Are You Ready for Service Management?

A simple, four question assessment

Every function or department within your organization has customers. Although these customers might not always fit your traditional definition of this term (internal users are customers too!), they still require (and expect) good service. However, providing a high level of service can often be a challenge, as most functions don’t have dedicated service or request management resources.

Enter service management. Service management addresses this challenge by extending best practices for service delivery and request management across the organization.

Once you recognize the business value of service management, what’s next? How do you know which departments are ready for service management and who can benefit the most from taking this approach? Ask yourself these four simple questions to find out.

1) WHAT ARE YOU FOCUSED ON ACHIEVING AS AN ORGANIZATION?

What can you do better? For many organizations, key areas of focus include improving:

• Customer Experience: Higher service quality, stronger communications with customers, better ongoing engagement, increased transparency
• Service Effectiveness: Accomplishment of business objectives, improved management of service delivery, more successful service launches
• Process Efficiency: Reduced cost of service delivery and provisioning, ability to fulfill requests faster, achievement of economies of scale due to broad adoption of new processes

2) WHERE ARE YOU NOW?

What applications do you own for traditional IT Service Management? What processes exist for IT that can be expanded to help other departments? Some common places to start include:

• Incident/Request Management
• Knowledge Management
• Change Management
• Asset Management
• Service Catalog

3) WHAT DEPARTMENTS OR FUNCTIONS HAVE TROUBLE DEALING WITH SERVICE REQUESTS?

The answer to this question is simple: Which departments are using email, fax and/or spreadsheets to manage their workflows? Which departments have complicated request processes with multiple approvers, dependencies, etc.?

4) HAVE ANY DEPARTMENTS ASKED FOR YOUR HELP HANDLING REQUEST MANAGEMENT?

Have any departments or functions (especially those that are having trouble dealing with service requests) asked for help? How are service-heavy departments like Facilities and HR, in particular, handling request management?

Because request management and service delivery are so central to these departments, they are typically great places to start with service management. For example, many Facilities organizations are embracing service management to improve asset management and performance tracking, while many HR organizations are using service management tactics to improve the onboarding process for new employees.

GETTING STARTED WITH SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Answering these questions will provide a solid foundation for any service management initiative by giving you a better understanding of which areas of the business need service management the most, what your key goals should be and what processes or technology you may already have in place to kickstart these activities.