Imagine while the world is moving towards smartphones and 4G network and you are a service provider for pagers. Service is nothing but delivering value to your customers. Forget about value, there is almost zero customer base for pagers. So change and improvement opportunity is inevitable for any business. In other words businesses need to be agile for changes and improvement opportunity to sustain.
For any Information Technology (IT) organisations, Service Management is most essential thing to manage and help customer achieve their objectives. For effective service delivery, these organizations adopt a best management framework to manage their service. ITIL or Information Technology Infrastructure Library is commonly used framework to manage services successfully. ITIL recommends service lifecycle approach to manage the entire service lifetime. There are five lifecycles namely Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continuous Service Improvement. While the first four lifecycle involves different stage of the service, CSI or Continuous Service Improvement lifecycle is involved throughout the service lifetime.
The main objective of the CSI lifecycle is to deliver continuous value to business. Adopting and implementing standard and consistent approaches for CSI will ensure that IT services remain continuously aligned to business requirements. CSI must be an objective for everyone in the organization.
Listed below are the key objectives of CSI lifecycle:
- Review and analyse service level achievement
- Identify and implement specific activities to improve IT service quality and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the enabling processes
- Ensure applicable quality management methods are used to support Continual Service Improvement Activities
- Understand what to measure, why it is being measured and what the successful outcome should be.
It is important that service owner, service manager or the team members to continuously look for improvement opportunities and they must be documented. Responsibility for ensuring that CSI is implemented throughout the organization and across all lifecycle stages should be given to a senior responsible owner who possesses the appropriate authority to make things happen. Improvement activities need to be planned and scheduled on an on-going basis.