Reader Question: How can we prepare for a discussion about warranty with the customer?

Third Sky Expert:  John Worthington, Director of Consulting, Third Sky

Discussions about warranty should begin before negotiating the warranty elements of an SLA, which many customers will consider a blood oath (as if the service will be 100% available 7x24 just because they got you to put this in writing).

First, there are some things that should have been completed by now. You should at this point know what segment of your market the customer’s in and have a clear understanding of their requirements --- the outcomes they desire, the assets they use to achieve those outcomes and how your service fits into this picture. You should also have an idea of which warranty elements (availability, capacity, security and continuity) are the most important and why. See Third Sky’s White Paper, Techniques for Understanding what the Customer Values in a Service for some good tips.

Reader Question: How do we best prioritize incidents to ensure that the most important ones are being resolved first?

Third Sky Expert Answer:

Kai Holthaus, ITIL Expert & Director of Consulting, Third Sky

ITIL® describes the concept of prioritizing incidents in the Service Operation book. On the generic level, it uses the concepts of urgency (how quickly the business needs a resolution) and level of business impact to derive impact urgency. These two measures are then most commonly put into a matrix that shows priority.  Of course, that only moves the question from priority to impact and urgency. How do you ensure that the right levels of impact and urgency are assigned to an incident?

On the urgency side, it is common to use the concept of “how is work affected”, for example “Work blocked”, “Work degraded”, “Work not affected”.

One common practice for level of business impact is to consider the number of users being affected. For instance, “High” could mean that the entire company is affected, “Medium” could mean that a single function (like Accounting) is affected, an “Low” could indicate that only a single person is affected. However, this type of coding is often too simple, and other factors should be taken into account. For example:

Reader Question:  What is the best strategy for migrating our current request management system into a Service Now implementation?

Third Sky Expert Answer:

Gregory Link, Director of Consulting, Third Sky

Two words – start small. There is a saying that you should not try to boil the ocean - to undertake an impossible task or project or to make a task or project unnecessarily difficult. That applies to a tool migration. By taking one process at a time, in this case Request Fulfillment, you are applying your available resources in one direction and building on subsequent successes.

Most likely, your current tool set has categories which contain similar request types or items. ServiceNow uses the same best practice in their Service Catalog application; which is where users would go to submit service requests.

Reader Question: We have a fairly new implementation of the Change Control Process at my company. In what ways can we streamline the process so that it does not impact daily operations?

Third Sky Expert Answer:

Kai Holthaus, ITIL Expert & Director of Consulting, Third Sky

It is easy to perceive Change Management as a bureaucratic hurdle in ‘getting things done’. By its very nature, Change Management tends to slow things down, but often we want to slow things down, in order to protect the environment from unintended consequences. So, the question is whether we need to apply the same amount of protection for all different types of changes.