Policy

This policy states that “a formal policy for service transition should be defined, documented, and approved by the management team, who ensure that it is communicated throughout the organization and to all relevant suppliers and partners” (ITIL Service Transition core volume).

Principles

The formal policy should clearly state the objectives and that any noncompliance with the policy shall be remedied. It is important to ensure that the policy aligns with the overall governance framework, organization, and service management policies. The sponsors and decision-makers involved in developing the policy must demonstrate their commitment to adapting and implementing it. This includes the commitment to deliver predicted outcomes from any change in the services.

Teamwork is an important factor in developing the overall policy for transition, and this stage should use processes that integrate teams. This will allow for a blend of competencies while maintaining clear lines of accountability and responsibility.

It is important for any changes to be delivered in releases. This means that the department should address deployment early in the release design and release planning stages, demonstrating a commitment to engagement with transition.

Best Practice

The best practice example for this policy would be that formal sign-off is obtained from the management team, sponsors, and decision-makers involved in developing the policy. This demonstrates the commitment required from a top-down approach.

Policy

The governance policy states that “all changes to the service portfolio or service catalog are implemented through change management and the changes that are managed by the service transition lifecycle stage are defined and agreed” (ITIL Service Transition core volume).

Principles

This governance approach includes the following requirements or principles:

• That there is a single focal point for changes to the live production services to minimize the probability of conflicting changes and potential disruption to the supported environment. This should include the principle that people who do not have the authority to make a change or release into the supported environment are prevented from having access.
• There should be sufficient familiarity with the service operation organization to enhance mobilization and enable organizational change.
• There should be an increase in knowledge of and experience with the services and supported environments to improve efficiency.
• Each release package will be designed and governed by a request for change raised via the change management process to ensure effective control and traceability.
• Standardized methods and procedures will be used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes in order to minimize the impact of change-related incidents on business continuity, service quality, and rework.
• All updates to changes and releases will be recorded against service assets and/or configuration items in the configuration management system.

Best Practice

Management commitment to the change process should be clear and visible, supporting existing processes through standardization and a top-down management approach.

Changes should be defined in a service design package and supported by a business case to ensure commitment from all areas.

Policy

The policy states that service transition should be based on a common framework of standard reusable processes and systems to improve integration of the parties involved in service transition and reduce variations in the processes.

Principles

The principles supporting the policy to adopt a standardized approach include the requirement to implement industry best practices as the basis of standardization. This will enable integration across the supply chain and support seamless transition activity.

Once agreed, it is recommended that the service transition framework and standards are controlled under change and configuration management.

Maintaining the standards is key, so to ensure that processes are adopted consistently, there should be regular, scheduled reviews and audits of the service management processes.

Best Practice

The examples of best practices for standardization include ensuring that the standards and best practices for service transition are published. There is also a need to provide a framework for establishing consistent processes for evaluating the service capability and risk profile and ensuring that it is in place before and after a release is deployed.

To achieve this standardization, it is important to provide supporting systems to automate standard processes in order to reduce resistance to adoption. This will require management understanding the need for standard ways of working so that there is a consistent approach to developing and delivering improvements based on a sound business case.

The engagement and commitment of management and stakeholders will be important, and there should be action taken to close any gaps. This will encourage continual planning of how to improve the buy-in to adopting a common framework and standards.

Policy

The policy states that service transition processes should be aligned with the organization’s processes and related systems to improve efficiency and effectiveness, and where new processes are required, they are developed with reuse in mind.

This approach supports the continual service improvement of the service lifecycle as well as optimizing efficiency and the use of resources.

Principles

The principles associated with this policy are concerned with the reuse of established processes and systems wherever possible. This will include capturing data and information from the original source to reduce errors and aid efficiency.

The development of reusable standard service transition models to build up experience and confidence in the service transition activities is also key and should support the implementation of industry standards and best practices as the basis of standardization. This should enable the integration of deliverables from many suppliers.

Best Practice

The best practices that demonstrate the policy and principles are the integration of the service transition processes into the quality management system, showing the capability to reuse the processes.

Best practice will also encourage use of the organization’s program and project management practices to utilize a repeatable methodology. This includes using the existing communications channels for service transition communication.

It is important to ensure that the service transition approach adopts and follows human resources, training, finance and facilities management processes, and common practices.

Another consideration will be to design the service transition models to enable easy customization to suit specific circumstances but structure models such that a consistent approach is repeated for each target service unit or environment, with local variation as required.

Policy

The policy states that, in order to maximize the value delivered by a change, service transition plans and new or changed services should be aligned to the customer and business needs.

This policy is a reflection of the overall approach adopted throughout the lifecycle from service strategy to continual service improvement.

Principles

The principles supporting this alignment include setting the customer and user expectations during transition on how the performance and use of the new or changed service can enable business change. This involves the provision of information and establishing processes to enable business change projects and customers to integrate a release into their business processes and services. It should ensure that the service can be used in accordance with the requirements and constraints specified within the service requirements in order to improve customer and stakeholder satisfaction.

The communication and transfer of knowledge to the customers, users, and stakeholders is a vital part of increasing their capability to maximize use of the new or changed service.

Monitoring and measuring the use of the services and underlying applications and technology solutions during deployment and early life support should ensure that the service is well established before transition closure.

Service transition should compare the actual performance of services after a transition against the predicted performance defined in service design, with the aim of reducing variations in service capability and performance.

Best Practice

The best practice approach should be to adopt program and project management best practices to plan and manage the resources required to package, build, test, and deploy a release successfully within the predicted cost, quality, and time estimates.

Any new implementation of a change or new service should provide clear and comprehensive plans that enable the customer and business change projects to align their activities with the service transition plans.

As part of any change or transition of a new or changed service, it will also be important to manage stakeholder commitment and communications.

Policy

This policy is to establish and maintain relationships with customers, customer representatives, users, and suppliers throughout service transition in order to set their expectations about the new or changed service.

Principles

The principles associated with this policy are as follows:

• Set stakeholder expectations on how the performance and use of the new or changed service can enable business change.
• Communicate changes to all stakeholders in order to improve their understanding and knowledge of the new or changed service.
• Provide good-quality knowledge and information so that stakeholders can find information about the service transition easily—for example, release and deployment plans and release documentation.

Best Practice

The best practices that support this policy are as follows:

• Checking with stakeholders to make sure the new or changed service can be used in accordance with the requirements and constraints specified within the service requirements
• Ensuring that service transition and release plans and any changes are shared with stakeholders
• Working with business relationship management and service level management to build customer and stakeholder relationships during service transition
• Working with supplier management to ensure commitment and support from key suppliers during and following transition

Policy

The policy states that it is necessary to establish suitable controls and disciplines throughout the service lifecycle to enable the smooth transition of service changes and releases.

This will ensure a seamless transition of new or changed services through the service lifecycle from strategy to continual service improvement.

Principles

The supporting principles for maintenance of suitable controls include service asset and configuration management, which is accomplished by establishing and maintaining the integrity of all identified service assets and configurations as they evolve through the service transition stage.

Where possible and cost effective, audit activities should be automated to increase the detection of unauthorized changes and discrepancies in the configurations.

Roles and responsibilities throughout the transition should be clearly defined to understand who is doing what, when, and where at all handover points. Doing so will increase accountability for delivery against the plans and processes. This will include the definition and communication of roles and responsibilities for handover and acceptance through the service transition activities (e.g., build, test, release, and deployment) to reduce errors resulting from misunderstandings and lack of ownership.

It will also be important to establish transaction-based processes for configuration, change, and problem management to provide an audit trail and the management information necessary to improve the controls.

Best Practice

The best practices for this policy should ensure that roles and responsibilities are well defined, maintained, and understood by those involved and mapped to any relevant processes for current and foreseen circumstances. This will involve the assignment of people to each role and the maintenance of the assignment in the service knowledge management system (SKMS) or configuration management system (CMS) to provide visibility of the person responsible for particular activities.

Implementing integrated incident, problem, change, and configuration management processes with service level management to measure the quality of configuration items throughout the service lifecycle is also important for the support of this policy. This will ensure that the service can be managed, operated, and supported in accordance with the requirements and constraints specified within the service design by the service provider organization.

Ensuring that only competent staff can implement changes to controlled test environments and supported services will provide further protection against errors. Checking and performing configuration audits and process audits to identify configuration discrepancies and nonconformance that may impact service transitions will also support this policy.

Policy

The policy specifies the knowledge transfer that is required in order to support decision-making in the organization. It states that service transition develops systems and processes to transfer knowledge for effective operation of the service and to enable decisions to be made at the right time by competent decision-makers.

It is a key function of the transition lifecycle stage to ensure that sufficient knowledge is transferred to the operational teams so that full understanding of new or changed services is communicated effectively. This will ensure that the decision-makers have the right information at the right time for effective operation of the service.

Principles

One of the principles that supports the transfer of knowledge and decision-making is that the service transition stage provides quality data, information, and knowledge at the right time to the right people to reduce effort spent waiting for decisions and consequent delays. It is important to ensure that there is adequate training and knowledge transfer to users to reduce the number of training calls that the service desk handles.

Service transition should improve the quality of information and data to improve user and stakeholder satisfaction while optimizing the cost of production and maintenance. This will involve improving the quality of documentation to reduce the number of incidents and problems caused by poor-quality user, release, deployment, support, and operational documentation. In addition, service transition should improve the quality of release and deployment documentation between the time changes are implemented and the document is updated.

It is also necessary to provide easy access to quality information to reduce the time spent searching for and finding information, particularly during critical activities such as handling a major incident.

A key principle is to establish the definitive source of information and share information across the service lifecycle and with stakeholders in order to maximize the quality of information and reduce the overhead in maintaining information. This will provide consolidated information to enable change management and release and deployment management to expedite effective decisions about promoting a release through the test environments and into a supported operational environment.

Best Practice

Demonstration of the principles for knowledge transfer include the provision of easy access and presentation and reporting tools for the service knowledge management system (SKMS) and configuration management system (CMS).

Another best practice approach is to provide quality user interfaces and tools to the SKMS and CMS for different people and roles to make decisions at appropriate times. It is important that, during service transition, the change evaluation process summarizes and publishes the predicted and unpredicted effects of change, deviations from actual versus predicted capability and performance, and the risk profile.

Service transition is also responsible for ensuring that service asset and configuration management information is accurate. This will be important to trigger approval and notification transactions for decision-making via workflow tools—for example, changes and acceptance of deliverables.

It is key to this lifecycle stage that there is provision of knowledge, information and data for deployment, service desk, operations, and support teams to resolve incidents and errors.

Policy

The policy states that release packages are planned and designed to be built, tested, delivered, distributed, and deployed into the live environment in a manner that provides the agreed levels of traceability in a cost-effective and efficient way.

This policy ensures that there is an audit trail and that the environment remains stable and secure.

Principles

The supporting principles ensure that appropriate planning takes place in advance and that a release policy is agreed on with the business and all relevant stakeholders. It is important that all resources are properly utilized to enable costs to be optimized during this lifecycle stage. This will require coordination of resources across release and deployment activities.

To maintain the integrity of release components, release and distribution mechanisms are planned for the installation, handling, packaging, and delivery of releases. If there is a requirement for an emergency release, this should be managed in accordance with the emergency change procedure. Coordinating these processes ensures that the risks of backing out or remediating a failed release can be assessed and managed with minimal disruption to the business.

The success or failure of a release should be measured so that improvements can be made, if required, to effectiveness, efficiency, and cost optimization.

Best Practice

These principles will be evidenced by ensuring that all updates to releases are managed and recorded through the configuration management system. This should include the capture of the definitive versions of electronic media, including software, in a definitive media library prior to release into the service operations readiness test environment.

The planned release and deployment dates and deliverables should be recorded, referencing the related change requests and problems. This should include proven procedures for handling, distribution, and delivery of release and deployment packages, including verification. It is important to ensure that the prerequisites and corequisites for a release (for example, technical requirements for test environment) are documented and communicated to the relevant parties.

Policy

The policy states that the service provider should anticipate and manage course corrections. This will require staff to be trained to recognize the need for course corrections and to empower them to apply necessary variations within prescribed and understood limits.

Principles

The principles supporting the policy include building stakeholder expectations to accept that changes to plans are necessary and encouraged. It is important to learn from previous course corrections to predict future ones and reuse successful approaches.

This can be achieved by ensuring that end-of-transition debriefing sessions take place to propagate knowledge and make conclusions available through the service knowledge management system. All course corrections should be managed through the appropriate change management and baseline procedures.

Best Practice

In order to manage course corrections effectively, it is important to use best practice approaches such as project management practices and the change management process. This will include documenting and controlling changes, but without making the process bureaucratic (it must be easier to do it correctly than to cope with the consequences of doing it wrong).

A key factor will be to provide information on changes that were applied after the configuration baseline was established. This can be demonstrated by involving stakeholders with changes but managing issues and risks within service transition when appropriate.

Policy

The policy states that the service provider should provide and manage shared and specialist resources across service transition activities to eliminate delays.

Principles

It is important to recognize the resources, skills, and knowledge required to deliver service transition within the organization. This will require the development of a team (including externally sourced resources) capable of successful implementation of the service transition strategy, service design package, and release package.

Establishing dedicated resources to perform critical activities to reduce delays is crucial to the management of shared resources to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of service transition. This will involve automating repetitive and error-prone processes to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of key activities such as distribution, build, and installation.

Best Practice

The best practice approach to demonstrate this policy is to work with human resources (HR), supplier management, and so on to identify, manage, and make use of competent and available resources. It is important to recognize and use competent and specialist resources outside the core ITSM team to deliver service transition.

Management of shared resources to minimize the impact that delays in one transition have on another transition is something that should be planned proactively. In this way, it should be possible to measure the impact of using dedicated versus nondedicated resources on delays—for example, using operations staff who get diverted to fix major incidents or resolving scheduling issues with test facilities.

Policy

The policy states that the service provider should establish suitable controls and disciplines to check at the earliest possible stage in the service lifecycle that a new or changed service will be capable of delivering the value required.

Principles

One principle supporting this early engagement is to use a range of techniques to maximize fault detection early in the service lifecycle in order to reduce the cost of rectification. This is because the later in the lifecycle an error is detected, the higher the cost of rectification.

It is also important to identify changes that will not deliver the expected benefits and either change the service requirements or stop the change before resources are wasted. Stopping a change is always a difficult choice because it is a recognition that the time and effort already expended have been wasted. So the earlier these checks can be made, the better for the service provider and customer.

Best Practice

There are a number of ways to ensure that early engagement is taking place, and foremost is to involve customers or customer representatives in service acceptance test planning and test design to understand how to validate that the service will add value to the customer’s business processes and services.

Involving users in test planning and design whenever possible is also valuable. This should include base testing on how the users actually work with a service, not just how the designers intended it to be used.

As always, use previous experience to identify errors in the service design.

It is necessary to build in—at the earliest possible stage—the ability to check for and demonstrate that a new or changed service will be capable of delivering the value required of it. This may require an independent evaluation of the service design and internal audits to establish whether the risks of progressing are acceptable.

Policy

The policy here states that it will be necessary to verify and validate that the proposed changes to the operational services are defined in the service and release definitions, service model, and service design package. This is to assure that it can deliver the required service requirements and business benefits.

Principles

Assurance of quality is an important factor in any change, and service transition is responsible for assuring that the proposed changes to the operational services can be delivered according to the agreements, specifications, and plans within agreed confidence levels.

Customer and user satisfaction will be very important, and it is necessary to ensure that service transition teams understand what the customers and business actually require from a service to improve customer and user satisfaction.

There are many approaches to assuring success, but quality assurance and testing practices provide a comprehensive method for assuring the quality and risks of new or changed services.

There are some obvious requirements for the success of any transition. For example, test environments need to reflect the live environment to the greatest degree possible in order to optimize the testing efforts.

Also, there is the need to manage test design and execution and ensure that testing is delivered independently from the service designer and developer in order to increase the effectiveness of testing and meet any segregation of duty requirements.

Performing independent evaluations of the service design and the new or changed service to identify the risks that need to be managed and mitigated during build, test, deployment, and use of the service is also key. This will require the implementation of problem and configuration management processes across the service lifecycle to measure and reduce the known errors caused by implementing releases into the live environment.

Best Practice

The best practices for testing include ensuring that service transition understands the business’s process and priorities. This often requires an understanding of the business’s culture, language, customs, and customers.

Comprehensive engagement with, and involvement of, stakeholders is important both for effective testing and to build stakeholder confidence and so should be visible across the stakeholder community.

It is necessary to understand the differences between the build, test, and supported environments in order to manage any differences and improve the ability to predict a service’s behavior. This will include ensuring that test environments are maintained under change and configuration management and that their continued relevance is considered directly as part of any change.

The service provider should establish the current service baseline and the service design baseline prior to evaluation of the change. They can then evaluate the predicted capability, quality, and costs of the service design, taking into account the results of previous experience and stakeholder feedback prior to release and deployment.

It is also very important to consider the circumstances that will actually be in place when service transition is complete, not just what was expected at the design stage.

Policy

The resulting policy states that the service provider should proactively plan and improve the quality of the new or changed service during transition.

Principles

The supporting principles include the detection and resolution of incidents and problems during transition to reduce the likelihood of errors occurring during the operational phase and directly affecting business operations adversely. Often service providers apply these processes only during the operational stage of the lifecycle, but they are invaluable in management of transition as well. By proactively managing and reducing incidents, problems, and errors detected during service transition, the service provider will be able to reduce costs, rework, and the impact on the user’s business activities. It is therefore important to align the management of incidents, problems, and errors during transition with the service operation processes in order to measure and manage the impact and cost of errors across the service lifecycle easily.

Best Practice

The best practice approaches that support this policy are to perform an independent evaluation of the new or changed service to identify the risk profile and prioritize the risks that need to be mitigated prior to transition closure. Such risks would include, for example, security risks that may impact the warranties.

Service providers should use the risk profile from the evaluation of the service design to develop risk-based tests. They should also encourage cross-fertilization of knowledge (for example, work-arounds and fixes) between transition and operation stages to improve problem diagnoses and resolution time. This should include the establishment of transition incident, problem, error, and resolution procedures and measures that reflect the procedures in use in the live environment. These processes will allow the service provider to fix known errors and resolve incidents in accordance with their priority for resolution, including documenting resolutions such as work-arounds so that the information can be analyzed. With this information, the service provider will be able to proactively analyze the root cause of high-priority and repeat incidents.

As with the live environment, it is important to record, classify, and measure the number and impact of incidents and problems against each release in the test, deployment, and live service stages in order to identify early opportunities to fix errors. This allows the service provider to compare the number and impact of incidents and problems between deployments in order to identify improvements and fix any underlying problems that will improve the user experience for subsequent deployments.