ITIL® 4 Essentials

CHAPTER 2: SERVICE MANAGEMENT ROLES

In this chapter, we look at some of the service management roles and relationships that need to be defined and managed by organisations. These include:

Service provider

Stakeholder

Service relationship

Consumer

Customer

User

Sponsor

Stakeholders and value types

Some role considerations

Roles are carried out by people and need to be clearly defined so that those people understand what they are supposed to do. Clear roles and responsibilities are essential for an effective service management organisation. If roles are not clear, tasks may be duplicated - or not done at all.

Remember: a single person can fulfil many roles - that's why it is so important to map roles carefully.

Many organisations that are new to ITIL and service management look at all the ITIL practices and panic. They think they need to hire hundreds of new staff to fulfil all the roles - confusing a job or person with a role.

In a smaller organisation, one person may have lots of roles. ITIL doesn't mean hiring lots of staff, but simply means matching the service management roles with the existing IT staff members. For example, one staff member might carry out change enablement and configuration management roles. Service desk staff might have roles within incident management, access management and request fulfilment.

Service provider

The organisation delivering a service is acting as a service provider. A service provider can be part of the same organisation as a consumer (for example, an IT department offering services to a sales team), or an external organisation (for example, a software solutions provider selling to customers).

A service provider organisation must understand who its customers or consumers are, and which other stakeholders are part of its wider service relationships.

There is still a common perception that ITIL is only suitable for organisations of certain sizes or in certain sectors, but this is not the case. Every IT service provider organisation, for example, needs change enablement of some type. The type and size of the organisation will influence how change enablement is implemented, but the underlying reason for having change enablement (protecting services while delivering new or updated functionality) remains the same.

Stakeholder

A stakeholder is "a person or organization that has an interest or involvement in an organization, product, service, practice, or other entity".

Stakeholders can be anyone - internal or external to the organisation.

If a service provider organisation doesn't understand what its consumers want, it has no chance of being able to deliver services to meet their needs. The organisation needs to build relationships with stakeholders to improve communication and really get to know them and their requirements. It is important to remember that the term 'stakeholder' covers more than just consumers. Examples of stakeholders could also include:

Suppliers and partners

Shareholders and investors

Auditors

Employees

There are many techniques available for stakeholder mapping; if this is an area where your organisation could improve, an Internet search will yield much useful information.

Service relationship

A service relationship is "a co-operation between a service provider and a service consumer. Service relationships include service provision, service consumption, and service relationship management."

Changing our perspective from 'making a sale' to managing a relationship can have a big impact on how we behave as a service provider organisation. When an organisation is new or immature, it will chase every single customer it can possibly find, even if that customer may be difficult to work with or even toxic. More mature organisations recognise that there are some customers with which they do not want to work, because the overhead of managing the relationship outweighs the benefits of the initial sale.

Managing service relationships requires the service provider organisation to continue to allocate time and resources after a purchase has been made or a service has been provided. Automation can help with this process; for example, you might receive a reminder when your automobile insurance or health insurance is due for renewal, along with an enquiry about whether anything has changed.

Effective service relationship management brings benefits for both the service provider organisation and the consumer. The service provider can have confidence that its customers will be loyal, allowing it to invest in its services and take a long-term planning view. The consumer will feel that they are being listened to and should be confident that the service will continue to meet their needs.

Service consumer

The service consumer is the person or organisation receiving a service. Most organisations will act as service providers and service consumers as part of normal service delivery (for example, as a consumer they buy components to build a service they supply as a service provider). Consumer is a broad term that includes customer, user and sponsor.

Table 1: The Service Consumer

Customer "The role that defines the requirements for a service and takes responsibility for the outcomes of service consumption." User "The role that uses services." Sponsor "The role that authorizes budget for service consumption. Can also be used to describe an organization or individual that provides financial or other support for an initiative."

One individual might act as the customer, the user and the sponsor for a service (for example, an individual who enters into a mobile phone contract fulfils all of these roles). In other situations, the roles are held by separate people (for example, a purchasing department procures mobile phones for staff in a sales team).

Defining roles clearly supports:

Better communication;

Better relationships; and

Better stakeholder management.

The roles within the 'consumer' definition can have different and conflicting expectations about value, agreeing essential requirements, and how much they are prepared to pay. For example, consider a project to provide new laptops to a team of mobile sales representatives:

The sponsor works in procurement and has little understanding of the sales role. Its goal is to purchase the cheapest laptops possible.

The customer is the sales team leader, who wants the team to be happy but has been office-based for some years, so has lost sight of mobile workers' requirements.

The users are the sales representatives who will receive the laptops, and they are likely to be unhappy as their needs have not been recognised.

In this scenario, it would be better for the users to be active in the customer role as well, so that the requirements are clearly defined up front.

Different stakeholders receive different types of value.

Table 2: Examples of Stakeholder and Value Types

Stakeholder Value example Service consumer Receives benefits from the service, and optimises the costs and risks it incurs related to it. Service provider Receives funding or loyalty from consumers, supporting further business development and reputation enhancement. Service provider employees Job satisfaction, financial and non-financial rewards, personal development. Society and community Employment, taxes, corporate social responsibility initiatives. Charity organisations Financial and non-financial contributions. Shareholders Financial benefits, such as dividends.

Using RACI models for role mapping

The RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed) model is used to track who is doing what. It provides clear mapping of roles across the different teams in the organisational structure.

RACI models are used to manage resources and roles for the delivery of a piece of work or task. Resources can be drawn from different functional areas within an organisation, which makes it challenging for line managers to track what their staff are doing. For example, a technical resource might be involved with incident investigation, problem resolution, a project and working with a new supplier.

Only one person can be Accountable for any task. The person who is accountable for the task has the overall authority for the task - but they may not carry out individual pieces of work themselves.

Any number of people can be Responsible as part of the RACI model. These are the workers who will get the actual tasks done, and they will report to the Accountable resource about their progress.

Sometimes resources are Consulted to get a task done. This might be a person within the organisation...