Step 1: Produce a Service Catalogue

Over time, the IT infrastructure of many organisations expands and evolves, often without a clear, up-to-date picture of all the services provided and their respective customers. To gain an accurate understanding, it’s crucial to create a Service Catalogue.

A well-structured Service Catalogue should include:

• A list of all the IT services currently provided.
• A summary of each service’s characteristics.
• Details of the customers and maintainers of each service.

Creating this catalogue may require some detective work, such as examining procurement records and consulting with suppliers and contractors. If your organisation has a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) or any type of asset database, these can be valuable sources of information. Additionally, Service Desk incident records can help identify old systems that may have been forgotten by everyone except the users.

Step 2: Define What Constitutes a Service

Defining what constitutes a ‘service’ in an IT context is not always straightforward. IT staff often mistake an IT system for a service, whereas customers typically view services from a broader business process perspective. One possible definition is: “One or more IT systems that enable a business process.”

To avoid confusion, it may be useful to establish a hierarchy within the Service Catalogue, distinguishing between:

• Business Services: Seen by the customer.
• Infrastructure Services: Essential to the delivery of business services but invisible to the customer.
• Network and Application Services: Also crucial to the delivery but not directly visible to the customer.

Once completed, the Service Catalogue may initially be a matrix, table, or spreadsheet. Some organisations integrate and maintain their Service Catalogue within their CMDB. Defining each service as a Configuration Item (CI) and creating a service hierarchy allows the organisation to relate incidents and requests for change (RFCs) to the services affected, facilitating service monitoring and reporting.

The Service Catalogue can also support other Service Management processes, such as:

• Business Impact Analysis (BIA): Used in IT Service Continuity Planning.
• Workload Management: Part of Capacity Management.

The investment in creating a Service Catalogue is easily justified, especially when prioritised according to the BIA, ensuring that the most critical services are addressed first.

Step 3: Manage Customer Expectations

Expectation Management is a vital aspect of SLM. From the beginning, it’s important to set realistic expectations for customers and establish a systematic process for managing these expectations over time. Remember, customer satisfaction often equates to the difference between expectations and perceptions.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are crucial for documenting expectations, but on their own, they do not inherently improve service quality. However, they can influence behaviour and help foster a service-oriented culture, which can lead to immediate benefits and pave the way for long-term improvements.

If services are charged to customers, it’s essential to align their demands with their budgets and the organisation’s strategy. Where direct charges are not made, it’s important to secure the support of senior business managers to ensure that no individual customer group places excessive or unrealistic demands on IT services.

Achieve Successful SLM with Pink Elephant

At Pink Elephant, we specialise in helping organisations implement effective Service Level Management. Our expert team can guide you through the process of creating a Service Catalogue, defining IT services, and managing customer expectations to ensure that your IT services deliver real business value.