices have been developed in service management and IT service management (ITSM) industries.
o There are 17 General Management Practices:
▪ ** Change Control
▪ ** Incident Management
▪ ** Problem Management
▪ ** Service Desk
▪ ** Service Level Management
▪ ** Service Request Management
▪ * IT Asset Management
▪ * Monitoring and Event Management
▪ * Release Management
▪ * Service Configuration Management
▪ * Service Continuity Management
▪ Availability Management
▪ Business Analysis
▪ Capacity and Performance Management
▪ Service Catalogue Management
▪ Service Design
▪ Service Validation and Testing
o Practices with (**) must be known in-depth for the exam
o Practices with (*) are recall only
o Practices without a (**) or (*) are not covered by the exam
● Change Control
o The purpose of the change control practice is to maximize the number of successful IT changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing the change schedule.
o The scope of change control is defined by each organization. It will typically include all IT infrastructure, applications, documentation, processes, supplier relationships and anything else that might directly or indirectly impact a product or service.
o A change is the addition, modification, or removal of anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on IT services.
▪ Standard
● Pre-authorized
● Implement without additional authorization
▪ Normal
● Authorization based on change type
● Low-risk, someone who can make rapid decisions
● Very major
▪ Emergency
● Expedited assessment and authority
● May be separate change authority
o The person or group who authorizes a change is known as a change authority.
▪ In high velocity organizations, it is a common practice to decentralize change approval, making the peer review a top predictor of high performance
o The change schedule is used to help plan changes, assist in communication, avoid conflicts and assign resources.
● Incident Management
o The purpose of the incident management practice is to minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible.
▪ An incident is an unplanned interruption to a service, or reduction in the quality of service.
● Incidents should be logged.
● Incidents should be managed to meet agreed target resolution times.
● Incidents should be prioritized.
o Design the incident management practice appropriately for different types of incidents
▪ Incidents based on different impact
▪ Major incidents
▪ Information security incidents
o Prioritize incidents
▪ Based on agreed classification
▪ Ensure incidents with highest business impact are resolved first
o Use a robust tool to log and manage incidents
▪ Link to configuration items, changes, problems, known errors and other knowledge
▪ Provide incident matching to other incidents, problems or known errors
o Incidents may be escalated to a support team for resolution. The routing is typically based on the incident category. Anyone working on an incident should provide quality, timely updates. Incident management requires a high level of collaboration within and between teams.
o Some organizations use a technique called swarming to help manage incidents. This involves many different stakeholders working together initially, until it becomes very clear which of them is best placed to continue and which can move on to other tasks.
▪ Collaboration can facilitate information sharing and learning as well as helping to solve the incident more efficiently and effectively.
● Problem Management
o The purpose of the problem management practice is to reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents, and managing workarounds and known errors.
▪ A problem is a cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents
▪ A known error is a problem that has been analyzed and has not been resolved.
o A workaround is a solution that reduces or eliminates the impact of an incident or problem for which a full resolution is not yet available. Some workarounds reduce the likelihood of incidents.
▪ Workarounds are documented in problem records
▪ Workarounds can be done at any stage, it doesn't need to wait for analysis to be complete
▪ If a workaround has been documented early in problem control, then this should be reviewed and improved after problem analysis is complete
o Problem Management interacts with:
▪ Incident management
▪ Risk management
▪ Change control
▪ Knowledge management
▪ Continual improvement
● Service Desk
o The purpose of the service desk practice is to capture demand for incident resolution and service requests. It should also be the entry point/single point of contact for the service provider with all of its users.
o With increased automation and the gradual removal of technical debt, the focus of the service desk is to provide support for 'people and business' rather than simple technical issues.
▪ Major influence on user experience and how the service provider is perceived by users
▪ Practical understanding of the wider organization – the empathetic link between the service provider and users
▪ The service desk can focus on excellent customer experience when personal contact is needed
▪ Support and development teams need to work in close collaboration with the service desk
o Supporting technologies for a centralized service desk
▪ Intelligent telephony systems
▪ Workflow systems
▪ Workforce management/resource planning systems
▪ Knowledge base
▪ Call recording and quality control
▪ Remote access tools
▪ Dashboard and monitoring tools
▪ Configuration management systems
o A virtual service desk allows agents to work from multiple, geographically-dispersed locations. It requires more sophisticated technology, allowing access from multiple locations and complex routing and escalation.
o The service desk may not need to be highly technical, although some are.
● Service Level Management
o The purpose of the service level management practice is to set clear business-based targets for service performance, so that the delivery of a service can be properly assessed, monitored and managed against these targets.
o Provides the end to end visibility of the organization's services:
▪ Establishes a shared view of the services and target service levels with customers
▪ Collects, analyzes, stores and reports relevant metrics to ensure service levels are met
▪ Performs service reviews to ensure the current services continue to meet the organization and its customers' needs
▪ Captures and reports on service issues including performance against defined service levels
o A service level agreement (SLA) is a documented agreement between a service provider and a customer that identifies services required and the expected level of service.
▪ SLA is a tool to measure the performance of services from the customer's point of view.
▪ Key requirements for successful SLAs:
● Related to a defined service
● Should relate to defined outcomes, not just operational metrics
● Should reflect an agreement between the service provider and the service consumer
● Must be simply written and easy to understand for all parties
o Interacts with:
▪ Relationship management
▪ Business liaison
▪ Supplier management
▪ Business analysis
▪ Skills and competencies
o Information Sources:
▪ Customer engagement
● Initial listening
● Discovery and information capture
● Measurement and ongoing process discussions
● Asking simple open-ended questions
▪ Customer feedback
● Surveys
● Key business-related measures
▪ Operational metrics
▪ Business metrics
• Service Request Management
o The purpose of the service request management practice is to support the agreed quality of a service by handling all agreed user-initiated service requests in an effective and user-friendly manner.
o Service requests are pre-defined and pre-agreed and can usually be formalized with clear, standard procedures.
o Service requests are a normal part of service delivery, not a failure or degradation of service, which are handled as incidents.
o A service request is a request from a user or a user's authorized representative that initiates a service action that has been agreed as a normal part of service delivery.
§ Fulfilment of service requests may include changes to services or their components; usually these are standard changes.
o Some examples of a service request:
§ Request for a service delivery action
§ Request for information
§ Request for provision of a resource or service
§ Request access to a resource or service
§ Feedback, compliments and complaints
o Service requests and their fulfilment should be standardized and automated to the greatest degree possible,
o Opportunities for improvement should be identified and implemented to produce faster fulfilment times and take additional advantage of automation.
o Policies should be established regarding what service requests will be fulfilled with limited or even no additional approvals so that fulfilment can be streamlined.
o The expectations of users regarding fulfilment times should be clearly set, based on what the organization can realistically deliver.
o Policies and workflows are needed to redirect service requests that should actually be managed as incidents or changes.
o Some service requests require authorization according to financial, information security or other policies.
o Service request management depends on well-designed processes and procedures, which are operationalized through tracking and automation tools.
o Service requests may have simple workflows or quite complex workflows
o Steps to fulfill requests should be well-known and proven
o The service provider can agree to fulfillment times and provide clear status communication to users
o Some service requests can provide a self-service experience – completely fulfilled with automation
o Leverage existing workflow models whenever possible to improve efficiency and maintainability.
● IT Asset Management
o The purpose of the IT asset management practice is to plan and manage the full lifecycle of all IT assets, to help the organization
▪ Maximize value
▪ Control costs
▪ Manage risks
▪ Support decision-making about purchase, reuse and retirement of assets
▪ Meet regulatory and contractual requirements
o An IT asset is any valuable component that can contribute to delivery of an IT product or service
● Monitoring and Event Management
o The purpose of the monitoring and event management practice is to systematically observe a service or service component, and record and report selected changes of state identified as events.
o This practice identifies and prioritizes infrastructure, services, business processes and information security events, and establishes the appropriate response to those events, including responding to conditions that could lead to potential faults or incidents.
o An event is any change of state that has significance for the management of a configuration item (CI) or IT service.
● Release Management
o The purpose of the release management practice is to make new and changed services and features available for use.
● Service Configuration Management
o The purpose of service configuration management practice is to ensure that accurate and reliable information about the configuration of services, and the Cis that support them, is available when and where it is needed.
o A configuration item (CI) is any component that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT service.
Technical Practices
● Technical Management Practices
o Technical management practices have been adapted from technology management domains for service management purposes by expanding or shifting their focus from technology solutions to IT services.
o There are 3 Technical Management Practices:
▪ * Deployment Management
▪ Infrastructure and Platform Management
▪ Software Development and Management
o Practices with (*) is recall only
o Practices without a (*) is not covered by the exam
● Deployment Management
o The purpose of the deployment management practice is to move new or changed hardware, software, documentation, processes, or any other component to live environments. It may also be involved in deploying components to other environments for testing or staging.
