The Service Transition stage of the lifecycle ensures that new, modified or retired services meet the expectations of the business as documented in the Service Strategy and Service Design stages.
The objectives of this stage are to plan and manage service changes efficiently and effectively; manage risk related to new, changed or retired services; successfully deploy service releases into supported environments; set correct expectations on the performance and use of new or used services; ensure that service changes create the expected business value; and provide good-quality knowledge and information about services and service assets.
In order to achieve these objectives, there are many things that need to happen during the Service Transition lifecycle stage. These include:
- Planning and managing the capacity and resources required to manage Service Transitions.
- Implementing a rigorous framework for evaluating service capabilities and risk profiles before new or changed services are deployed.
- Establishing and maintaining the integrity of service assets.
- Providing efficient repeatable mechanisms for building, testing and deploying services and releases.
- Ensuring that services can be managed, operated and supported in accordance with constraints specified during the Service Design stage of the service lifecycle.
The scope of Service Transition includes the management and coordination of processes, systems and functions required to plan, build, test, evaluate and deploy a release into the live environment; ensure that requirements are effectively realised in Service Operation; control risks of failure and disruption; transfer services between suppliers; and retire services.
It is during this phase of the lifecycle that so many companies get it so wrong, with some very high profile and spectacular IT outages. How many times do we hear of organisations not being able to provide their customers with services because of ‘technology’ problems? The UK banks have had numerous, well publicised, outages because of what is described as ‘technical issues’ where, for example, a new version of an application didn’t work. It is estimated that around 80% of these so-called ‘technical’ issues can be avoided through a rigorous Service Transition process. The majority of these failures can be attributed to poor process.