Prepare your Teams for the Next Major IT Service Development through ITSM Training

The primary function of service development is to introduce new and improved services for your users and initiatives for your organizations. It is about taking valuable input from concept development, business projects, service integration, and key users to carry out development efforts as either individual changes, service releases or standalone projects. For this purpose, it is essential to prepare your teams for your next major project through IT Ops training. While it is OK to react to developmental needs as and when it arises it is also crucial that an organization develops and research new digital opportunities for the business continuously. Service managers and owners have a critical role to play when it comes to preparing your staff.

Services development also consists of services design, which considers the key stakeholders like the end users when designing their services. The purpose is to create a holistic approach with a variety of perspectives that is then incorporated into the design and development of said services. Service design is required for ensuring the satisfaction of the end-user all the while making sure the services are delivered in the most efficient way possible, online IT technical training can certainly help your staff with that.

The service design stage consists of identifying the needs of the project as well as the potential problems that might come up. The objectives are set, the users are profiled, and ideas are improved upon and tested in a virtual environment. Service Design can either be used to improve existing projects or create new ones completely from scratch.

The architecture of the Service has an integral role in allowing efficient service design, development, and Lifecycle management. The Service Development Architecture has four elements.

• Service Offering
• Service Roadmap
• Service Delivery Model
• Service Structure

Service development Architecture along with value-driven Roadmap and professional services help in achieving optimal service development. It is important to include key service providers in the phase of development of Service Architecture. The Architecture must always be kept as simple and clear as possible.

The architecture is managed by the Service Owners. Each Owner is accountable for a specific Service Domain or a service. Organizations usually have about 5 to 10 Service Domains such as:

• Marketing and Sales Solutions
• Supply Chain and Production Solutions
• Engineering and R&D Solutions
• Support Solutions
• End User Service
• Connectivity and Capacity Services

Elements of Service Development

The primary element of Service development is the Service Offering, otherwise known as the service catalog. The offerings are a tangible and presentable aspect of your IT service that forms the basis of organizing, developing, improving and delivering the management of IT overall. It also creates a direct connection between IT and business by articulating how the services that are available connect with which components of your business to create value for your organization. A completed catalog will contain an overview of the IT services you have to offer, the brochures you’ll distribute and finally, the service and order request you’ll manage through the Service management platform.

Secondly, the Service Roadmap is the plan for creating a service or a domain that contains information on the scope, costs, schedule, and benefits of each of these initiatives. Each developmental project is initiated and carried out as a project, or service release.

The Delivery Model is created along with sourcing. The delivery model for continuity in services includes cloud services. The delivery model must decide which services need to be sourced in addition to who your preferred cloud service providers. It should also define which parts of your services are standalone end-to-end service and which ones are separate components to be shipped separately. However, in most cases, the operational model and size of an organization will determine the delivery model that is best for them. Last but not the lease the Service Structure defines the logical structure of the services, responsibilities, and relations. It defines the highest level of elements for CMDB or Configuration management database.

Release and Update Management

Change Management is essentially a governing process that is employed to standardize methods as well as procedures in order to make an assessment of the need for a change versus the impact of a change. Following this procedure makes it far easier to prevent any and all unintended consequences to the quality of your service.

Release Management is basically the execution process that’s used for planning, building as well as deploying the alterations, however, depending on the type of each change some will need to be individually carried out (such as pre-approved changes or even emergency changes). By scheduling the alterations on a Release Calendar allows the entire Change Management procedure to be far more predictable and proactive.

Changes to applications can be classified in one of three ways, standard, normal or emergency. Normal alterations are not frequent to services or an infrastructure that needs risk assessment through CAB or change advisory board. Such changes can be implemented as and when needed. Normal changes are further divided into subcategories that are as follows:

• Minor: these changes are relatively trivial and present minimal risk of causing any service issues. The Manager can approve an update without forwarding a Request to the Change Advisory Board. Minor changes could also be a standard change.
• Medium: This change requires a lot of effort and could significantly impact the service. Such changes need to be preapproved from the Change Advisory Board.
• Major: These changes have the potential to impact your critical mission objectives and operations intended by the organization. It not only needs approval from Change Advisory Board but from IT Management as well.

These are a few things that your staff needs to be aware of and the management should disseminate this information at the earliest. In order to ensure that there are no hiccups along the way, providing your staff with IT Ops Training and certifications such as CompTIA+ and CCNP Service Provider will go a long way to ensure that the service development operations in your organization go as smoothly as possible and according to plan.