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Chapter 5 ■ Service Design
Usually, service breaches are discussed in detail in service review meetings. The
service provider must come prepared not only with an answer to what caused the breach,
but also to find a permanent solution to prevent it in the future.
In some cases, the service provider might find it unfeasible to meet certain SLAs. In
such cases, service review meetings are the forum to discuss whether the SLAs need to be
tweaked to make them realistic.
I personally look forward to being in service review meetings. No matter how much
we prepare, the other party always throws a curve ball at you, and it is also interesting
from the service provider standpoint to hear customer’s observations on service
deliverance, something you might have rated trivial might end up being a big deal for the
customer.
5.7.1.7 Service Improvement Plan
More often than not, the outcomes of service review meetings are seeds to improve
the quality of services. The initiation to improve services might come as a result of
suggestions or recommendations and as one of the components on the contract
document.
It is extremely critical for services to improve, and not stagnate by barely keeping
their head above water. When I say improve a service, what aspect of the service am I
referring to? Remember the resources and capabilities I discussed in Chapter 1 that make
up the service? There were ten service assets within the resources and capabilities, and
improving any or multiple assets leads to service improvement.
Let’s say that you are looking at the people aspect of a service. Getting mature
resources to work on services, those who can resolve incidents quickly, improves the
quality of service. Getting a technology upgrade to bypass certain service constraints and
deliver better on business outcomes is another example of service improvement.
To state a real-life experience, when I started out, I was working for a customer
whose users used to call the help desk to get passwords reset. At the time, automated
password resets were not as common as they are today. When we implemented a selfhelp
password reset enhancement, the customer greatly benefited by the increase in
productivity of his employees. The service provider, who was my employer at the time,
benefited by reducing the headcount at the help desk. It was a win-win situation. Who
said service improvements benefit the customers alone?
A service improvement plan (SIP) is a document that contains all the identified
aspects of a service that could potentially undergo improvements. The instigation for the
SIP items comes from the service review meetings. Service-level management initiates
the SIP and it gets carried out in the continual service improvement lifecycle phase (see
Chapter 8).
It is also not uncommon for contracts to list the projected service improvements. The
underpinning contract could state that the cost of services should reduce by 10% year on
year. While inflation hits the world, how in the world can the cost of services decrease?
Mainly from service improvements. Such clauses mandate service providers to work
diligently toward improving services, not just maintain the existing services. Of course,
service improvements need a budget of their own.
Let’s say that a user requests a laptop. As per the process, the team that fulfills the
request reaches out to the user’s manager, obtains approval, and then places an order
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