ITSM Basics: What Is Service Transition? (Part 1)

When setting up your transition planning and support capabilities, make sure that you have your key stakeholders mapped.

Effective stakeholder mapping will help enable you to create a solid RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) matrix to ensure that all appropriate roles and responsibilities are known and agreed.

The benefits of service asset and configuration management can sometimes be difficult to articulate – especially when seeking funding and other resources – because generally, the new capability doesn’t offer the quick wins associated with implementing, say, incident or change management.

One way to make it easier for key business stakeholders, and purse-string holders, to understand the benefits of service asset and configuration management is to include a data model when setting out your configuration management plans – with this something that maps out end-to-end services at a high level.

A typical data model would start with the following items:

• Infrastructure configuration items (CIs) – the hardware that your hosts your application and service CIs such as servers, storage arrays, and network devices such as hubs, routers, and switches.
• Service CIs – the services delivered to the end user. For example, File and Print (servers, SharePoint, and printer hardware) or Communications (email, video conferencing, and instant messaging).
• Software CIs – the software and applications that combine with hardware and facilities CIs to create the end-to-end services.
• Facilities CIs – for example, data centers, generators, backup fire supplies, and cooling systems to protect the hardware CIs and the services hosted on them.

Done well, a configuration data model will effectively represent data/information about the most common CIs such as hardware, software, and services and provide a mechanism for linking that information to show a complete view of all elements of the corporate IT environment and how they affect each other.

When setting up your change management process/capability, avoid the temptation to route every single change via the change advisory board (CAB). Why? Because it might otherwise slow your organization down and nothing is more frustrating than when your CAB runs over time discussing minor issues such as making network ports live or rebooting test servers when the serious, high risk (and high impact) change content hasn’t been tabled.

To help, introduce standard changes – low risk change tasks that can be pre-approved to free up the CAB for the more visible and business-impacting changes.

Not sure how to identify low risk changes? Spend an hour with each support team and ask what changes they’re raising all the time. For the ones that are low risk/low impact follow the standard change route. Then create templates for everything else – change models – so that, for support teams, raising a change is a case of selecting the right template, updating the implementation window, and then detailing any exceptions such that it takes less than a minute to raise a change instead of ten minutes plus.

This is a quick win where changes are raised with the appropriate detail and are routed such that low impact work is automatically approved, freeing up the CAB for the big-ticket items.

There’s no such thing as a risk-free environment and thus risk management is an essential aspect of any major change. Use change evaluation to provide structure around the identification of risk, for example:

• Prior to planning – assessing a proposed major change at the initial stages, before the planning stage is authorized
• Prior to build – assessing whether the change meets all planning needs (with the requirements gathered) before it can be built and tested
• Prior to deployment – testing the change to ensure that it’s fit for purpose and will deliver the expected benefits
• Post deployment – reviewing the change performance, identifying what went well and what can be improved upon

By capturing this information at each stage of the change lifecycle, the desired outcomes are more likely to be achieved and any improvements can be fed into the CSI process. What’s not to love?