THE FOLLOWING ITIL INTERMEDIATE EXAM OBJECTIVES ARE DISCUSSED IN THIS CHAPTER:

• ✓  Service design challenges
• ✓  Service design critical success factors
• ✓  Service design risks

This chapter covers the challenges, critical success factors, and risks of service design. The learning objective for this chapter is to gain an understanding of these three areas.

Service Design Challenges

Every new design comes with challenges related to meeting all stakeholders’ requirements. The following list includes some examples of service design challenges:

• Organizational resistance to change.
• Difficulty with documentation and adherence to agreed practices and processes.
• Unclear or changing requirements from the business. This may be unavoidable in some cases because business needs are likely to change. The service provider must strive for a close relationship with the business customer. This will ensure that any changing requirements are identified as quickly as possible.
• A lack of awareness and knowledge of service and business targets and requirements. Effective requirements gathering and testing will help ensure that all the required facilities are built into the design.
• A resistance to planning, or a lack of planning leading to unplanned initiatives and unplanned purchases.
• Inefficient use of resources, causing wasted time and money.
• Resistance to work within the agreed strategy.
• Restrictions due to the need to use legacy systems.
• Required tools that are too costly or too complex to implement or maintain with the current staff skills.
• Lack of information, monitoring, and measurements.
• Unreasonable targets and timescales previously agreed to in the SLAs and OLAs.
• Overcommitment of available resources with an associated inability to deliver (e.g., projects always late or over budget).
• Poor supplier management and/or poor supplier performance.
• Lack of focus on service availability.
• The use of diverse and disparate technologies and applications.
• Lack of awareness and adherence to the operational aspects of security policies and procedures.
• Ensuring that normal daily operation or business as usual is considered as part of the design.
• Cost and budgetary constraints.
• Difficulty ascertaining the return on investments and the realization of business benefit.

Critical Success Factors

Let us now consider some of the critical success factors for successful service design. Let’s first remind ourselves of the definitions of critical success factors (CSFs) and key performance indicators (KPIs). A CSF describes something that is necessary for an organization or project to achieve its mission.

Key performance indicators are measures that show whether we are meeting our CSFs. There should be KPIs for the overall design and for each of the processes. Achievement against KPIs should be monitored; this will highlight possible opportunities for improvement, which should be logged in the CSI register for evaluation and possible implementation.

Set a small subset of CSFs and KPIs and focus on these. Over time, other areas can become the focus, but having too many CSFs at once risks dissipating effort. These CSFs and KPIs should be set at the beginning of any implementation or improvement activities. It is important that CSFs are agreed on during design so that the design includes the necessary metrics. KPIs should measure both utility and warranty to ensure a complete picture.

It is also important to consider the resources used, not just the quality of the product, when evaluating efficiency. Collect data regularly, especially as part the review for each significant stage to ensure that objectives have been met.

It is vital when designing services or processes that KPIs are designed from the outset and collected regularly and at important milestones. For example, at the completion of each significant stage of the program, a postimplementation review should be conducted to ensure that the objectives have been met. The postimplementation review will include a review of supporting documentation and the general awareness among staff of the refined processes.

Clearly defined objectives with measurable targets should be set in order to assess the quality of the service. These will provide confirmation or otherwise of the success of any improvement initiatives. Carry out a comparison of what has been achieved against the original goals set in the project. Once this has been confirmed, new improvement targets should be defined.

Service Design Risks

There are a number of risks directly associated with the service design stage of the service lifecycle:

• Failing to meet a CSF is a risk, especially if this is the result of immature processes; when there are poor processes in one area, there is a risk of other areas or processes being affected. Poor incident management, especially concerning the quality and quantity of data gathered, will affect problem management as well as incident management itself. Poor configuration management makes the impact assessment of a change much more difficult.
• Failure to manage unrealistic business expectations may mean that the design does not meet the requirement.
• Insufficient testing may allow poor-quality services to be launched into the live operational environment.
• Another risk is failing to achieve a balance between innovation, risk, and cost while seeking a competitive edge; this could mean excessive costs or designs that cannot deliver.
• There may be too much focus on IT improvements without a clear understanding of business needs and objectives. There may not be a good enough fit between infrastructures, customers, and partners to meet the overall business requirements, or there may be a poorly implemented interface between IT and business planners.
• The service strategy may not be understood or processes may be over- or underengineered. Insufficient resources, budget, time, or skills available for service design activities are common risks. Services may be developed in isolation for short-term savings but may be much more costly in the long term.
• The approach to CSI may be ad hoc, with no consistent approach to identifying areas most in need of improvement.
• The service provider may fail to carry out sufficient monitoring and analysis to identify the areas of greatest need.
• A lack of commitment to improvement by staff will make success almost impossible.
• Insufficient data to populate a business case for improvement may mean that the importance of the improvement is not realized.
• There may be a lack of ownership or loss of ownership for the improvement initiatives.

Finally, although a culture of continuous improvement is to be encouraged, the organization should not lose sight of the business needs and objectives; improvements should not be carried out for their own sake but only when they further those business aims and objectives.

Summary

In this chapter we discussed the following:

• Service design challenges
• Service design critical success factors
• Service design risks

We have now completed the entire syllabus for the Service Design Lifecycle examination.

Exam Essentials

Understand the challenges faced by service design staff when designing services that meet stakeholder requirements. Understand the difficulties caused for service design by unclear requirements. Be able to list several other challenges that are commonly encountered.

Understand how service design challenges may be overcome using ITIL guidance regarding best practice. Understand how the advice contained within ITIL core guidance addresses the challenges, in particular regarding gathering requirements and ensuring buy-in from stakeholders.

Understand the role played by KPIs in relation to CSFs. Understand that it is through measurement of KPIs that we know whether we are achieving our CSFs.

Understand the critical success factors that need to be in place if successful service design is to take place. Understand the importance of clearly defined objectives with measurable targets. Be able to list some CSFs and their related KPIs for service design.

Know the risks encountered in the service design stage, in particular the danger that the importance of this stage may not be recognized. Understand the risk that spending insufficient time or resources on service design in order to save time or money will lead to increased costs and delays later.