ITIL - Introduction to Service Design Tutorial

Service Design

Welcome to the fifth lesson of the ITIL Foundation tutorial (part of the ITIL® Foundation Certification Training.)

This lesson provides an overview of the service design phase of the service lifecycle. It helps you to design IT services that are aligned with the requirements of a business.

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

• Explain the purpose, objective, scope, and value of service design

• List the roles and responsibilities of service design

Service Design-Overview

We will focus on the purpose, objective, scope, and value of service design.

Purpose

The purpose of service design includes the following:

• To design IT services in alignment with the governing policies, IT practices, and processes

• To understand the service provider’s strategy

• To make sure the service delivery is of high quality

• To ensure cost-effective service provision and customer satisfaction

Now let us understand the objectives of service design.

Objective

Following are the objectives of service design:

• Service design aims at designing IT services efficiently and effectively to avoid major improvements.

• The changing trends in business are identified and this leads to opportunities for the improvement of services and solutions.

• Continual Service Improvement or CSI is included in all service design activities to ensure their effectiveness.

Let us now focus on the scope of service design.

Scope

The scope of service design is to interpret and design the following:

• New, existing or modified business requirements

• Management information systems and tools

• Technology, management and architecture systems

• Measurement methods and metrics

• All processes essential for effective service design

Now let us discuss the value that service design brings to a business. 

Value

Service design offers the following benefits:

• Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of services

• Improved quality of service delivery

• Improved consistency of the service, as services are designed within the corporate strategy, architectures, and constraints

• A simpler implementation of new or modified services

• Improved services being aligned with the needs of the business

• Improved effectiveness of performance with incorporation and recognition of capacity, financial availability and IT service continuity plans

• Improved IT administration

Roles in Service Design

There are two key roles under service design. They are the Process Manager and the Process Practitioner.

The responsibilities of the Process Manager are:

• Collaborate with the Process Owner to plan and coordinate process activities;

• Manage resources assigned to each process;

• Coordinate with other Process Managers and service owners;

• Work with the Process Owner and the CSI manager to prioritize improvements in the CSI register; and

• Ensure that all activities under process are carried out as required throughout the service lifecycle and improvements are made in their implementations.

Roles in Service Design (contd.)

Now we will discuss the role of the Process Practitioner.

The responsibilities of the Process Practitioner are:

• Ensuring that all activities are carried out in a process

• Working with other stakeholders, process managers, co-workers, users and customers to ensure that their contributions are effective

• Ensuring that input, output, and interface of the activities in a process are correct

• Creating and maintaining records to ensure that tasks are executed correctly

Summary

Let us summarize what we have learned in this lesson:

• Service design ensures that IT services are designed in alignment with the governing policies, IT practices and processes.

• Service design offers benefits such as lower Total Cost of Ownership of services and improved quality of service delivery.

• The Process Manager collaborates with the Process Owner to coordinate and plan process activities.

• The Process Practitioner ensures that input, output, and interface of the activities in a process are correct.

Conclusion

Next, we will focus on the sixth lesson Key Concepts in Service Design.