{"id":4701,"date":"2013-04-09T01:48:37","date_gmt":"2013-04-09T01:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/multiacademstg.wpengine.com\/20000academy\/blog\/2013\/04\/09\/itil-continual-service-improvement-never-ending-story\/"},"modified":"2025-05-24T13:42:35","modified_gmt":"2025-05-24T13:42:35","slug":"itil-continual-service-improvement-never-ending-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/blog\/2013\/04\/09\/itil-continual-service-improvement-never-ending-story\/","title":{"rendered":"ITIL Continual Service Improvement \u2013 the never-ending story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Business needs are changing. It\u2019s happening today and it will happen tomorrow. This isn\u2019t exactly breaking news, but continual alignment and re-alignment of IT services as a business changes may be a surprise to some people in the IT services industry. For organizations that are using <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/what-is-itil\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ITIL<\/a>, that shouldn\u2019t be the case.<\/p>\n<p>Already, in ITIL V3 2007 edition (current is 2011 edition), ITIL introduced Continual Service Improvement (CSI) as a stage in the IT Service Lifecycle. The approach emphasized that by entering the operational stage, management of an IT service did not a reach a standstill. Actually, it never does. CSI ensures that service will be continuously monitored, measured and improved.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px;\">Where to start?<\/h2>\n<p>It is difficult to answer this question, because it differs depending on services. But, the important thing is that you start somewhere. ITIL (as part of CSI) gives three possible approaches:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Service approach<\/li>\n<li>Lifecycle approach<\/li>\n<li>Functional Group approach<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Generally, I agree with this methodology. But, from my experience, Process approach should also be listed, due to the fact that some organizations did not implement the complete lifecycle, but just some processes (e.g. only Incident Management and Problem Management from Service Operations). Let me briefly explain the above mentioned approaches.<br \/>\n<div id=\"middle-banner\" class=\"banner-shortcode\"><\/div><script>loadMiddleBanner();<\/script><br \/>\n<div id=\"side-banner-trigger\" class=\"banner-shortcode\"><\/div><\/p>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px;\">Process approach<\/h2>\n<p>Incident Management and Change Management are examples of customer-facing processes. Therefore, it is important that they are consistently monitored, measured and reported. Responsible organizations will know what to do with the results \u2013 improve the process. I found some examples where organizations had to repeat tasks to solve certain incident types because Problem Management was poorly implemented (if it was implemented at all). The number of repeated incidents was the trigger to start improving the Problem Management process.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px;\">Service approach<\/h2>\n<p>While taking this approach, it is advisable to be careful and choose just a few <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/iso-20000\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">services<\/a> to start with. Usually, services include a lot of processes, functions and roles, so it could be resource intensive and time consuming to start with all services. The agreed service level with a customer will trigger some actions, because we have to know (and report) on SLA achievement. Even if we are achieving the agreed <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/iso-20000-documentation-toolkit\/?rel=relationship-and-agreement-processes&#038;doc=service-level-agreement-sla-\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">SLA<\/a> (Service Level Agreement \u2013 formal agreement with customer), measurement can give us valuable information as to what can be improved.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px;\">Lifecycle approach<\/h2>\n<p>The service operation lifecycle stage is sometimes taken for granted. \u201cIt is (daily) business as usual,\u201d we used to say. But, it must be strongly emphasized that Service Operation can be a valuable source for all other service lifecycle stages (Service Strategy, Service Design or Service Transition). Basically, Service Operation has know-how gathered in praxis, which can be valuable to improve future services (or changes made on existing ones) in an early lifecycle stage. I saw that, while adopting ITIL, organizations try to use their own experience (know-how of their services) and re-use gained knowledge to improve, while developing new services.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px;\">Functional Group approach<\/h2>\n<p>Some functional groups could be also improved. That does not necessarily mean that end-to-end service will be improved, but certainly some part of the services. Take a server admin group as an example. There are many parameters that you can measure and get an impression of how well they are performing. Based on results, improvement measures will be defined. Education can be just one of them.<\/p>\n<p>From the above discussion, you see that CSI has to be taken very carefully, considering many parameters. But, as can be seen in the picture below, there are a few basic rules that have to be followed: Baseline and Trend. Baseline is the starting point and it gives us the ability to compare (where we are compared to where we have been). After every improvement made, new a baseline should be set. Trend is the direction in which the improvement cycle is turning. Speaking generally, improvement is acceptable as long as the trend is rising. The Deming Cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act) is particularly applicable to CSI. The goal is steady improvement, and the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle prevents the circle from rolling downward.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-10679\" src=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/\/sites\/6\/2015\/07\/Continual-quality-control2.png\" alt=\"Continual-quality-control\" width=\"299\" height=\"249\" \/>Figure: Continual quality control and consolidation<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Either you didn\u2019t start, because you don\u2019t know in which direction to go (but you know that something has to be done), or you are looking to improve your services \u2013 it\u2019s the start of Continual Service Improvement. The only advice I can give you is \u2013 \u201cGo! Start implementing CSI. Carefully, step-by-step and proactively. You will start getting results. And don\u2019t forget \u2013 improve it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>To implement ISO 20000 easily and efficiently, use our<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/iso-20000-documentation-toolkit\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ISO 20000 Documentation Toolkit<\/a> <em>that provides step-by-step guidance for full ISO 20000 compliance.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Business needs are changing. It\u2019s happening today and it will happen tomorrow. This isn\u2019t exactly breaking news, but continual alignment and re-alignment of IT services as a business changes may be a surprise to some people in the IT services industry. For organizations that are using ITIL, that shouldn\u2019t be the case. Already, in ITIL &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":4702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[425,344],"class_list":["post-4701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-csi","tag-itil"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4701"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18297,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4701\/revisions\/18297"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}