Chapter 21
Introduction to Service Transition
THE FOLLOWING ITIL INTERMEDIATE EXAM OBJECTIVES ARE DISCUSSED IN THIS CHAPTER:
- ✓ The concepts of service transition relating to
- Purpose
- Objectives
- Scope
- Value to the business
- ✓ Service transition in relation to the other lifecycle stages
- Service strategy
- Service design
- Service operation
- Continual service improvement
In this chapter we will examine the concepts relating to the service transition lifecycle stage, including the purpose, objectives, and scope of the stage. You will be expected to be able to apply your understanding of these concepts in the examination. We will also consider the relationship of service transition to the other lifecycles stages, and you should be able to analyze these relationships and demonstrate your understanding of their importance in the examination.
Service Transition Concepts
Service transition’s main aim is to ensure that any modifications or transitions to the live operational environment—affecting new, modified, retiring, or retired services—meet the agreed expectations of the business, customers, and users.
Purpose
The purpose of service transition is to transition new, modified, retiring, or retired services that have been designed to deliver the strategy. Following transition, the services must meet the business expectations as established in the earlier lifecycle stages.
Objectives
The objectives of service transition include ensuring that changes to services happen as seamlessly as possible. The service releases are deployed into the supported live environment, where they can deliver the business value identified in service strategy. The new or changed service should be transitioned into the live environment without disrupting the other services and, as a result, without disrupting the business. Transition must strike a balance between avoiding risk to the live services and ensuring that the business can receive the new or changed service it requires without unnecessary delay or cost. Effective risk management is therefore also a key objective of this lifecycle stage.
A key aspect of service transition is communication. The business must know what to expect from the new or changed service in terms of its performance or use; if the business’s expectations are not managed, it may judge a transition to have failed because it did not deliver the benefits or functionality that it was expecting but had never been part of the design.
Having said that, however, transition must ensure that the expected business value is delivered. It is a common mistake to focus on the successful installation of hardware or software and fail to ensure that the business obtains the expected value from these.
An essential part of every transition is the accompanying knowledge transfer. A key objective of service transition is to provide good-quality knowledge and information about services and service assets.
The requirements for successful service transition are as follows:
- Careful planning of resources
- Risk assessment and mitigation
- Control of service assets to ensure that their integrity is maintained
- Efficient repeatable mechanisms for building, testing, and releasing the service to increase the chances of success while reducing the cost and risks of transition
Service transition must understand the constraints under which the service will operate and ensure that the transitioned service can operate and be managed and supported successfully under these constraints.
Scope
The guidance given in the ITIL Service Transition volume is focused on improving an organization’s capabilities for transferring new and changed services into supported environments. Its scope is wider than change management’s scope; it covers planning the release, building and testing it, and then evaluating and deploying it. Included within the scope of service transition are retiring services at the end of their useful life and transferring services between service providers, such as during an outsourcing or insourcing exercise or when a service is moved from one outsourced service provider to another. Service transition is all about ensuring that the requirements from service strategy, which were developed in service design, are effectively realized in service operation while controlling the risks of failure and subsequent disruption. A well-designed service can be damaged in the eyes of the business if it is poorly transitioned. If it fails to deliver the benefits reliably because the planning or testing was insufficient, it may be rejected by the business.
Service transition provides guidance on managing changes to services and service management processes, ensuring that the organization is protected from unplanned consequences of changes, while still enabling successful changes that deliver business benefits. These changes may be new services or improvements to existing services, such as expansion, reduction, change of supplier, acquisition or disposal of user base or suppliers, or changed requirements.
Service transition also covers managing the end of a service being provided, including decommissioning equipment, discontinuing contracts or other service components, and so on.
The scope of service transition also includes managing the introduction of changes to the service provider’s people, processes, products, or partners.
Transition includes managing the transfer of services to and from other service providers:
- Transfer to a new supplier by outsourcing the work or transfer between suppliers. Sometimes the transfer is from a supplier to in-house provision. This is called insourcing.
- Moving to a partnership or co-sourcing arrangement for some aspects of the service; this may involve multiple suppliers and is sometimes called multi-sourcing.
Although the service itself may not change, such transfers are not without risk, and careful planning is required to ensure that the transfer appears seamless to the business and nothing is forgotten.
Other transitions may be the result of setting up a joint venture with another organization or restructuring the organization through reducing staff (downsizing) or increasing staff (upsizing). Both of these are known as rightsizing, and the best solution will vary among organizations. Finally, work may be transferred to a location with cheaper labor costs. This is called offshoring. The organization may be involved in a merger or an acquisition.
Of course, in any organization, several of these transitions may be combined, with all present risk as well as opportunity, and so must be carefully planned and executed.
The following two lists include the service transition processes. They can be categorized into two groups, based on the extent to which their activities take place within the service transition stage of the service lifecycle. The first group consists of processes that are critical during the service transition stage but influence and support all stages of the service lifecycle:
- Change management
- Service asset and configuration management
- Knowledge management
The second group consists of processes whose focus is strongly related to service transition:
- Transition planning and support
- Release and deployment management
- Service testing and validation
- Change evaluation
We shall look at all of these processes later in this publication. Remember, almost all transition processes are active in other stages of the lifecycle, and transition is also impacted by processes from other lifecycle stages.
All the lifecycle processes should be linked closely together, and it is important to define the interfaces between processes when designing a service or improving or implementing a process.
Figure 21.1 shows all of the processes described in ITIL Service Transition.
Figure 21.1 The scope of service transition
Copyright © AXELOS Limited 2010. All rights reserved. Material is reproduced under license from AXELOS.
Processes that are largely within the service transition stage of the service lifecycle are shown within the central rectangle; the other stages of the service lifecycle that come before and after these processes are shown in the smaller, darker rectangles. The service transition processes that support the whole lifecycle are shown in the mid-color rectangles.
Value to the Business
Selecting and adopting the best practice as recommended by ITIL will assist organizations in delivering significant benefits. Adopting and implementing standard and consistent approaches for service transition will benefit the business by making it easier for projects to estimate the cost, timing, resource requirement, and risks associated with service transition. This in turn enables a higher volume of successful change because there will be less rework required. Other benefits include clear processes that are easy to adopt and follow and sharing assets across projects while avoiding clashes between transition projects that require the same asset (such as a test environment) at the same time. Avoiding such clashes will also reduce delay. Following the advice will also minimize the effort spent on managing the service transition test and pilot environments.
Good service transition ensures the following benefits:
- Better expectation setting for all stakeholders involved in service transition, including customers, users, suppliers, partners, and projects
- Increased confidence that the new or changed services can be delivered to specification without unexpectedly affecting other services or stakeholders
- Ensuring that new or changed services will be maintainable and cost-effective and improving the control of service assets and configurations
Service Transition in the Context of the Service Lifecycle
Service transition is a key stage in the service lifecycle. We will review how service transition interacts with each lifecycle stage in turn.
Service Strategy
Service strategy is at the core of the service lifecycle. It is the role of strategy to understand the organizational objectives and customer needs and provide the perspective, position, plans, and patterns to support the strategy.
ITIL service strategy asks why something is to be done before thinking of how. Incorporating the processes of service portfolio management, demand management, financial management for IT services, business relationship management, and strategy management for IT services, this stage makes the plans for the IT services.
It helps service providers to set objectives; set expectations of performance serving customers and markets; and identify, select, and prioritize opportunities.
Service strategy ensures that providers understand and can handle the costs and risks associated with their service portfolios.
Service Design
Service design turns strategic ideas into deliverables. The design must always consider the strategy to ensure that services are designed with the business objectives in mind.
Design considers the whole IT organization and how it will deliver and support the services, turning the service strategy into a plan for delivering the business objectives.
Remember, design includes changes to existing services, not just the introduction of new services.
The service design processes include design coordination, service catalog management, service level management, availability management, capacity management, IT service continuity management, information security management, and supplier management.
Through these processes, service design ensures that both the utility and the warranty of the new or changed service is considered in design, covering the continuity of the service, its achievement of service levels, and its conformance to security standards and regulations.
Service Transition
Service transition, the subject of this section of the book, provides guidance for developing and improving capabilities for introducing new and changed services into supported environments.
The value of a service is identified in strategy, and the service is designed to deliver that value. Service transition ensures that the value is realized by enabling the necessary changes to take place without unacceptable risks to existing services.
Service transition enables the implementation of new services, and the modification of existing services, to ensure that the services provided deliver the service strategy of achieving the business objectives and that the benefits of the service design are fully realized.
Service transition also introduces the service knowledge management system, which ensures that knowledge is stored and made available to all stages of the service lifecycle so that lessons are learned and decisions are backed with factual data, leading to improved efficiency and effectiveness over time.
The service transition processes include transition planning and support, change management, service asset and configuration management, release and deployment management, service validation and testing, change evaluation, and knowledge management.
Each process has a role to play to ensure that beneficial changes can take place and, as a consequence, the service can be introduced and will work as transitioned.
Service Operation
Service operation describes best practice for managing services in supported environments. It includes guidance on achieving effectiveness, efficiency, stability, and security in the delivery and support of services to ensure value for the customer, the users, and the service provider. Without this, the services would not deliver the value required and the achievement of business objectives would become difficult or impossible.
The service operation stage is therefore critical to delivering the design and, in doing so, achieving the service strategy and outcomes.
Service operation provides detailed guidance for delivering the service within the agreed service levels by tackling issues both proactively through problem management and reactively through incident management. It provides those delivering the service with guidance in managing the availability of services, controlling demand, optimizing capacity utilization, scheduling operations, and avoiding or resolving service incidents and managing problems. It includes advice on shared services, utility computing, web services, and mobile commerce. By delivering the services to the agreed levels, service operations enable the business to use the services to achieve its business objectives.
The service operation processes include event management, incident management, request fulfilment, problem management, and access management.
Each process has a role to play to ensure the delivery of services within the agreed service levels. The operations functions are the service desk, technical management, IT operations management, and application management. Each function is responsible for managing its own area of delivery across all stages of the lifecycle.
Continual Service Improvement
CSI ensures that the service provider continues to provide value to customers by ensuring that the strategy, design, transition, and operation of the services is under constant review. Feedback from any stage of the service lifecycle can be used to identify improvement opportunities for any other stage of the lifecycle. It ensures that opportunities for improvement are recognized, evaluated, and implemented when justified. These may include improvements in the quality of the service or the capabilities of the service provider. It may be developing ways of doing things better, or doing them to the same level but more efficiently. Improvements may be major or small and incremental. It enables every new transition to incorporate lessons from previous transitions.
CSI ensures that feedback from every lifecycle stage is captured, analyzed, and acted upon. The CSI approach to improvement is based on establishing a baseline and checking to see whether the improvement actions have been effective. It uses the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle together with service measurement, demonstrating value with metrics, and conducting maturity assessments. The seven-step improvement process provides a framework for these approaches.
Summary
In this chapter we looked at the introduction to service transition. We explored the purpose, objectives, and scope of service transition and its value to the business. We examined the context of service transition in relation to the other four stages of the service lifecycle: service strategy, service design, service operation, and continual service improvement.
Exam Essentials
Understand the purpose of service transition. All lifecycle stages are important, but the purpose of service transition is to ensure that strategy and design are implemented correctly.
Be able to explain and expand on the objectives of service transition. Ensure that the implementation of any and all new or changed services is seamless and effective for the business.
Understand and expand on the scope of service transition. The scope of service transition is to improve an organization’s capabilities for transferring new and changed services into supported environments, including all aspects of change, release, evaluation, and testing for new, modified, retiring, or retired services.
Be able to explain and justify the value of service transition to the business. Transition is a key part of the lifecycle, enabling the services to be integrated seamlessly into the organization. Without this stage, testing and preparation may be overlooked, causing difficulties in delivery and support.
Understand and explain service transition in the context of the service lifecycle. Transition is responsible for ensuring that the decisions and designs made in strategy and design are implemented successfully so that they can be of value to the business in operation. All lifecycle stages are of course integrated with continual service improvement.
You can find the answers to the review questions in the appendix. Which of the following is NOT an objective of service transition? Which of the following statements about service transition is/are correct? Which of these situations is out of scope for service transition? True or False? The purpose of service transition is to ensure that new or changed services are designed according to the strategy. Which of these options is NOT an aspect of successful service transition? Which of these processes is considered to have a focus that is strongly related to service transition rather than in use across the service lifecycle? Which of these statements is/are correct about the scope of service transition? Which of the following approaches are included in the management of transitional activity? Which of these statements is correct about the service lifecycle? True or False? Service transition integrates with continual service improvement and will apply the PDCA approach to improving the processes in the transition lifecycle stage.Review Questions