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:
• 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 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.)