Continual Service Improvement
Activities and Concepts
Introduction
In ITIL®, improvement becomes a process within IT with defined
activities, inputs, outputs, roles and reporting.
Activities
It is essential that during CSI, ITSM processes are developed and deployed as well as develop an ongoing continual improvement
strategy for each of the processes and services. These deliverables must be reviewed on an ongoing
basis.
The activities performed during the Continual Service Improvement
are:
• Review management
information
• Analyze trends
• Produce/analyze SLA reports
• Conduct maturity assessments
• Conduct internal audits
• Conduct customer satisfaction surveys
• Conduct external and internal Service
reviews to identify CSI opportunities
Roles
CSI Manager
• Responsible for the success of all improvement activities
• Defines, monitors,
analyzes and reports on KPIs and CSFs in cooperation with
SLM
• Coordinates CSI activities throughout lifecycle
• Prioritizes improvement
opportunities
• Leads, manages and delivers improvement
projects
Service Owner
• Accountable for a specific
service within an organization
• Responsible for continual improvement and management
of change
• A primary
stakeholder in all of the underlying IT processes which enable or support
the service they own
• Close cooperation with SLM and CSI Manager
Interfaces
It is important to provide
improvement opportunities through out the Service lifecycle. The Service Portfolio is the connection between
all lifecycles stages:
• CSI relation with Service Strategy: Improvement opportunities driven by external factors such as new security or regulatory
requirements
• CSI relation with Service
Design: Defines the need for CSFs, KPIs and metrics
on services.
• CSI relation
with
Service
Transition: Transition
to new or changed
services
provide opportunities for improvement in terms of knowledge,
metrics, communication and management.
• CSI relation
with
Service
Operation: Identifies areas
for
improvement within
operational services within the organization, which involves people
processes and IT infrastructure.
Inputs and Outputs
There is a systematic sequence
of inputs and outputs in the Service lifecycles.
Each lifecycle will produce
inputs to the next
lifecycle and
as
a result
the
latter lifecycle will produce feedbacks or outputs to the former lifecycle. This consistency in results can help CSI identify the strengths and weaknesses throughout the lifecycle
stages and find opportunities for improvements.
Interface with
Service Level
Management
Interface with Service Level Management (SLM) are described as followes:
• Service Level Management (SLM)
is a key principle of CSI, thus is compulsory to the lifecycle
• SLM initiates Service Improvement Programs
and Service Quality Plans
• Monitoring and measuring is a joint responsibility of SLM and CSI
• SLM effort is about building and maintaining
better relationships between IT
and its Customers
Within Service Design, Service Level Management is concerned with:
• Designing and planning the process
• Determining Service Level Requirements
(SLRs)
• Negotiating and agreeing
upon SLAs, OLAs and UCs
Within CSI, Service Level Management is concerned with:
• Monitoring (executed within Service Operation)
• Reporting
• Evaluating
• Improving
Service Improvement Plans are formal plans to
implement improvements to a process or service. They are used to ensure that improvement actions are identified and carried
out on a regular
basis. The
identified improvements may
come as a result of:
• Breaches of Service Level Agreements
• Identification of user training and documentation issues
• Weak system testing
• Identified weak areas within internal and external support groups
Risk Management
Risk Management
aims
to
support
better
decision-making
through a
good understanding
of risks and their likely impact.
Risk analysis
• Gathering information about exposure to risk so that the organization can make better decision-making and manage risk appropriately
Risk management
• Having processes to monitor risks, access to reliable and updated information about risks as well as appropriately create balance and control
risks.
A risk is the chance that a certain asset stops performing its function
or value due to a threat.
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