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What is a Service?If you as the service provider are asked what is the service you provide, what would you answer?The term "service" is usually — at least in information technology — associated with some kind of continuity. Building the WhatEver V5 software as project work is usually not a service. However, the tasks related to its maintenance are usually considered a service. Drawing the boundary line is not easy. The service has several different attributes. Perhaps the most important thing to do first is to identify who the customer is. It is not always
obvious. The services may also be in a hierarchy with each other or otherwise interfacing: you cannot deliver service A without delivering service B, too.
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Expectation ManagementThe ITIL framework defines a number of processes, practices and other entities, but it has left out one of the most important topics: Expectation Management.Expectation Management is not about implementing everything expected. Instead, it is about making the end-users and Service Recipients know what to expect from the service, and when. Failures on Expectation Management are very common root causes for unnecessary conflicts. A user might raise his adrenaline level and blood pressure by raging that the Service Desk does not
serve him at 5:30 p.m. Instead, he or she would probably take a calmer approach if he or she had been told that the Service Desk is open between 8 am and 5 pm.
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Service HoursAt first glance, the Service Hours sounds like an easy concept. True, but there are lot of moving parts, and several opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot.The Service Hours is about the period to provide services. But not usually everything, not to everyone, and not necessarily in their full scope. There is a lot of desire to optimize the service time, on both sides of the table, because it is a significant cost factor. The bottom line is like betting:
Make an educated guess and hope that it leads to a good result.
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The Governors in Their PyramidsThe success of the Governance Model is a prerequisite to the success of IT services delivery.Most management books draw the Governance Model as a triangle or a pyramid standing on its base, the sharpest people of the company sitting at the top corner. We follow this abstraction. The next question is what the scope of the Governance Model is. We take a broad-minded approach: seeing IT as a part of the business, as an enabler to the businesses,
and IT as the interface to the external service providers.
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Process Capacity PlanningIf a perfectionist, a keen process planner, and a junior designer recently passed his/her ITIL Foundation exam are put together to plan for corporate processes, the result usually is a disaster. The result is either overwhelming or nothing. Nothing because the perfectionist never gets anything complete.A pretty common approach is to cover all walls with large, complex, and fancy process charts. Often, the most important principle is ignored: Create such processes only, which you have resources to run. Simple math is usually enough to make the initial estimation: multiplication and division, nothing more.
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Multivendor Service ManagementIt is a common practice to avoid putting all eggs in the same basket by splitting the services across two or more service providers. A popular separation line lies between application development and IT production. However, this is not the only way to build the multivendor setup: For example, the application portfolio might be divided across vendors.The multivendor model creates more contract management work than the single-vendor one.
The roles and responsibilities related to the agreements must be clear, to avoid repeating conflicts between the vendors.
Also, the priority of service providers to not disclose trade secrets makes the model challenging.
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