ITIL v3 Service Management Lifecycle – Part 1

LiveTime Service Manager provides service organizations all they need to adopt a lifecycle approach to service management, irrespective of their current level of service maturity, available resources and capability. Such capacity guarantees organizations control over their ITIL adoption process, whether they choose to use internally trained staff or outsource to industry specialists for their ITIL implementation.

ITIL v3

At the end of October in 2007, ITIL version 3 was released and the understanding of IT service management best practices was transformed to encompass a lifecycle approach to service. Processes are grouped into different segments based on their lifecycle. Many of these overlap into many segements of the framework as illustrated below.

A ‘service’ is defined as delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without ownership of specific costs and risks. The ITIL Service Lifecycle caters to the concept that services continually adapt and evolve with the changing needs of business. Through this evolution the service builds value through interaction, evolution, dependencies and relationships to provide positive results. The stages of evolution covered by ITIL are Strategy, Design, Transition, Operation and Continual Service Improvement.

Strategy

Successful service providers have a clear understanding of their customer’s business objectives and the role IT plays to ensure their customer’s success. They predict the customer’s needs by preparing, analyzing and examining customer activity and usage patterns.

LiveTime Service Manager provides service organizations with this capacity as the system includes Service Portfolio Management at its core. Although it may not be relevant to all organizations when they first start working with the system, in their own time, organizations can build their service strategy and record all proposed services along with forecasted costings in LiveTime. These services can be transitioned through the configured service lifecycle that begins with an idea or proposal, through approvals, design & implementation, into operation and subsequently through maintenance cycles until it is decommissioned.

Applying Service Categories that include business related attributes, such as business processes supported, business owners and users, and making these accessible to customers with a description of the services in a language they understand, ensures IT is evolving from supporting the business to a point of enabling business activities, and in some cases, even driving the business.

With the cost of providing a service often a deciding factor when developing services for the business, LiveTime includes the capability to track and report on service offerings and component usage, service level performance and costs as part of the fully integrated Financial Management.

Recording financial attributes against services, including the service cost, charges and revenue, allows service providers to calculate the expenses they incur for offering services and charge internal or external consumers appropriately.

Design

Moving from the prediction and planning stages, successful service providers apply service management practices systematically, which ensures the services they offer are responsive, consistent and measurable.
Approved services that are transitioned into an operational state within the Service Portfolio, are made available to customers within LiveTime’s Service Catalog. Considered a filter view of the Service Portfolio, the active or ‘Live’ services offered by the service provider can be accessed by customers within LiveTime’s Customer Portal.

Within the Portal, customers can log Service Requests, Incidents or Change Requests against services, as defined relevant by the service provider. It should be noted that if the Service Portfolio, Service Catalog and Financial Management functionality is never enabled, service providers can still record requests against items and services owned or accessed by their customer base.

Responsive service is managed with all requests being associated with Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which is applied Service Level Management. Service providers can use LiveTime’s fully configurable SLAs supported by Operations Level Agreements (OLAs) and Underpinning Contracts (UCs) to ensure the quality of service delivered to their customers. Applying SLA-compliance reporting, Managers can define and track service availability and performance objectives that reflect business requirements and improved customer satisfaction.