ITIL Intermediate v3: Service Design – enabling value creation

Without employing SD and, for example, moving to transition without much design and attention to processes there is a risk of creating a huge technical debt. Within service design it’s vital to address organizational questions, support, service and working with governance that connects back to service strategy, roles and responsibilities – and at the same time keep up with the pace of today’s changes!

If you ignore SD you are probably working solely with a product and haven’t given full appreciation to service. This means you’ll be unable to co-create value with customers and the organization won’t be ready to deliver service with the right processes, maintenance and service improvements – all of which are key to the design phase.

It’s necessary to talk about value and establish well-formed value propositions during SD, or the consequences will be short-cuts and reactive working. That’s why SD contributes to a well-thought through service that provides customer value.

SD for the ITSM practitioner

The SD course helps ITSM practitioners see the big picture, take a holistic view and gives them the tools and knowledge to say: “Stop! have we thought about X, Y and Z?” That includes the five aspects of service design:

• Designing the service solution
• Management information systems and tools
• Technology
• Processes
• Measurements and metrics

What’s also important today is to recognize that SD can be both agile and iterative: professionals studying SD need to understand Agile, Lean, and DevOps to understand SD in a more agile context – and the course trainer needs to help put SD in a modern context.

SD in the organization

When organizations want to improve processes they need to be thinking about the bigger picture of improvements. For example, if customers want incidents resolved within a specific timeframe is the organization enabled to achieve that and is the service desk designed to meet those requirements? SD helps with a proactive approach to this.

Using SD principles means you can create a long-term plan and embed design concepts in your organization.

Therefore, a good place to start is making a check-list of service design questions, for example:

1. Do you have processes in place?
2. What metrics are you using?
3. Have you agreed service expectations?
4. …
5. …

This, in the long term, enables you to stop building technical debt and instead start moving away from older systems and software.

And the SD discipline is even more critical today, when organizations and their IT providers are moving so quickly and – potentially – generating more and more technical debt.

Whether you are outsourcing, co-sourcing or multi-sourcing your IT, if it’s not handled with service design and strategy you will encourage the spread of shadow IT and bring surprises you really don’t want. If you don’t have good design of your processes and services, how can you ask someone else to do it and expect better, cheaper, faster?

Read more Blog Posts in our series covering the ITIL Intermediate modules

ITIL Intermediate – Operational Support and Analysis (OSA): Combating chaos

ITIL Intermediate – Service Offerings and Agreements (SOA)

ITIL Intermediate: Release, control, validation – many happy releases

ITIL Intermediate: a pathway to ITIL 4 – Continual Service Improvement

Read more Axelos Blog Posts by Leif Andersson

Kanban: making progress and delivering value in ITSM

Cultural transformation – vital for business and digital transformation success

ITIL and DevOps – better together

The content of ITIL v3 Intermediate modules is key for professionals working in ITSM today due to the essential knowledge they contain, creating increased understanding and the ability to handle immediate work challenges more effectively.

Also, ITIL-certified practitioners wanting to gain accreditation in the new ITIL 4 guidance can get a helping hand from the existing v3 credit system. By obtaining 17 credits from any combination of the ITIL Intermediate modules or ITIL Practitioner you can take the new Transition Module to achieve ITIL 4 Managing Professional. More information about ITIL 4 Managing Professional will be released throughout the second half of 2019.