Service Design is the second of the five stages of the ITIL v3/4 service lifecycle, which aims to design new or changed IT services that are fit for business purpose and use, and that can be delivered by an organization, along with its IT ecosystem. The goal is to assure efficiency and to achieve predictable service delivery, based on the service strategy prepared at an early stage. Service Design approach makes emphasis on the 4xP’s of service design: People, Processes, Products, and Partners, and ensures that the services are reflecting the business objectives and related requirements. Service Design activities involve planning and organizing the processes, resources, information, communication, technology, and practices.
Understanding the business objectives and requirements and translating them into IT requirements to assure that services are aligned with customer goals/value chain. Such alignment should be obtained on both: strategic and operational level of services.
Assure that the stakeholders’ feedback, validation, and improvement of the services are included into the scope of the design processes. Maintain their involvement throughout the whole service lifecycle to support the continuous improvement and optimization.
Balancing the conflicting requirements and expectations of different stakeholders, such as customers, users, suppliers, and internal teams.
Keeping up with existing and expected technological advancements. Efficiently integrating new technology into the existing IT ecosystem or services.
Ensuring that the service design complies with all relevant laws, regulations, and standards.
Ensuring the consistency and coherence of the designed services across the service portfolio, the service catalogue, and the service level agreements.
Prepare the blueprint in the way it would support the implementation of future (expected) changes in the catalog or the services.
Successfully manage constraints in terms of budget, time, quality, available infrastructure and human resources.
Successfully identify and manage the risks and issues that may affect the efficiency of Service Design and the quality of deliverables, such as security, compliance, availability, continuity, capacity, and performance.
With a service strategy prepared earlier, the next logical step is to design the necessary services and required IT infrastructure. The key outcome of Service Design stage is the new or updated “IT services management blueprint”. Properly designed and documented blueprint synchronizes business and technical perspectives into one consistent solution. It allows IT organization to initiate the next stage of the service lifecycle, i.e. Service Transition (including the implementation of new services into the infrastructure before operational delivery).
A big part of the world's data resides in legacy HW and is accessed by old systems and tools. The CIOs and IT managers responsible for these enterprise applications face challenges such as:
Establishing a service design policy, time & costs boundaries and content of a service design package. As a minimum, the package should cover these elements: service objectives, scope, principles, required technical services or processes, inputs and deliverables, tools, key quality measures and targets.
Assuring that all 4xP’s dimensions (People, Processes, Products, and Partners) are to be considered during the service design.
Managing the service design activities, processes, and resources, through the design coordination practice, which ensures the effective and efficient delivery of the service design outputs and outcomes.
Considering the set of mandatory processes being part of the service design. As a minimum, we strongly suggest to take into account the following: service catalog management (business, technical), service level management, capacity management, availability management, IT service continuity management, stakeholders management (especially suppliers), security management (information, access, …), risk management.
Engaging and collaborating with the relevant parties involved in the service design, such as the customers, the users, the suppliers, the partners, and the internal teams. This involves communicating the service design vision, strategy, and requirements, soliciting and incorporating the feedback and input, and ensuring the alignment and agreement of the service design with the stakeholder needs and expectations.
Evaluating and measuring the service design quality and performance, using the appropriate metrics, indicators, and criteria. This involves monitoring and reporting on the service design progress, outcomes, and benefits, identifying and resolving the service design issues and gaps, and ensuring the continual improvement of the service design.
Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty: thanks to the high quality of delivered services.
Increased Efficiency leading to reduced Total Cost of Ownership of IT Systems.
Improved IT Governance by providing necessary information to establish governance and roles.
Better Risk Management by considering all aspects of a service during its design stage, which will result in better service availability and reliability minimizing service disruptions and failures.
More efficient management of IT Infrastructure and resources by anticipating future needs for new investments and changes.
Fluent and productive cooperation with external suppliers via well-defined requirements, cooperation scope, roles and responsibilities.
Increased service agility and openness to innovation.
“If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together...”
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