Chapter 4

Understanding Service Design

THE FOLLOWING ITIL FOUNDATION EXAM OBJECTIVES ARE COVERED IN THIS CHAPTER:

• 2-5. Account for the purpose, objectives and scope of service design
• 2-6. Briefly explain what value service design provides to the business
• Unit 3: Generic concepts and definitions:
  • 3-14. Service design package
• 4-3. Understand the importance of people, processes, products and partners for service management
• 4-4. Understand the five major aspects of service design
  • Service solutions for new or changed services
  • Management information systems and tools
  • Technology architectures and management architectures
  • The processes required
  • Measurement methods and metrics

The success or failure of a service is largely dependent on its design. As a result, the ITIL framework spends a lot of time looking at this key lifecycle stage, so we will be spending the next few chapters covering service design and its processes.

This stage starts with a customer requirement for a new or changed service and finishes when a service that matches that need is ready to be handed over to the transition phase (together with the service design package that documents all aspects of the design). It is the aim of the transition stage to build and test the service and deploy it successfully into the operational environment, where it becomes the responsibility of the operation stage.

Poor design may mean that the service never delivers the value envisaged in the strategy stage. In Chapter 2, “Understanding Service Strategy,” we discussed the need for services to provide utility and warranty in order to deliver value. If a service is unable to deliver the level of service required consistently (because of poor availability, capacity issues, insufficient security, or a lack of service continuity), it will have failed to deliver the warranty required. It has often been an issue that design projects concentrate on delivering the utility of a new service but spend too little time ensuring that warranty is also delivered. It is the combination of these two aspects that deliver value (as we discussed when we covered the service strategy stage of the lifecycle in Chapter 2). Designing a service without considering what service levels it will need to meet will result in a service that fails to meet the customer’s requirements or requires expensive amendments once it is in operation.