Service Design – Purpose

ITIL Service Design is relevant to organizations involved in the development, delivery or support of services, including: Service providers, both internal and external. Organizations that aim to improve services through the effective application of service management principles and a service lifecycle approach. Organizations that require a consistent managed approach across all service providers in a supply chain or value network.

Organizations that are going out to tender for their services. The publication is also relevant to any professional involved in the management of services particularly:

• IT architects

• IT managers

• IT practitioners

• IT service owners

Business relationship managers Goal and Objective The Goal of service design is to create a realistic service. Five aspects of Service Design are:

• Service Solution

• Processes

• Technology Architecture

• Supporting systems

• Measurement System & Metrics.

And these goals can be achieved by some Objective like :

• To ensure the new or changed services are consistent to all other services.

• Technology architectures and management systems should be consistent.

• Processes, roles, responsibilities and skills have the capability to operate support and maintain the new or changed services.

Existing measurement methods can provide the required metrics for new/changed services. Service Design enforces the principle that the initial service design should be driven by a number of factors, including the functional requirements. The requirements within service level agreements (SLAs), the business benefits and the overall design constraints

• Service Design – Value to Business Service Design help creating the blueprint of a service which adds Business Value by better design Hence reduces

• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

• Improved quality and consistency of service

• Easier implementation of new or changed services.

• Improved service alignment with business

• Improved IT governance more effective Service Management and IT processes.

ITIL Service Design : It Provides guidance for the design and development of services and service management practices. It covers design principles and methods for converting strategic objectives into portfolios of services and service assets thus providing great business value. Some of the key concepts of Service Design:

Service Design Package (aka SDP): This is the output of Service Design which feeds into Service Transition. A SDP details all aspects of the service and its requirements during the design stage through all of the subsequent stages of its lifecycle. Service solution, together with its SDP, is then passed to service transition to evaluate, build, test and deploy the new or changed service or to retire the service, if this is thechange required.

Service Level Agreement (aka SLA): Formal agreement between service provider & customer – record of agreed service levels. The SLA describes the IT Service, documents Service level targets and specifies the responsibilities of the IT Service Provider and the Customer. The documents agreed with the customers that specify the level, scope and quality of service to be provided, either now for an existing service (SLAs) or in the future for a new service (SLRs).

Operational Level Agreement (aka OLA): Mostly confused by SLA OLA is an agreement between an IT Service Provider and another part of the same Organization. This is internal agreement. An OLA supports the IT Service Providers delivery of IT Services to Customers. Any internal agreements necessary to deliver the quality of service agreed within the SLA.

Key Concepts

Here are few more key definitions of Service Design:

Contract: Legal binding, covering obligations each entity has to the other; from the first day of the contract, often extending beyond its termination. The moment you legally bind the SLA document it becomes contract. It is expressed from the point of view of the IT service provider, particularly as it relates to underpinningcontracts and agreements.

Availability: Ability of a Configuration Item (CI) or IT Service to perform its agreed function when required is called availability. It can also explained as the proportion of time that a customer is able to access a particular service. Service Provider: An Organization supplying Services to one or more Internal Customers or External Customers is called Service Provider.

Here by services, we mean IT Services. Supplier: Third party who supplies good/services required to deliver IT services. Usually supplier vendors and third parties are used interchangeably.