Implementing ITIL Service Management with LiveTime

Organizations today rely heavily on IT to deliver corporate objectives and strategic goals, while maintaining day-to-day operations. This dependency demands that IT service and support departments reduce costs, manage risks and improve technological and employee efficiency.

The tight integration of people, process and technology is a business strategy being adopted to align organizational objectives with IT service delivery. This integration means that IT departments no longer think in terms of servers, but of services provided to the organization and its customers. This change of focus results in a high quality service that is accountable, transparent and predictable.

To achieve business-orientated service management, IT service organizations are modeling service capabilities around ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) best practice guidelines.

Designing

Adopting ITIL to design an organization’s support infrastructure is a critical undertaking. It should be managed as a formal business project with clear ownership, defined business goals, responsibilities, deliverables and management commitment.

Before designing the new Service Desk, all existing service workflows should be assessed and potential for improvement identified. It is an opportunity for business analysts to rethink and redesign existing processes and activities, in order to increase productivity, add value, and reduce costs. As the shop front for organizations, the service desk is an opportunity to enhance the customer’s perception of the organization.

Implementing

LiveTime Service Manager is a comprehensive ITIL Service support solution that incorporates 11 ITIL v3 processes, the core of which are Incident, Configuration, Problem and Change management.

LiveTime’s recommended two-stage approach includes:

• Phase I: Implement Configuration, Service Level and Incident Management
• Phase II: Progress to Problem and Change Management.

Following is a summary of the steps that organizations are guided through when implementing LiveTime Service Manager as either a phased or all-in-one installation.

People

Adopting ITIL best practices will require a culture change for the organization, in addition to the changes to the service desk process itself. This will require:

• Educating staff about the benefits of ITIL, and winning champions to the cause
• Train service desk staff about working with the relevant process
• Maintain & support process improvements by completing self-audits.

Technology

Setup & Install

• Hardware, O/S, RDBMS, Application Server, Web Server, LiveTime Service Manager application

Migration of Service Desk data (Optional)

• Perform data mapping between existing & new system
• Perform data migration
• Validate migration

Integration

• Asset Discovery
• Authentication (ADS/LDAP/SSO)
• Mail
• Web Services

Process: Phase I

Incident Management can be fully configured and automated to reflect the preferred workflow of your organization.

• Review current process
• Define objectives
• Create Incident Management workflow
• Create incident support teams and assign members to relevant escalation layer
• Plan review of process using employee feedback and relevant reporting metrics.

Service Level Management in LiveTime improves internal and external communication for Service Desk users and assists in the timely management of the support requests. Service Level Agreements (SLA) within LiveTime Service Manager can be underpinned by Operational Level Agreements (OLA) to guarantee the internal capacity meets customer service expectations.

• Review IT services offered to the organization
• Establish teams for areas of specialty with relevant escalation layers
• Create a list of services offered by each team and associate with the service catalog
• Establish SLAs relative to the business unit requirements and support by appropriate OLAs
• Define metrics for measuring efficiency and effectiveness of process
• Implement a review/audit program to ensure service levels meet the organizational needs.

Configuration Management is only effective if the data associated with the core IT operational processes is stored and managed appropriately. To guarantee the validity and accuracy of the CMDB:

• Assign owner(s) to the Configuration Management process
• Assign accountability for operational repository – setup, ongoing maintenance and support of the CMDB
• Synchronize with 3rd party asset management and discovery tools (optional)
• Create baselines for CIs
• Plan audit and validation of CMDB data.

Process: Phase II

After the initial phase has settled, the following processes are rolled out:

Problem Management is tightly integrated with Incident and Change Management in LiveTime Service Manager. This allows problems and changes to be manually created from incidents. Further, parameters can be customized in the application to allow for automatic detection and escalation of incidents to problem management.

• Review current process and set objectives
• Define workflow
• Define team and assign staff to relevant escalation layers
• Define parameters that are to be included in LiveTime, which will allow for auto-detection of problems
• Define metrics for measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of the process
• Plan review and audit of process.

Change Management typically includes defining multiple workflows relevant to the types of changes that are handled by the service desk. To implement Change Management using LiveTime Service Manager, an audit of the current processes needs to be completed so all change workflows can be defined within the application.

• Define Change Management workflows – identify the types of changes to be handled and how priority is assigned to the change request
• Allocate the roles and responsibilities of the IT support staff within the workflows
• Define measurements that will be used to track the efficiency of change implementation
• Monitor/review process by evaluating and reporting on implemented changes.