Purpose

The purpose of the CSI stage of the lifecycle is to support the business by ensuring that the IT services provided meet its requirements. In most companies, there are business drivers that cause changes in behavior to meet market forces. Organizations that do not respond to outside forces or recognize the need to change will usually not survive the rigors of the marketplace. IT services support business processes, and as the business processes change, the IT services must change also to ensure that they still support the business. It is the job of CSI to identify and implement these improvements to IT services. These improvements may occur anywhere in the lifecycle; CSI looks for improvements in service strategy, service design, service transition, and service operation. CSI constantly tries to identify opportunities to improve service-effectiveness, process-effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness.

Objectives

Let’s now look at the objectives for CSI. To achieve the purpose for this lifecycle stage, the ITIL Continual Service Improvement publication provides the following objectives:

• Review, analyze, prioritize, and recommend improvement opportunities in each lifecycle stage: service strategy, service design, service transition, and service operation as well as CSI. Regular activity of this type will move the improvement efforts from an ad hoc approach to a genuine improvement initiative.
• Review and analyze service level achievements according to the service level agreements in place.
• Identify and implement specific activities to improve IT service quality, including improvements to the effectiveness and efficiency of the enabling processes. The overall service quality is partially dependent on the quality of the processes. It can be tempting for IT services to assume that the only metrics that matter are those relating to the technology.
• Improve the cost-effectiveness of IT service delivery without negatively impacting customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is an important measure of the value of the service being delivered.
• Ensure that suitable and applicable quality management methods are in use to support the continual service improvement activities. The quality management methods in use should support the overall quality governance in place in the organization.
• Ensure that the processes in use have clearly defined objectives and measurements that produce identifiable and actionable improvements. This should be part of the controls around the processes in use throughout the service lifecycle.
• Understand what to measure, why it is being measured, and what the successful outcome should be. Recognizing exactly what is required will enable a better interpretation of the metrics and the behaviors they will drive.

Scope

There are four main areas that CSI needs to address. First is the overall health of IT service management (ITSM) as a discipline, and second is the continual alignment of the service portfolio with the current and future business needs. CSI will work with service strategy to ensure that the service portfolio remains relevant to the changing business requirements. Next it needs to consider the maturity and capability of the organization, management, processes, and people utilized by the services; where necessary, CSI will suggest and implement process improvements to ensure that the processes continue to deliver effectively and efficiently. Finally, it attempts to improve all aspects of the IT service and the service assets that support them.

It is CSI’s responsibility to ensure that the ITSM processes continue to be followed after the initial novelty wears off—and despite day-to-day pressures. It is only by understanding how the improvements are to be carried out, and what the desired outcomes are, that you can deliver continual service improvement. The activities that support improvement are as follows:

• Reviewing the service performance targets and trends, using the available management information, to understand if the desired service levels are being met
• Reviewing process outputs to understand if the required performance is being achieved to enable the services
• Regularly carrying out maturity assessments on the processes in use to identify areas of concern or demonstrate improvement achievements
• Conducting compliance audits on the processes, ensuring that maturity is maintained
• Identifying and making proposals for improvements
• Conducting customer satisfaction surveys as required on a periodic basis
• Reviewing and understanding business trends and projections and maintaining awareness of business priorities
• Measuring and identifying the value created by continual service improvement initiatives

These activities will require ownership to ensure that they actually get done. Improvement activities should be planned and be part of a considered approach, managed by individuals who have appropriate authority to carry them out. It is important to make sure the processes and services are subject to a continual improvement strategy. This strategy should ensure that the improvement initiatives are achieving their targets and being kept up-to-date. Specific improvements that require changes should follow the change management process. It is easy for improvement programs to fade, so it is necessary for these activities to be monitored as part of the overall continual service improvement approach.

Value

The adoption of standard and consistent approaches to improving IT service quality will result in controlled, gradual, and maintainable improvement. Any improvements must, naturally, be cost-justified in terms of the return on the investment or, more appropriately, on the value of the investment.

When regular reviews of the business needs are employed and IT services remain aligned to them, the business can be assured of an acceptable level of support. Because IT services may be said to underpin the success of the majority of organizations, this assurance is critical for business confidence.

One of the key aspects of any improvement is cost, but it is not only the cost justification for the initiative; it is also the benefit that can be achieved in terms of cost. An improvement may be able to create cost savings in real terms or increase capability for additional workload. Because one of the most common themes of budget negotiations is the requirement to achieve more for the same or less than the previous year, this is a genuine long-term goal for organizations. Utilizing the techniques and approaches of continual service improvement will allow for a gradual and sustained increase in capability because the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes and services are managed.

But it is not only the processes and the services they support that are under the scrutiny of continual service improvement. It looks at all elements that enable the delivery of services to the business. This will include all resources, partners, technology, staff skills, training, and communications. The emphasis on a holistic approach to improvement means that true business benefits can be achieved by delivering cost-effective enhancements across the wider enterprise. For example, renegotiating contracts with third-party suppliers may deliver an ongoing benefit to the business.

To achieve these benefits, it is necessary to ensure that monitoring and reporting on performance across the service portfolio allows for the identification of improvement opportunities.

Stage 1: What Is the Vision?

There are key questions that need to be asked as part of implementing improvements. These are all covered by the continual service improvement approach. The first stage is to identify the vision that is driving the improvement initiative. Understanding the high-level focus of the business will allow for the alignment of the IT services and the business strategies. The IT service provider’s vision must support the business vision, so this step is actually identifying the business vision and the IT vision that supports it.

Stage 2: Where Are We Now?

Stage 2 of the CSI approach is to assess the current situation to obtain an accurate, unbiased snapshot of where the organization is right now. This initial baseline assessment is essential; without it, we have no way of knowing whether we have been successful because we will have nothing to compare our postimprovement results with. If you have ever joined a gym to get fit, you know that the first action is to assess your current fitness level. This is documented, and another assessment is done after a few months to determine how much your fitness level has improved. This baseline assessment is an analysis of the current position in terms of the business, organization, people, processes, and technology. To ensure that the baseline is objective, external consultants may be used.

Stage 3: Where Do We Want to Be?

Stage 3 of the CSI approach is to decide where we want to be. Although we have already identified a vision, it is likely to be a high-level vision. By answering this question following the assessment of where the organization is currently, we are able to set measurable targets that will show an improvement on the results of the assessment. The full vision may be years away, but this step provides specific goals and a manageable time frame. So, our vision may be to provide extremely reliable services for all our customers, the assessment will show the services with the worst availability performance, and the targets set in this step would state explicitly the percentage of improvement in availability we must achieve for specific services across a defined time period. It is important that the targets set are challenging but achievable; setting targets that no one feels they have a chance of meeting will mean that CSI loses credibility and support. Remember also that these improvements take place alongside the provision of the usual service, so the amount of time and effort needed must be realistic.

Stage 4: How Do We Get There?

Stage 4 of the CSI approach is to define the steps to be taken to achieve the improvement targets we have defined. These steps will include improvements in service management processes and in the services provided. Other improvement actions may involve training staff and improving communication.

Stage 5: Did We Get There?

Stage 5 of the CSI approach assesses the success of the actions taken, asking, Did we get there? The results are compared with the original baseline taken in stage 2, and the extent of the improvement is compared with the target that was set in stage 3. We need to ensure that staff are complying with any new process requirements.

Stage 6: How Do We Keep the Momentum Going?

Finally, the process should ensure that the momentum for quality improvement is maintained and that changes become embedded in the organization. This stage involves ensuring that the improvement actions become the new business-as-usual way to operate. Because improvement must be continual, we also consider what actions should be taken next: Can we set new targets to move us closer to achieving the vision? Has the vision changed? What is the priority area for action? And so on.

Using the CSI Approach

To help the business decide whether to support a CSI initiative, we would ask the same questions we asked in the CSI approach, except the emphasis would be placed on the business perspective.

What Is the Vision? The IT service provider needs to understand the business vision and its long-term business aims. Often the business does not realize the importance of sharing its vision with IT.

Where Are We Now? We need to establish an agreed objective baseline of data for services currently being delivered.

Where Do We Want to Be? This is often expressed as business requirements.

How Do We Get There? What actions should be taken to achieve the desired end result? These improvement initiatives will often include a mix of short-, medium-, and long-term plans. They should be logged in the CSI register.

Did We Get There? This is assessed by reviewing service level achievements and performance against targets identified by the business requirements.

Proactive Improvement

Adopting an approach of continual service improvement does not mean that we have to wait for failures and then fix them through improvement initiatives. CSI does not need to wait until a service is operational to identify improvement opportunities. CSI is relevant for all lifecycle stages, so lessons learned from previous experience may lead to improvements in design or in planning and implementing a release. In this way, even new services can benefit from CSI, enabling the new services to avoid the same issues that have affected other services. CSI can therefore proactively prevent the potential flaws in new services.

Service Strategy

Service strategy focuses on setting a strategic approach to service management as well as defining standards and policies that will be used to design IT services. It is at this stage of the lifecycle that standards and policies are determined around measuring and reporting for an enterprise-wide view of the organization, possibly utilizing a tool such as a balanced scorecard.

Service improvement opportunities could be driven by external factors such as new security or regulatory requirements, new strategies due to mergers or acquisitions, changes in technology infrastructure, or even new business services to be introduced. Feedback from the other core stages of the service lifecycle will also be important.

Service Design

Service design creates or modifies services and infrastructures that are aligned to the business needs. Design ensures that a customer-centric viewpoint is used throughout. It takes the strategy described in the first stage and transforms it through the design stage into deliverable IT services.

Service design is responsible for designing a management information framework that defines the need for critical success factors (CSF), key performance indicators (KPIs), and activity metrics for both the services and the ITSM processes.

New strategies, architecture, policies, and business requirements will drive the need for continual improvement within service design. Service design will also ensure that the success of improvements can be measured.

Service Transition

Service transition manages the transition of new or changed services into the production environment. Change and configuration management play major roles at this point in the lifecycle. This stage focuses on the best practices of creating support models and a knowledge base, managing workflow, and developing communication and marketing for use in the transitioning of services to production. As new strategies and designs are introduced, this provides an excellent opportunity for continual improvement.

Service transition is also responsible for defining the actual CSFs, KPIs, and activity metrics; creating the reports; and implementing the required automation to monitor and report on the services and ITSM processes.

Service Operation

Service operation provides best practice advice and guidance on all aspects of managing the day-to-day operation of an organization’s IT services. Service operation is responsible for the monitoring and initial reporting related to the people, processes, and infrastructure technology necessary to ensure a high-quality, cost-effective provision of IT services that meet the business needs. Every technology component and process activity should have defined inputs and outputs that can be monitored. The results of the monitoring can then be compared against the norms, targets, or established service level agreements. When there is a discrepancy between what was actually delivered and what was expected, this becomes a service improvement opportunity.

Within the service operation stage of the lifecycle, internal reviews are performed to examine the results of the monitoring activity, what led to these results, and if necessary, recommendations for some level of fine-tuning.

Improvement throughout the Lifecycle

An organization can find improvement opportunities throughout the entire service lifecycle. There is no need to wait until a service or service management process is transitioned into the operations area to begin identifying improvement opportunities. Each lifecycle stage will provide an output to the next lifecycle stage. This same concept applies to CSI.

Figure 43.3 shows the interaction that should take place between each lifecycle stage. Take a moment to study it.

Service Strategy

We’ll start by looking at the inputs from service strategy into CSI; these include the strategic vision and mission, policies, and plans. The service portfolio is another input into CSI. One possible improvement activity is to try and identify possible gaps in the services provided or services that are no longer required. The strategic priorities are an important input because the improvement initiatives suggested should be in line with them.

CSI can use financial information and budgets to see how money is currently being spent; possible areas for cost savings may be identified as a result. CSI can understand the current situation by studying the patterns of business activity and examining how current performance matches the KPIs and CSFs. Any improvement opportunities identified are logged in the CSI register.

CSI outputs to strategy would include the results of customer and user satisfaction surveys from business relationship management, feedback on strategies and policies, and input to business cases and the service portfolio. Financial information regarding improvement initiatives would be an essential output because they would form an input to budgets. Other outputs would be the data required for metrics, KPIs and CSFs, service reports, and requests for change (RFCs) for implementing improvements.

Service Design

CSI inputs from design include the service catalog and the service design packages with their details of utility and warranty. Other inputs into CSI are the knowledge and information contained in the SKMS. This information records the detailed design, measurements, processes, infrastructure, and supporting systems for each service. Service design is also responsible for the design for the seven-step improvement process and procedures. A key input is the record of achievements against metrics, KPIs, and CSFs because it will often highlight improvement opportunities. As with the other lifecycle stages, all improvement opportunities are logged in the CSI register.

CSI outputs to design would be the results of customer and user satisfaction surveys; input to design requirements; the data required for metrics, KPIs, and CSFs; and service reports. Another possible output would be any feedback on service design packages. Any possible improvement opportunities would also mean CSI would raise RFCs for implementing them.

Service Transition

CSI inputs from transition would be the reports from testing—a failed test may be an improvement opportunity. Change evaluation reports would highlight any improvements needed if a change did not result in all the desired benefits. The knowledge and information in the SKMS would be useful to CSI, and the performance measurements showing whether service level targets, KPIs, and CSFs have been achieved would show possible improvement opportunities to be logged in the CSI register.

CSI outputs to service transition would be the results of customer and user satisfaction surveys; input to testing requirements; and data required for metrics, KPIs, and CSFs. CSI may also provide input to change evaluation and change advisory board meetings and service reports. CSI would raise the RFCs for implementing improvements.

Service Operation

Finally, let’s look at the inputs and outputs for CSI and service operation. The inputs to CSI would include operational performance data and service records (which would highlight weak areas), proposed problem resolutions and proactive measures (which would be improvement opportunities), the knowledge and information in the SKMS, and the achievements against metrics, KPIs, and CSFs. As with every other area, any improvement opportunities would be logged in the CSI register.

The CSI outputs to operation would be the results of customer and user satisfaction surveys; service reports and dashboards; the data required for metrics, KPIs, and CSFs; and the RFCs for implementing improvements.

Starting Improvement

At this point you may have concluded that all aspects of CSI must be in place before measurements and data gathering can begin. Nothing could be further from the truth. Improvement can start at any time. Although good data helps guide improvement, any data that can be gathered can form the starting point. Improving the information available can be one of the first CSI opportunities to be implemented. So don’t wait until everything is in place because you will have missed opportunities that could have been followed up.