– How many Service Desk staff does it take to change a light-bulb?
a) None. Restoration of service is a Level 1 Support function

Multiple choices here🙂

I recently spent some time reading about service management, more specifically, ITIL. Some notes – in random order – below:
– Service – a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs or risks
– Service Management – a set of specialized organisation capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services
– Process – a structured set of activities designed to accomplish a specific objective.

– Physical product value – its intrinsic value, resale value. Value of a service comes from what it enables someone to do
– Value is defined by the customer. Value changes over time.
– Value = customer perceptions + customer preferences + business outcomes
– Value = utility (what the service does) + warranty (how well the service performs)
– Assets – any resource or capability.
– Resources – tangible assets that can be bought (infrastructure, information)
– Capabilities – intangible assets that can be developed over time (people, knowledge)
– Functions = a team or group of people and the tools they use to carry out a process: service desk,  technical management,  IT operations management, application management
– Type of investments: run the business, grow the business, transform the business

– Serviceability – the ability of a 3rd party supplier to meet the terms of its contract
– Reliability – how long a function can be performed without interruption (uptime or MTBF)
– Maintainability – how quickly and effective can be a function restored after failure (downtime or MTRS)
– uptime + downtime = MTBSI (Mean Time Between System Incidents) = MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) + MTRS (Mean Time to Restore Service)
– strategical, tactical, operational, commodity suppliers
– cold/warm/hot standby (gradual/intermediate/immediate recovery)
– Definitive Media Library (DML) – one or more locations where the definitive and authorized versions of all software are securely stored
– Release deployment: bing bang vs phased, pushed vs pulled, manual vs automated.
– Early Life Support. Once a new service has been deployed in the live environment, support can be provided for a limited period of time.
– Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom:
–Data – a set of discrete facts. Ex – the date and time when an incident has been logged
–Information – comes from providing context to data Ex – average time to close priority 2 incidents
–Knowledge – is composed of tacit experiences, ideas, insights, judgement of individuals. Ex – average time to close priority 2 incidents has increased by 10% since a new version of service
–Wisdom – makes use of wisdom to create value through well-informed decisions. Ex – the increase in time to close priority 2 incidents is due to poor quality documentation for the new version of the service.

– Incident – an unplanned interruption to an IT service or reduction of quality of an IT service.
– Problem – the cause of one or more incidents.
– Incident Management focuses on restoring services to normal state operation
– Problem Management focuses on finding ways to prevent incidents from happening.
Incidents do not become problems
– Known error – a problem that has a documented root cause and a workaround.
– Workaround – a way of reducing or eliminating the impact of an incident or problem for which a full resolution is not yet available (ex – restart it 🙂
– Escalation can be horizontal (functional) vs vertical (hierarchic)
– Event – a change of state that has a significance. Event types: informational, warning, exception
– Alert – a notification that a threshold has been reached
– Service request – a formal request from a user. Incidents cannot be planned; but service requests can.
– Service Desk – Single point of contact for IT users on a day-to-day basis. Handles service requests and incidents. Can make the difference between a poor service delivered well, and a good service poorly delivered.
– Service Desk types: local, centralized, virtualized or follow the sun.

– Continual Service Improvement: What is the vision? Where are we now? Where do we want to be? How do we get there? Did we get there? How do we keep the momentum going?
– Critical Success Factors (CSF) – Something that must happen if an IT service, process, plan, project is to succeed.
– Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used to measure the achievement of each CSF.

– ITIL Service Lifecycle  – Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation, Continual Service Improvement