Self-Guided Service Review

Statement of Best Practice

A service review is a technique to look at a service, and the people, processes and specific technologies that make it work holistically. Ideally, every service in the service catalog is reviewed at some interval. Formal large-scale reviews of our most business critical services are underway. This article describes a more light-weight approach that could be used by a service owner on their own to conduct a smaller-scale review.

Contact

  • Assistant Director, IT Process and Planning: Bob Black
  • Process Owner: Bob Black
  • Process Sponsor: Troy Travis

Roles and Responsibilities

  • Service Owner: Individual responsible for the end-to-end operation and performance of a service against targets. Also known as Service Level Manager
  • Business Owner: The person(s) with whom the IT Service Owner partners to deliver value to the organization
  • Configuration Item Owner: The person(s) accountable for specific technology components that work together to deliver an IT Service
  • User: consumers of an IT service or related component
  • Process Manager: operational oversight of process activity for loggers and solvers on their team
  • Process Owner: accountable for the incident management process meeting organizational goals and process targets
  • LT Sponsor: Sitting leadership team member who has ultimate accountability for the design and delivery of a particular service. They work closely with the process/service owner to ensure success.

 Definitions 

  • Artifact: Documentation of a result of a step of system development in software or systems engineering. There are many instances of artifacts such as data models, requirements documents, software or system specifications, architecture descriptions, program modules, test cases, quality requirements, reports, etc.

Service Artifacts

This section establishes a basic blue print of the service architecture to understand all the components that work together to produce the service value to the customers and users of the service.

Prepare your service review documentation

The service review document helps collect the information used in these service reviews and output a service improvement plan that helps track that potential improvements to people, processes, or technologies that work together to provide any particular service.

  1. Make a copy of this service review template to store your potential improvements as you work through the review. If not, any document that you are comfortable using is suitable for the light weight review.
  2. Update the first slide to include the service name and Month/Year of the review.
  3. Review material on service reviews in slides 2-6

Review and update the service catalog entry

Locate the Overview for this service in the IT Service Catalog

  1. Add a link to slide 8
  2. Consider the questions on slide 8 to make improvements to the catalog entry
    • Is the service name still relevant
    • Does the name reflect words used by typical consumer?
    • Do the service offerings represent the majority of use cases?
    • ​​​​​Does the catalog entry reflect the primary use cases
    • Does the catalog entry provide service level targets that represent expectations for the typical users
  3. Either edit the service to fix obvious mistakes or otherwise improve the content of the service catalog entry or makes notes on you service improvement plan of ways you would like to see the service improve

Note: IT Process and Planning has User Experience (U/X) interns that have a process to conduct a peer benchmarking where they look at examples from other peer schools and compare out service definition to theirs. If you would like this analysis completed for your service, contact IT Process and Planning.

Conduct Stakeholder Analysis

  1. Consider the primary stakeholders of this service and make notes on slide 9, adding rows to the table as needed
    • Who represents the primary user groups? 
    • Who provides financial support to operate the service?
    • Who would bring the pitchforks if the service is down or retired?
    • Who would celebrate an upgrade that provided new features or met an unmet need?
       

Review related, enabling technologies

  1. Visit this report of enabling technologies https://miamioh.teamdynamix.com/TDNext/Apps/0/Reporting/ReportViewer?ReportID=220008&RunNow=1
  2. Clear the service listed in the prompt and replace with the Overview of service you are reviewing
  3. Click Run now
  4. Copy each over into slide 10. If you copy the name, the link to the CMDB typically pastes to the slide

Then, consider the following questions:

  1. Are these specific technologies relevant to the overall delivery of the service?
  2. Which of these technologies keeps you up at night? What might be done to reduce that risk?
  3. Are there technologies that are needed for the service to operate that are not listed?
  4. Is the owner and owning team the correct technology experts for the delivery of that technology component for use in this service?
  5. Is the requesting account the best representative of the department who serves as the partnering department to achieve service value?

Document any discrepancies or concerns on the improvement plan slides as improvement opportunities to consider fixing on slide 15

Review related services

Visit this report of enabling technologies https://miamioh.teamdynamix.com/TDNext/Apps/0/Reporting/ReportViewer?ReportID=220263&RunNow=1

  1. Clear the service listed in the prompt and replace with the Overview of service you are reviewing
  2. Click Run now
  3. Copy each over into slide 11. If you copy the name, the link to the CMDB typically pastes to the slide

Sadly, the relationship director is not reportable at present. We have identified three basic relationship types

  • Is a request model of: indicates that the related service is really a request model. We recommend transitioning these to service offerings
  • Enables: this service is has a strong dependency to the operation of another service
  • Is Enabled by: this service has a strong dependency to another service in order to operate

To see the relationships,

  1. Locate the service overview entry in the service catalog
  2. Click Edit
  3. Click on the relationships tab

Then, consider the following questions:

  • Are there other services (not technology components, but full services) that interact heavily with this one? A listing of all IT Services / Overviews is available to assist.
  • Are there missing request models -- frequent, repeatable requests from users who need to engage in the service?
  • Does the service have MACD (moves, adds, change, deletes) requests not represented in the request models or service offerings?

Document any discrepancies or concerns on the improvement plan slides as improvement opportunities to consider fixing on slide 15

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Ideally, a service review is tracking performance against targets established with the business partner with whom the service value to the institution is considered. Generally speaking, we are not that far in our maturity. Until we elevate our service management practice to that maturity level, we glance through the data available to us.

Our reports are setup to take a 1 year perspective from the date you conduct the KPI review.

  1. On slide 13, update the date range in the upper right to indicate the review period of 1 year ag to the current date

Support

Those with tableau licenses may use our Support Ticket Performance visualizations for a more detailed perspective but some basic reporting out of TDX gives perspective

  1. Run this report https://miamioh.teamdynamix.com/TDNext/Apps/0/Reporting/ReportViewer.aspx?RunNow=1&ReportID=220283
  2. Clear the Service parameter and replace with the name of the service you are reviewing.
  3. Replace the ID parameter with the ID of the service you are reviewing. We need this to consider any tickets that came in through a related request model or service offering. This can be found a few ways. The easiest is to view the service in the service catalog and copy the portion that appears at the end of the URL. For example, the URL for the Email service is https://miamioh.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/1813/Portal/Requests/ServiceDet?ID=4658 so the ID is 4658
  4. Click Run
  5. Fill in the number of incidents and service requests in the first two rows of the table on slide 13
  6. Calculate the percentage of the total that is incidents versus service request and add to the parenthetical of the first two rows of the table on slide 13. Ie, the percentage of incidents is the number of incidents divided by the total of incidents and service requests combined.
  7. To scroll through details, click on the bar(s) of the graph for a list

High Priority Incidents

We want to consider incidents that were potentially major incidents or otherwise highly disruption to the operation of the institution to achieve its goals.

  1. Run this report https://miamioh.teamdynamix.com/TDNext/Apps/0/Reporting/ReportViewer.aspx?RunNow=1&ReportID=220286
  2. Clear the Service parameter and replace with the name of the service you are reviewing.
  3. Replace the ID parameter with the ID of the service you are reviewing. We need this to consider any tickets that came in through a related request model or service offering. This can be found a few ways. The easiest is to view the service in the service catalog and copy the portion that appears at the end of the URL. For example, the URL for the Email service is https://miamioh.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/1813/Portal/Requests/ServiceDet?ID=4658 so the ID is 4658
  4. Click Run
  5. Fill in the number of high priority incidents on the third row of the table on slide 13

Consider the following:

  • Does the ratio of incidents to service requests seem appropriate?
  • What opportunities might exist to automate or eliminate the need for service requests through policy or other changes?
  • What opportunities might exist to shift fulfillment of service requests to the service desk or self service?
  • What opportunities might exist to deflect incidents to self service through creation of KB articles?
  • What opportunities might exist to eliminate incidents through an upgrade or other technology fix to address a root cause?
  • Do the major incidents accurately reflect the services uptime and availability to users?

Document any actionable ideas as an opportunity for improvement on slide 15

Change

Changes are a reflection of enhancements or maintenance activity implemented to maintain the service or potentially improve it.

  1. Open this report https://miamioh.teamdynamix.com/TDNext/Apps/0/Reporting/ReportViewer.aspx?RunNow=1&ReportID=220298
  2. Clear the Service parameter and replace with the name of the service you are reviewing.
  3. Replace the ID parameter with the ID of the service you are reviewing. We need this to consider any tickets that came in through a related request model or service offering. This can be found a few ways. The easiest is to view the service in the service catalog and copy the portion that appears at the end of the URL. For example, the URL for the Email service is https://miamioh.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/1813/Portal/Requests/ServiceDet?ID=4658 so the ID is 4658
  4. Clear the Asset parameter and replace with the list of assets that you included in scope as the enabling technologies back on slide 10
  5. Click Run
  6. Fill in the number of changes on the forth row of the table on slide 13

Consider the following:

  • Are the number of change tickets representative of the amount of configuration change conducted on the technologies that enable this service?
  • What portion of the changes resulted in new features versus keeping the service running?
  • Were you involved in decisions to make these changes that ultimately impacted this service?

Document any actionable concerns as an opportunity for improvement on slide 15

Projects

Project represent major investment or sometimes divestment in the service or technology components on which this service heavily relies.

  1. Run this report https://miamioh.teamdynamix.com/TDNext/Apps/0/Reporting/ReportViewer.aspx?RunNow=1&ReportID=220303
  2. Clear the Service parameter and replace with the name of the service you are reviewing.
  3. Click Run
  4. Fill in the number of high priority incidents on the fifth row of the table on slide 13

Consider the following:

  • Were there major investments in the features or operation of this service that are not represented in the project portfolio?
  • Are there opportunities for significant investments in this service on the horizon?

Document any actionable concerns or ideas as an opportunity for improvement on slide 15

KB Articles

KB article represent self-service help available to users as well as documented procedures published for internal use.

Unfortunately, there is no direct tie between a service, it's dependent configuration items, and specific KB articles. So, we have setup the report to primarily consider categories where the knowledge content resides.

  1. Run this report https://miamioh.teamdynamix.com/TDNext/Apps/0/Reporting/ReportViewer.aspx?RunNow=1&ReportID=220305
  2. Clear the category parameter and replace with the categories of the service you are reviewing.
  3. Add the IDs of any configuration items from slide 10 that you feel are essential to the delivery of this service. We allow for up to 5.
  4. Click Run
  5. Fill in the number of KB articles on the sixth row of the table on slide 13

Consider the following:

  • Are there areas where subject matter experts have important information to the operation of the service that if they were to win the lottery and leave their job it would be difficult to recover?
  • Are there solutions to common problems users encourter that are not documented for them to use?
  • Are their procedures critical to the operation of the service that are not documented?
  • Is the material accurate and timely?

Document any actionable concerns or ideas as an opportunity for improvement on slide 15

IT Annual Survey

Each year IT has issued a survey, originally knows as TechQual+, to assess performance on a set of standard questions. Sometimes there are questions that are directly related to the service you are reviewing and others there are not.

  1. Read through the most recent analysis from 2020 to see if there are any relevant questions to consider 

If so, consider the following:

  • Did we meet the minimum service expectations? If not, what might we do to raise the perceived performance next year?
  • Has the perception of the service performance increased or decreased over recent years? If decreased, what might we do to reverse that trend?

Document any actionable concerns or ideas as an opportunity for improvement on slide 15

Service Improvement Plan

Hopefully, the final section of the service review on slide 15 has been built incrementally as you worked thorugh the prior sections. Nonetheless, take a moment to consider any improvement opportunities that you have observed that would make the service better -- new features, increased reliability, increased accessibility, increased performance -- and add them to the list.

Update Service Review Data

The final step of your service review is book keeping so that we can monitor progress of these light-weight service reviews.

  1. Locate the service in the service catalog
  2. Click Edit
  3. Select the settings tab
  4. Set the value of the Date of Most Recent Light-weight Review to today's date
  5. Set the value of the Date of Next Light-weight Review to the date which you would like to do this again
  6. Save

Related Documents, Forms, and Tools 

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