- Occurs during all stages, most useful during Service Operations
- Identifies areas for improvement in processes and functions
- Main effort is increasing efficiency
Key Takeaways
- Capture relevant info for appropriate fixes
- Verify interprocess links as functional, effective, and efficient
- Occurs at all stages (even on itself)
- Service Operations data is critical
- Measure and identify the value of initiatives
- Review trends to ensure services meet SLAs
- Do outcomes of processes meet standards?
- Review business trends, priorities, and projections
- Perform customer satisfaction surveys
- Conduct maturity assessments against process, functions, activities, and roles
- Internal and external service reviews
- Internal audits to verify compliance with processes and activities
- Review existing deliverables
Deming Cycle
- Plan - Establish objectives and processes to get there
- Do - Implement the plan and collect appropriate data
- Check - Study the data
- Act - Improve original plan
Continual Service Improvement Register
- Central repository for documenting all potential improvement opportunities (areas for improvement database)
- All stakeholders can make entries
- Owned by CSI Manager
- CSI register is large
- Allows cross-sync of "good ideas" for maximum ROI
CSI Register Items
- Description
- Scale
- Timeline
- Resources needed
- Originator and Sponsor
- Cross-references (CSI Items, RFCs, project proposals)
Define and manage improvements. We want to make things better.
Functions
- Identify opportunities for improvement
- Reduce cost of services
- Identify what metrics to capture
- Review service achievements
- Understand what to measure and why
- Define the objective: What is a successful outcome?
Plan
- Define the vision/strategy
- Define what to measure
Do
- Gather relevant data
- Process data into information
Check
- Analayze data for trends (knowledge)
- Leaders asses knowledge and produce improvement plans
Act
- Implement agreed-upon changes
- What is the vision? - Understand teh business's vision, goals, and objectives
- Where are we now? - Be honest about your organization, people, processes, & technology
- Where do we want to be? - Create achievable steps to meet the agreed-upon goals and time tables
- How do we get there? - Develop a plan that is realistic and achievable
- Did we get there? - Verify process compliance, analyze the metrics, and create another baseline
- How do we keep the momentum? - Find the next project or initiative to snowball your current momentum
- Validate previous decisions
- Are we meeting the SLAs?
- Justify course of action
- Course correct errors
Baselines in Measurement
- Snapshot of an area in the CMS
- Create baseline before and after a change to see if it was effective
Metrics - Measure that is captured and reported on
- Technology Metrics - component- or application-based
- Server Availability or app performance
- Process Metrics - Captured using workflow tools
- Service Metrics - end-to-end experience
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
- Metric used to help manage an IT service, process, or activity
- Quantitative - based on numbers
- Qualitative - subjective
- KPIs are supported by metrics
Critical Success Factor (CSF)
- Thing that MUST happen for an IT service to succeed
- CSFs are supported by related KPIs
Measuring Objectives
- Supported by CSFs
How to put it into practice
- Leadership buy-in is crucial
- Get better at operations
- Get control over Change Management
- Improve Configuration Management
- Focusing on managing services, not technology
What if you are in charge?
- Make small wins and build momentum
- Partnerships with the right people will pay off
- Learn to influence others to achieve your goals
Kotter's 8 Steps to Change
- Create a sense of urgency.
- Form a guiding coalition.
- Create a vision.
- Communicate the vision.
- Empower others to act on the vision.
- Plan for and create quick wins.
- Consolidate improvements and produce more change.
- Institutionalize the change.
Bottom Line
- You need to build a culture of change and improvement.
- Look for efficiencies and quick wins.
- Build your partnerships.
- Any tools from other phases are useful in CSI
- CSI helps determine the best tools for each phase
Useful areas
- Event/incident/problem management
- Systems and network management
- Service requests
- Knowledge management
- Performance management
- IT service management
- Financial management
Always continually evaluate tools.
- The model known as the CSI approach comprises a number of steps. What activity is associated with the step "Where are we now"?
Perform a baseline assessment - What is the correct list of activities in the Deming cycle?
Plan, Do, Check, Act - Which of the following is not a type of metric described in the Continual Service Improvement lifecycle stage?
- Compliance metrics
- Process metrics
- Technology metrics
- Service metrics
- Which one of the following is not a stage of the service lifecycle?
- Service Optimization
- Service Operation
- Service Transition
- Service Strategy
- What is the correct order of teh activities of the Seven-Step Service Improvement process?
- Define the vision
- Define what is to be measured
- Gather the data
- Process the data
- Analyze the information
- Produce improvement plans
- Implement the improvement plans
- Which of the following statements regarding key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics are correct?
i. There should be more than one KPI for each critical success factor.
ii. You can have quantitiative KPIs and qualitative KPIs.
iii. The most important use of KPIs is in annual staff performance reviews.
iv. Service metrics should measure the end-to-end service. - In which stages of the service lifecycle is Continual Service Improvement (CSI) particularly important?
It is equally important in every stage. - On which of teh following aspects of IT service management does Continual Service Improvement (CSI) provide guidance?
i. Improvement of process efficiency and effectiveness
ii. Measurement and metrics
iii. Better alignment of services to business needs
iv. Checking that deliverables are still appropriate - Which is the second activity of the Continual Service Improvement approach?
Carry out a baseline assessment. - Which of the following is an activity in the Seven-Step Service Improvement process?
- Keep the momentum going
- Plan
- Analyze the information
- How do we get there