What's in this Success Playbook

This Success Playbook will help you create a world-class service catalog design, governance, and maintenance process that:

• Optimizes customer experience and process efficiency
• Builds a robust catalog structure to improve search and set the right expectations
• Streamlines fulfillment workflows for faster delivery time and issue diagnosis
• Provides flexibility to make changes to the catalog for relevance
• Defines the right measures of success and predictive metrics to identify performance gaps

Key takeaways

The most important things to know

• Creating a world-class service catalog—one that continuously optimizes customer experience and provisioning efficiency—is not a one-time effort. Changing customer and business needs means that even the best service catalogs need to be frequently redesigned or updated, which can be costly and time consuming.
• You must have a design, governance, and maintenance process that focuses on ongoing customer needs assessment, flexibility so you can make on-demand changes to the services you offer, and proactive performance improvement so you can improve value for cost.

The payoff of getting this right

A world-class service catalog design process should improve both customer experience and the efficiency of your provisioning processes.    

Steps covered

Step 1: Plan for the catalog design process     

• Clarify your catalog design team’s roles and responsibilities. 
• Define clear measures of success for your service catalog design. 
• Plan an incremental approach to scale your service catalog design deployment.

Step 2: Create the top-level catalog structure    

• Aim for six to ten top-level customer-driven categories that cover most requests.
• Offer bundles for end-to-end use cases that align with a specific business outcome.
• Improve search with metatags and naming conventions using customer language.
• Guide users to help them make the right choices and build transparency.

Step 3: Simplify and standardize fulfillment workflows 

• Design fulfillment workflows with a threefold approach—standardize, simplify, and automate.
• Define fulfillment stages, and their expectations, that are meaningful for the user.
• Create a rigorous process to handle exceptions.

Step 4: Define the catalog design maintenance process     

• Manage catalog item change requests as “services” to service owners.
• Let fulfillers and owners make minor changes to catalog items without going through development.
• Track metrics that highlight performance gaps and fulfillment process redundancies.
• Conduct quarterly “user review board” meetings to evaluate feedback.