IT Service Management: Best Practices and Challenges

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Contents
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................2
WEEK 1................................................................................................................................................2
Introduction to service Management.....................................................................................................2
ITIL Framework....................................................................................................................................2
WEEK 2................................................................................................................................................4
Service Strategy.................................................................................................................................4
Service Design...................................................................................................................................4
Service Transition..............................................................................................................................5
Week 3..................................................................................................................................................5
Service Operation..............................................................................................................................5
Continual Service Improvement........................................................................................................6
Business Relationship Management..................................................................................................6
WEEK 4................................................................................................................................................7
Financial Management for IT Services..............................................................................................7
Demand Management........................................................................................................................8
WEEK 5................................................................................................................................................8
Capacity Management.......................................................................................................................8
IT Service Continuity Management...................................................................................................9
ITSCM Process..................................................................................................................................9
WEEK 6................................................................................................................................................9
Information Security Management....................................................................................................9
Problem Management........................................................................................................................9
Seven Step Improvement Process....................................................................................................10
WEEK 7..............................................................................................................................................10
Measurement and Metrices..............................................................................................................10
Deming Cycle..................................................................................................................................10
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................................11
References...........................................................................................................................................12

Introduction
This assignment is divided into many different parts. Like the assignment is divided into
many weeks. And each week defines an individual topic. The first week defines service
management, ITIL framework, and some other topics. The second week is describing the
service strategy and design, and service transition and governance laws. The third week
describes service operation, service improvements, and business relationship management.
The fourth week describes financial management for IT services and demand management.
The fifth week describes capacity management and IT service continuity management. The
sixth week describes Information security management and also describes 7 steps of the
improvement process. And last week describes the measurement and Deming cycle. All these
topics are covered in this assignment.
WEEK 1
Introduction to Service Management
Service management is a process used by organizations to maximize business values. IT
service management involves many activities like creating, designing, delivering and also
manage the lifecycle of these services.
ITIL Framework
Implementing ITIL gives lots of business benefits. ITIL helps in business growth so many
organizations implement ITIL to take many business benefits. These benefits include making
a good relationship with customers by providing good services and provide the services
which meet with customer expectation and it also manages different type of service
interruptions, works on employee productivity. There are so many benefits of ITIL
framework, but with these frameworks some disadvantages are also there like ITIL
framework is too complex. And with this some critics say that ITIL is out-of-date. ITIL is a
framework, not a standard. So it is not necessary to implement the framework perfectly.
Organizations can easily choose the process which they want for their organization. There are
many ITIL frameworks which are used to support IT service management. Below is the list of
different frameworks of ITIL:
 FitSM: - This framework is used for the lightweight ITSM.
 Microsoft Operation Framework: - This framework is made to support Microsoft
products.
 IBM Tivoli Unified Process: - Like for Microsoft products mainly MOF is used. And
this ITUP is used designed for IBM products.
 COBIT: - This framework is used for IT governance.
ITSM and ITIL: -
It is very important to understand the difference between ITSM and ITIL. ITIL is used ITSM
framework. Many companies are using ITSM not ITIL. The companies might be not using
any standard framework but other than these different frameworks are using by companies

like COBIT, USMBOK, MOF and many more. ITIL is most widely used ITSM framework
which is divided into five different categories. And all these parts are working as a different
part and this is what ITIL called service lifecycle. Below is the list which describes different
parts of the service lifecycle.
 Service Strategy: - In this part, a service strategy is made, how to deliver the services.
And for this service provider makes strategies that how to deliver the products
considering the business needs.
 Service Design: - This is the second part of the service lifecycle. In this part design of
service is prepared.
 Service Transition: - This step involves different parts like introducing, any type of
changes and retiring any service.
 Service Operation: - This is the step where different types of service desk and
activities are sits.
 Continual Service Improvement: - This step includes all types of improvements. And
also optimize another type of activity.
Best practice And Good Practice: - ITIL tells that how to make a solid ITSM practice.
There are 7 things to make the best practice in IT service management. Here is a list that
tells about 7 things that have to do to make the best practice (Wahab & Soomro 2015).
 Always build a good and clear strategy: - This step tells about how to understand
customers. Means what customer want, what are the needs of customer. And for this
analyze customer portfolio and basis on this sort the customers which are having
some similarities. And by doing this it is easy to find that at which point effort has to
make.
 It is very important to be transparent while talking about returns on investment: - ITIL
suggests that always be transparent as much as possible. And giving a better detail to
customers.
 Manage Portfolio: - ITIL always talks about the process and which is called SPM i.e.
a portfolio of service management. This technique helps in managing the resources
transparently. And it makes a life cycle for service. There is way or a path to do work
and SPM follows that path. Below part describes how SPM exactly works: -
1. Define: - This step defines the outcomes of the service.
2. Analyze: - In this step, analyze the values of service and also find the
resources which are needed.
3. Approve: - This step approves all the service values and also helps to allocate
the resources.
 Manage Demand: - After understanding of portfolio, the next step is about to manage
demand. Demand is changing with time. Here are the 3 steps which tell how to
manage demand. The first step is about to analyse usage, means find the problems
where most of time is spend. The second step is anticipating means make a
connection with customers to find out the objectives. And last step is adjusted means
if a customer wants to change service it is necessary to be ready at all times to make
changes.
 Make Customer Lifecycle: - It is very necessary to provide good services to
customers and to do this make a lifecycle process with customers to understand the
customer needs and requirements.

WEEK 2
Service Strategy
A service strategy is about to find the current scenario of market and also analyze existing
offers. And after that on basis of this information create a new plan to meet requirements.
Service strategy consists of 5 steps that involve portfolio of service management, second is
financial management, third is strategy for IT services, demand management and last is
relationship management of business. All these parts of service strategy are described below:
1. Service Portfolio Management: - This step is to work on managing the portfolio
which are offered IT services. It guarantees that delivered services continue
associated with strategic goals.
2. Financial Management: - This step focuses on financial spending and on services
which include charging activity of business, accounting. Financial management also
works on maximize service value.
3. The strategy of IT Services: - This step helps in finding IT services position in the
market. And it also involves many things like review current needs of client, analyse
market scenario and plan for market growth.
4. Demand Management: - This step is used to check the service provided to customers.
And then understand needs and requirements of customer and manage all these
things. And balance with capacity.
5. Business Relationship Management: - This is the final step of the service strategy.
This step is used for making and managing relationship with customer. And also
works on customer needs and tries to provide them a better service.
This is all about service strategy that how it works in service management and what are the
steps and processes involved in service strategy (Cronholm & Gobel, 2016).
Service Design
Service design works on designing services which are provided to customers and business
and also works to fulfill the requirements and needs of customer and business. Service
Design consists of 8 parts which are following as:
1. Service Level Management: - This step is used for planning and also defines delivery
targets of organizations. And after that find the performance of all the targets.
2. Service catalog Management: - It is used to provide a catalog with accessibility to
customers.
3. Capacity Management: - It provides a guarantee that systems are operating with the
proper capacity to happen business needs.
4. Availability Management: - It provides a guarantee that customers can take services
anytime.
5. IT Service Management: - This step includes risk management and provides a
business continuity guarantee.

6. Security Management related to information: - It includes security and data
protection. And also providing protection to systems and data. Preventing intrusion
and detecting, correction problems all are part of the security management.
7. Supplier Management: - It handles supplier relationships.
8. Design Coordination: - This step is used to make the design more efficient and
optimum. And for doing this it looks previous designs.
This is all about service design. Service design is divided into 8 different parts.
Service Transition
It consists of service implementation and also managing services. Mainly 7 processes are
present in-service transition. All these steps help to understand service transition better.
1. Change Management: - It provides a guarantee that services are reliable all the time as
business needs modification.
2. Change Evaluation: - This step is used to manage changes and also includes
anticipating.
3. Release Management: - This step is consisting of software deployment.
4. Validation and testing of service: - This step is used for validation and testing of
service. And also helps to make any type of service changes.
5. Configuration Management: - This step is used to manage configuration items which
include owner, status, relationship and many more.
6. Knowledge Management: - This step is used to manage knowledge, which means it
collects important knowledge used by users and technicians for solving problems.
7. Transition Planning: - This is the last stage of service transition which is used for an
idea for new change into creation.
Week 3
Service Operation
Service Operation is a process that consists of periodic activities, infrastructure, and
processes that are used to deliver value to business. Mainly service operation is consists of 5
parts which include Incident Management, Problem management, event management, Access
Management and last is request fulfillment. All these steps are described below (Holland,
2015):
1. Incident Management: - This process is used to restore services that are disrupted due
to incidents. And bring them into normal form. These incidents are in form of
password reset, error message and printer failure.

2. Problem Management: - This process is used to handle problems. And resolve the
problem and also helps to find main cause of the incident. Problem management is
mainly used for managing the problem. And fix the problem in such a way that it
never occurs in future.
3. Event Management: - This process finds all service events and analyse them which
are arises from systems, applications.
4. Access Management: - This step is only used to manage access. Means provide access
to authorized clients. And it also prevents unauthorized clients from access.
5. Request fulfillment: - This process consists of logging, receiving. Resolve request
which is received from service desk.
Continual Service Improvement
This process is based on find chances for service growth and improvement. It is a process that
emphasis on utilization of techniques and learns from failures. The main goal of continual
service is to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of ITSM. The main feature of
continual service is that it focuses on both failure and success and this will help in identifying
bottleneck, trends. And this will help in business improvement. Mainly this service
improvement process consists of three steps: process evaluation contains CSI initiatives
definition and CSI monitoring. These are three main steps on which this service improvement
process is working.
1. Process Evaluation: - It means continuously checking and analyzing process. This
step is used for evaluation and for analyzing. This evaluation is done for
improvement.
2. CSI Initiatives: - This step or process is used for picking service improvement on the
basis of review and analysis.
3. Monitoring CSI initiatives: - This step is used to check that the process is going as
per plan or not. It also keeps track of all CSI initiatives development.
These are processed on which continual service improvement is working.
Business Relationship Management
Business relationship management means to maintain a relationship with customers. Maintain
means identifies the customer needs and requirements and service provider check whether
these needs are fulfilled or not.
The main purpose of business relationship management is to identify customer needs and
then provide the service and helps in achieving the goals of customers. In this process service
providers provide the service to customer according to the customer needs and requirements.
Business relationship management is based on complete relationship among service provider
and the client. Business relationship management is also working on client satisfaction. But
thing is very hard to find and maintain. It is a part of ITIL framework which deals with client
needs. With the help of business relationship management service delivery is improved for
customer. And it also helps in making a good and strong relationship between service
provider and customer. There is a big responsibility for service providers when providing
services to customers because the need and requirements of customer are changes with time.
So it is very important for service providers to provide a better service to their clients. There

is a big responsibility on service providers or on relationship managers while providing the
services (Eikebrokk & Iden, 2017).
There are some sub-processes of Business Relationship Management.
 Maintain customer Relationship: -Maintains relationships by providing services to
customers time to time. It is very important to maintain a good relationship with
customer. And service provider also fulfills the needs on time as per the client’s
requirements.
 The second step is about identifying service requirements by checking the desired
result. And provide a new solution if previous solution is not better.
 The third step is about to obtain new customers by providing service level
agreements.
 It is very important to take feedback from customers and these few techniques are
developed like customer surveys. By using doing this it very easy to find that
customer needs are fulfilled or not.
 This step is about handled customers' complaints with urgency. And provide them
better solution to resolve their problem.
 This step is used to keep track of growths and complaints.
WEEK 4
Financial Management for IT Services
Financial management is used to define the values of services that are offered to the clients.
Financial management consists of three parts: accounting, budgeting, and charging.
The main purpose of financial management is to provide visibility and decision-making
abilities to the company.
There are 3 main factors of financial management, each factor has some planning and
reporting cycle.
 Accounting: - This step is used by the service provider to account for administrations
for money consumed.
 Budgeting: - This step is a very important and main step of financial management for
IT services Because this step is used for control and predict the income of service
providers which are achieved during the whole periodic cycle. And during this period
budgets are fixed annually and the actual budgets are described on regular base.
 Charging: - This is the last step of financial management and this step consist of a bill
of customer for services. As the name suggests that customer has to pay bill for the
services which are used and accessed by user.
Mainly service providers like to invest in financial management to make their business
better and it also helps the administrations to work with legal limits. And this helps in
increased accuracy.

Objectives of financial management
It is very necessary to have an objective and goal before doing anything. Here is the list of
objectives of financial management:
It is used to predict the financial supplies of the service provider.
It defines a framework in such a way that it secures funding and also manage cost of
services that are provided to customers.
Demand Management
Demand management is a process that is used to understand and impact customer's demand
for service. Capacity management and demand management work together and give a
guarantee to customer that service provider completes their all needs and requirements.
Demand management is working on 3 main parts i.e. analyzing, anticipating and influencing.
These three parts play an important role in demand management (Orta & Ruiz 2019).
1. Analyzing: - This process is used for analyzing service data which consist many
details like requests, problems. This is process mainly used for analyse the present
usage of services by clients.
2. Anticipating: - BRM is used in anticipating future demands for services by clients. In
this process, manager talks with customers about services and analyzes the trend.
And after that make the projects and services according to the customer trends.
3. Influencing: - Demand management check costs which are included in service
design. This means if a client using more services than an anticipated amount of
service, in this case, service provider can take additional charges from the client.
Objectives and scope
It is used to identify the patterns to understand the levels of demand. It also helps in analyzing
profiles of users. And it also checks whether appropriate resources are present to meet the
demands. Demand management is used to find and analyze patterns of business activity.
WEEK 5
Capacity Management
Capacity management is a process used to meet the IT services and infrastructure to meet the
requirements and needs. Capacity management is used to manage relationship between three
components. And these three components are interconnected with each other in such a way
that help each other to meet the requirements (Wulf et al. 2015).
The three main sub-part of capacity management are business capacity, service capacity, and
component capacity.
1. Business capacity: - It is known as the driving force of capacity management. And it
changes business needs into requirements for services and infrastructure.
2. Service capacity: - Capacity management recognize peaks, patterns of IT services. It
predicts and controls the performance of IT services. The main goal is to manage
performance of service.

3. Component Capacity: - This process is used to handle the utilization and performance
of the IT component.
Capacity management improves the performance of its services. It also helps in reducing
problems and incidents which are related to capacity.
IT Service Continuity Management
IT service continuity management guarantees the continuity of service in any type of disaster.
It means that the services are always continuing in any type of situation.
The objective of IT service continuity management is:
Maintains service continuity and recovery plans.
Perform a business impact analysis.
And it also guarantees continuity and recovery mechanism.
ITSCM Process
ITSCM process is divided into 4 parts: initiation, requirements and strategy, implementations
and ongoing operation.
1. Initiation: - This step defines the scope, resource, and planning of the project.
2. Requirements: - This step includes risk assessment and analysis.
3. Implementation: - This step is consisting of testing, plans, and recovery arrangements.
4. Ongoing Operation: - It includes ongoing testing and awareness.
ITSCM includes the following parts: - Business continuity plan, continuity management,
impact analysis.
WEEK 6
Information Security Management
Information security management is used to manage organizational information and control
access to information and data. This is the scope of information security management. This
system is also dealing with incident management and change management. And this process
also guarantees of availability and integrity of data.
Subprocess of Information security management:
1. Design of security Controls: - This step is used for design in order to ensure security,
availability, and integrity.
2. Security Testing: - This step is used for testing and validation of IT security
implementation.
3. Manage Security Incidents: - This step is used to detect attacks and helps in
minimizing damage.
4. Security Review: - This step is used to review the security measures and also gives
suggestions and ideas to improve security.

Problem Management
Problem management is used to identify problems. Problem management includes two
processes:
Reactive problem management: - This part is used to execute a service operation.
Proactive management: - This step is working as a continual service improvement.
ITIL problem management includes:
 First identify problem.
 Put problem case.
 Log the problem.
 Then categorize.
 Systematic Investigation.
 Find changes that are needed to resolve problem.
 Verify the problem.
 Close program.
Seven-Step Improvement Process
These 7 steps help to improve the process. Here are the following steps:
1. The first step is to identify the strategy.
2. Then define what will be measured.
3. Collect data.
4. After the collection of data, process the data.
5. Analyze the data and information.
6. Use information.
7. And then implement improvement.
These 7 steps tell how to deal with problems.
WEEK 7
Measurement and Matrices
Measurement is used to measure and calculate the information from the customer. It is used
to collect matrices and information and then convert them into useful data that is used to
make decisions. The measurements have some purpose:
It reports the service to the clients.
Compare actuals with targets.
To find improvement opportunities.
Metrics: - There are 3 types of metrics that help organizations and also support activities.
Technology metrics, Process metrics, and service metrics.

Deming Cycle
Deming cycle is used to improve service improvement. This process is related to the service
provided by companies and delivers the services. This cycle is used to improve.
There are few activities in the Deming cycle:
Plan: - Used for planning the improvement.
Do -Implements of improvements.
Check: - This step is used to measure and for review.
Act: - In this step improvements are implemented.
Conclusion
This assignment is based on the service lifecycle. And divided into different weeks. All the
topics and points of each week are successfully achieved. This assignment describes each
point in brief and includes service life cycle design, operation, transition and improvement
services. All these points are achieved.

References
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