While there are many
drivers for the implementation of a Service Catalog, in my experience I find
that there are two keys which I would start with.
Scope and Perspective
Scope
From a project
perspective, scope has to be clearly defined if we are ever going to reach our
deployment target. Let’s face it there are many things which will contribute to
scope creep, so having something solid is critical. The scope for Service
Catalog is to, oddly enough, catalog services. But within the scope we need to
define what the service is before anything else. It is possible that the
journey to define services has an underlying initiative to introduce SLA’s but
you have to crawl before you can run
Perspective
While perspective
might not be on the list of things to review, I find that it needs to be
considered before beginning to avoid any potential repeating pitfalls we might
have experienced in the past. Perspective may have a few fundamental components
Have we tried this before? If so what happened?
If we have attempted
this is in the past we need to identify what didn’t work so that the same
mistakes are not repeated. Sounds like a no brainer but repeating issues
happens all the time. Stakeholders in both IT and the Business may have some
reservations regarding the success of this newest attempt and might ask WIIFM (What’s
in it for me)
Communication
We also need to
ensure that we communicate and keep all stakeholders, whether they are IT or
Business, informed on the progress we are making. I have seen countless
projects of all types start out with a big bang and then the communication
fizzle begins. Drive some excitement about this initiative and gain some
momentum around that
What is a service really?
It may be in the
infancy of these projects that IT assumes that they know what a service is and that
they then can create the service catalog around it. The challenge here is that
there may be a difference in the understanding of the defined services. You may
never make it simple enough but a clear definition from the onset when
discussing the services with the business if critical. This ultimately ties
back into your scope
Overall starting the
implementation on the right foot will allow you to position IT to provide
exception services for your business.
But this is just the
beginning…..
Labels: #SMFlashBook, Service Catalog, Service Management