In this short blog, I am going to try and help you get to an understanding of what a service is and some simple techniques or methods to define them. For the academics reading this, you are probably already reaching for your ITIL books and reading verbatim what it suggests. Taxonomy of a service is an important term to understand, and there are two ways to think about this:
- a classification scheme for services that establishes defined patterns of conduct, reusable business rules, layers of commonality, and architectural and design patterns for building solutions … or
- Identify the service and say what it does and why
Personally, I understand the 2nd option more easily. We are all in the service business..the request to write this blog is just that. a request of my services to put hand to keyboard. I often speak about categorising your Inbox into the 4 categories of 'Help, Change, Request, Knowledge'. Almost all things you have piled up will fall into one of these categories. In IT we are pretty familiar with these terms, but go outside of IT and we start to struggle. Regardless of what department you work in, you provide some type of service all day everyday. So lets start with what are the things you do, what they provide to the person asking for them, and why are they important to them. For example:
On-boarding new employees
- Making them effective contributors as soon as practicable
Fleet maintenance
- Ensuring trucks are available and usable when required
Once you have done this, you can then start to build up the activities and supporting information needed to provide the service, one might call that a Service Model. Who does this, when do they do it, how often do they do it, what do they need to know to do it, what do they already know, what is needed or varies each time it is asked for….simple, common sense questions almost like a 2 year old continually asking 'Why?' you can quickly determine how to build up the service and its capabilities.
I have run a workshop many times for customers and attendees of our annual Knowledge Conference. It takes 2hrs to go through 5 steps in defining, capturing a service model using whiteboards and pens. No technology, to some extent I actually don't allow it. The graphic below shows the 5 stages we go through, each having a slightly different outcome but when bringing them together to define a service. Often times data or information captured in later stages is pushed earlier in the process, to try to enable as much self-service as possible to the user/requester. If you are interested in the workshop, please let me know and we I would be more than happy to share with you.
To often we get caught up in the latest whizz-bang technology and over promises of automation. By breaking the problem down in to multiple stages we have managed to really focus on what we are solving, and who for, and how does it help the requester but also the service provider as a result.
So there you go, 2hrs…the gauntlet is thrown down
#GWP
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