ITIL Continual Service Improvement

Purpose

Purpose of ITIL Continual Service Improvement is to ensure IT Services alignment with business needs. This is  done via improvements to IT services through Strategy, Design, Transition and Operation stages. We want to improve effectiveness of service, process and cost.

Objectives

I will quote these in a best effort to provide quality info under 'fair use' terms

• Review, analyze, prioritize and make recommendations on improvement opportunities in each lifecycle stage
• Review and analyze service level achievement
• Identify and implement specific activities to improve IT service quality and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the enabling processes
• Improve cost effectiveness of delivering IT services without sacrificing customer satisfaction
• Ensure applicable quality management methods are used to support continual improvement activities
• Ensure that processes have clearly defined objectives and measurements that lead to actionable improvements
• Understand what to measure, why it is being measured and what the successful outcome should be

Scope

• Overall ITSM health
• Alignment of Service Portfolio with changing business needs
• Organization maturity and capability
• Continual improvement of all aspects IT services and supporting assets

Value

• Continual service quality improvement
• IT Services alignment to business needs
• Cost effectiveness
• Identification of improvement opportunities in all processes via monitoring and reporting
• Identification of improvement opportunities org. Structures, resources, partners, technology, training and communications

Principles

Here are some Key principles:

CSI approach

It is a somewhat changed improvement approach from V2. here are steps and deliverables:

What is the vision? - Align with business vision, mission, goals and objectives
Where are we now? - Baseline assessments
Where do we want to be? - Measurable targets
How do we get there? - Service and process improvement
Did we get there? - Measurement and metrics
Feedback branch to beginning is How do we keep the momentum going? - Manage the implementation of improvement changes

ITIL Continual Service Improvement Mind Map

Service Measurement

Why do we Measure?

• To validate
• To direct
• To justify
• To intervene

Baseline - current state of CI used as reference value for future comparisons

Vision to measurements:

1. Vision
2. Mission
3. Goals
4. Objectives
5. CSF
6. KPI
7. Metrics
8. Measurements

The seven-step improvement process

This is the only process in CSI, as title says it consists of seven steps, nicely mapped to a Deming's PDCA cycle and Knowledge management DIKW cycle. Picture is worth 1000 words. Enjoy:

CSI Seven-Step Improvement Process diagram