Successful implementation of ITIL Service Transition best practices enables IT departments to develop capabilities for transitioning new and changed services into operations, ensuring that requirements are effectively realized while controlling the risks of failure and disruption.

Implementing Service Transition in an organization when this has not existed before is only likely if a new service provider is being established. Therefore, the task for most service provider organizations will be one of service improvement, a matter of assessing their current approach to the Service Transition processes and establishing the most effective and efficient improvements to make, prioritized according to the business benefit that can be achieved.

Implementing new or improved Service Transition processes will be a significant organizational change and an introduction of improved services delivered by the service provider. From that context, much of the guidance in this publication on delivering new or changed services is directly applicable to introducing Service Transition itself. In doing so, is in itself, a Service Transition exercise, since it is changing the services delivered by the service provider.

Stages of Introducing Service Transition

These stages will match those of other services, requiring a (a)justification for the introduction, (b)designing of the Service Transition components and then their introduction to the organization (transitioning) before they can run in normal mode.

(a) Justifying Service Transition

Service Transition is a key contributor to the service provider’s ability to deliver quality services to the business. It is the delivery mechanism between the work of design, and the day-to-day care delivered by operations. However, Service Transition processes are not always visible to customers, and this can make financial justification difficult. When setting up Service Transition, attention needs to be paid to ways of quantifying and measuring the benefits, typically as a balance between impact to the business (negative and positive) and cost (in terms of money/staff resources) and in terms of what would be prevented by applying resources to any specific transition, such as delivering staff resources or delaying implementation.

Gathering of evidence on the cost of current inadequate Service Transition is a valid and useful exercise, addressing issues such as:

• Cost of failed changes

• Extra cost of actual transition compared with budgeted costs

• Errors found in live running that could have been detected during test transition.

(b) Designing Service Transition

Useful factors to consider when designing Service Transition are:

Applicable standards and policies

Consider how agreed policies, standards and legislation will constrain the design of Service Transition. Considerations might include requirements for independence and visible accountability.

Relationships

Other internal support services: there are many situations when Service Transition must work together with other areas that are transitioning other elements of a business change, such as HR, facilities management, production control, education and training. The processes will be designed to facilitate these relationships. The aim should be to ensure that ownership for each component of the overall service package is defined and subsequently management responsibility is clear.

Program and project management

Major transition may be managed as programs or projects, and Service Transition will deliver their role within the appropriate umbrella. To ensure appropriate transition is delivered, staff will be involved in agreeing key program and project milestones and timelines and Service Transition should be set up to adopt this role.

To be effective, Service Transition needs to take a broader view across projects, combining transitions and releases to make the best use of available resources.

Internal development teams and external suppliers

Communication channels will need to deal with defects, risks and issues discovered during the transition process. Channels to both internal teams and external suppliers will need to be identified and maintained.

Customers/user

Communication with customers and users is important to ensure that the transitioned service will remain focused on current business requirements. The requirements at actual transition may evolve from the needs identified at design stage and communication channels with the customer will be the source of identifying those changes. Effective communication will benefit from an agreed strategic stakeholder contact map. In many circumstances this communication will be routed through service or account management or Service Level Management, but these channels need to be identified and designed into the Service Transition processes also.

Other stakeholders

Other stakeholders will need to interface with Service Transition and these should be identified for all foreseeable circumstances, including in disaster recovery scenarios, and so liaison with ITSCM should be created for. Other possible considerations might include:

• IT e.g. networks, IT security, data management

• Outside of IT but within the organization e.g. facilities management, HR physical security

• Outside of the organization e.g. landlords, police and regulatory bodies.

Budget and resources

Funding approach

A mechanism for controlling the funding of the transition infrastructure needs to be established, this will need to include:

• Testing environments

• SCM and Service Knowledge Management Systems

The costing of transition objectives needs to be an essential inclusion of design. Often the transition options will be costed and a business risk-based decision reached.

Resources

Similar to the issues and options identified in the funding area, supply and control of other resources will need to be addressed within the Service Transition such as:

• Staff

• Central Infrastructure

Test environment management is a major item of expenditure and a significant resource element in many organizations. Under funding/resourcing can cause very expensive errors and problems in supporting live services, and have severe detrimental effects on an organization’s overall business capability.

Risk & Value

As with all transitions, decisions around transitioning the transition service should not be made without adequate understanding of the expected risks and benefits. Risks may include:

• Alienation of support staff

• Excessive costs to the business

• Unacceptable delays to business benefits.

The risks and beneficial values require a baseline of the current situation, if the changes are to be measureable. Measures of the added value from Service Transition might include:

• Customer and user satisfaction

• Reduced incident and failure rates for transitioned services

• Reduced cost of transitioning.

The ITIL v3 Service Transition Toolkit

This Service Transition Toolkit (over 80 Documents) is created to give you a head start and strong foundation in mapping and developing your IT Service Transition.

It Contains:

Service Transition

The ITIL v3 Service Transition Toolkit

Stages of Introducing Service Transition

(a) Justifying Service Transition

(b) Designing Service Transition

Budget and resources

Risk & Value

The ITIL v3 Service Transition Toolkit

Products by the same publisher: The Art of Service (#39769)

Note: The purchase screen may provide the option to download a trial version with a free license key.