Developing a Standard Service Model Using the ITIL 4 Guiding Principles

If you’re a large organization, or an IT service provider offering services to large enterprises, then reviewing your standard service model on a regular basis is imperative. Ensuring that it stays aligned with your business and IT strategy. Especially because understanding the outcomes your customers need is difficult in an evolving and changing business world.

What’s a standard service model?

Well, if you provide a wide-ranging and complex set of IT services to your customers, then balancing return on investment (ROI) and value on investment (VOI) for customers is likely to be a challenge. Having a standard service model that delivers a standard set of outputs for your customers across your services could be the answer you’re looking for.

The benefits are economies of scale for your operational areas, a better understanding of your cost base, and every stakeholder in your service relationships knows what you’ll deliver (including, of course, the customer).

Using ITIL 4 to create your standard service model

To assess the status quo within your organization, and any existing service model(s), a great tool to use is the ITIL continual improvement model – which was called continual service improvement (CSI) in earlier versions of ITIL (please see the diagram below).

Source: AXELOS, Continual Improvement ITIL 4 Practice Guide

In addition to employing the continual improvement model as a way of reviewing and assessing the current standard service model position, even if you haven’t got anything in place right now, there’s also the ITIL 4 guiding principles.

These can be extremely beneficial when looking to ensure that the newly created model is fit for purpose.

How the ITIL 4 guiding principles can be used to create one

Guiding Principle	Standard Service Model Application
1. Focus on value	Understand what makes your customer successful, how their business works. The service model should be designed to enable and deliver the outcomes and the value they need.
2. Start where you are	Normally a service provider will have a wide range of established processes, procedures, and documentation. Take the best and use it. There’s no need to start from scratch (unless you feel you have to).
3. Progress iteratively with feedback	The service model is likely to be quite complex, so approach it in an agile way, i.e. in small, bite-sized chunks, and get continual feedback from stakeholders to ensure that it’s fit for purpose. Then release regular iterations which will deliver value sooner.
4. Collaborate and promote visibility	The service model is likely to be quite complex, so approach it in an agile way, i.e. in small, bite-sized chunks, and get continual feedback from stakeholders to ensure that it’s fit for purpose. Then release regular iterations which will deliver value sooner.
5. Think and work holistically	The service model will work across the organization, not just within IT operations. It will also – depending on if you’re an internal or business-to-business (B2B) service provider – impact product development, sales, bid teams, and delivery management. So, consider the end-to-end requirements and design the model accordingly.
6. Keep it simple and practical	Keep the model simple, because stakeholders will understand it better and it will be easier to deploy. Focusing on getting value delivered in the most straightforward way will also help to keep the model up-to-date and relevant.
7. Optimize and automate	Optimize the service model by making things as simplified and efficient as they can be, then look to automate where possible. This will introduce additional efficiencies. However, please don’t automate just for the sake of it – focus on what value the automation will bring.

Getting a standard service model right is not an easy task in a large organization. However, the value it’ll bring is enormous.

Source: itsm.tools.com