IT Service Management: A Guide for ITILFoundation Exam

Candidates, Second Edition

by Ernest Brewster, Richard Griffiths, Aidan Lawes and John Sansbury
BCS. (c) 2012. Copying Prohibited.

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ITServiceManagement:AGuideforITILFoundationExamCandidates,SecondEdition

Chapter 3: Service Design

INTRODUCTION
Once an organisation has determined the IT strategy it wishes to pursue, it uses the service design phase of the lifecycle
to create new services which service transition then introduces into the live environment. In so doing, service design aims
to take the necessary steps to ensure that the new service will perform as planned and deliver the functionality and
benefits intended by the business. This principle is at the heart of the ITIL approach and is why the majority of the service
design processes are focused on operational control:
n

Service catalogue management;

Service level management;

Capacity management;

Design coordination;

Availability management;

IT service continuity management;

Information security management;

Supplier management.

The contribution that the service design phase of the lifecycle makes can therefore be summarised as ensuring the
creation of cost-effective services that provide the level of quality required to satisfy customers and stakeholders
throughout the life of the service.
However, the fact that business requirements change over time and generate the need or opportunity for further
improvement, means that even an organisation with mature service design processes will need to make changes to
services throughout their life. Service design therefore has an important role to play in supporting continual service
improvement and is as important for managing changes to existing services as it is in designing new services. In this
respect, service design must also consider the impact of its activities on the overall services, systems, architecture, tools
and measurements in order to minimise the potential for disruption when a new or changed service is introduced into the
live environment.
WHY SERVICE DESIGN?
Without well-established service design, services will become less stable and more expensive to maintain and become
increasingly less supportive of business and customer needs. Furthermore, the cost of correcting these deficiencies is
almost always higher than the costs that would have been incurred to prevent them at the design stage.
Not every change will require service design activities. Rather these are reserved for 'significant' changes. Each
organisation must decide its own definition of 'significant' and use the change management process to assess the
significance of each change and therefore whether or not service design activities need to be used.
Good service design will deliver a range of business benefits that help to underline its importance in the design of new and
changed services. These are summarised below:
n

Lower cost services because of the lower support and enhancement costs, leading to lower total cost of ownership
(TCO).

Services that consistently provide the required level of quality and alignment to business and customer needs.

Faster and easier introduction of new services and changes.

Better governance to ensure compliance to legal and corporate rules and guidelines.

Better measurement capability to support decision-making and continual improvement.

Poor planning, preparation and management are common reasons for the failure of plans and projects in general and the
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ITServiceManagement:AGuideforITILFoundationExamCandidates,SecondEdition

design and deployment of new and changed services in particular. ITIL helps prevent this by offering guidance on
preparing and planning the use of people, processes, products and partners: the Four Ps of service design. (N.B. It is
important not to confuse these with the Four Ps of service strategy discussed in Chapter 2.)
THE FIVE MAJOR ASPECTS OF SERVICE DESIGN
ITIL formally recognises five separate aspects of service design that together describe the scope of this part of the service
lifecycle:
n

The introduction of new or changed services through the accurate identification of business requirements and the
agreed definition of service requirements.
The service management systems and tools such as the service portfolio, ensuring mutual consistency with other
services and appropriate tools support.

The capability of technology architectures and management systems to operate and maintain new services.

The capability of all processes, not just those in service design, to operate and maintain new and changed services.

Designing in the appropriate measurement methods and metrics necessary for performance analysis of services,
improved decision-making and continual improvement.

OBJECTIVES OF SERVICE DESIGN

From the considerations above, we can appreciate that the main objectives of service design are:
n

to design services that not only satisfy business and stakeholder objectives in terms of quality, ease-of-use, compliance
and security, but also minimise the total cost of ownership;
to design efficient and effective policies, plans, processes, architectures and frameworks to manage services
throughout their lifecycle;

to support service transition in identifying and managing the risks associated with introducing new or changed services;

to design measurement systems for assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of service design and its deliverables;

to contribute to continual service improvement (CSI), particularly by designing in features and benefits and then
responding to improvement opportunities identified from the operational environment.

THE SERVICE DESIGN PACKAGE

The design stage takes a set of new or changed business requirements and develops a solution to meet them. The
developed solution is passed to service transition to be built, tested and deployed into the live environment.
However, it is not enough simply to pass the technical or architectural design to service transition. The service transition
teams will need more than this to deliver a fully functioning service that provides the utility and warranty expected. They
need a blueprint that covers all aspects of the new service. This blueprint is known as the service design package.
SERVICE DESIGN PACKAGE
(Service design) document(s) defining all aspects of an IT service and their requirements through each stage of its
lifecycle. A service design package is produced for each new IT service, major change or IT service retirement.
The key contents of the service design package include:
n

the service definition, agreed business requirements and how and where the service will be used;
the service design including the architectural design, functional requirements, SLRs/SLAs (if available), service and
operational management requirements including metrics and key performance indicators, supporting services and
agreements;
a service model showing the overall structure and dynamics of the service, showing how customer and service assets,

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service management functions and processes come together to deliver value;

n

an assessment of organisational readiness and its implications;

a plan covering all stages of the service lifecycle;

plans for service transition (covering build and assembly, test, release and deployment) and for operational service
acceptance;
acceptance criteria and the strategy and plan for user acceptance testing.

TEST QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER 3

SL 07, SL 12
SD 03, SD 04, SD 07, SD 17, SD 30

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