Understanding the Purpose, Objectives, and Scope for Service Design

Service design is involved in planning both new services and changes to existing services, ensuring that the new or changed service fulfills the service strategy by delivering the business objectives. It touches all areas of IT because each area will have a role in delivering and supporting the eventual service. It includes the design of both services and the service management processes, which will ensure that the service continues to provide value.

Successful design depends on taking the time to plan ahead. This is often seen as wasted time, with the service provider anxious to press ahead with the design. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth; insufficient planning leads to costly rework and delay later. Part of the planning phase is identifying and managing risks to ensure a successful outcome.

The Purpose of Service Design

The purpose of service design is to deliver a new service or a change to an existing service that is capable of delivering the strategic outcome required. This involves not only the technology used to deliver the service but the processes and policies needed to ensure that the technical solution delivers the intended value. It considers what will be required by the transition phase to implement the service in the operational environment, how the service will perform, and what will be required to support it. Service design must ensure that the service runs within the allocated budget and delivers a level of service that meets or exceeds the customer requirement.

The Objectives of Service Design

In an ideal world, services would be designed so well that they would require little or no improvement later. Although this is not realistic, service design should aim to deliver a service that will require very little improvement later. This is not to say that there is no role for continual service improvement; every design effort should apply lessons learned from previous design projects because these lessons can improve the eventual output. The business requirement may also change, requiring improvements to the original design.

Service design activities may be undertaken on a regular basis or as the result of identifying a new or changed business requirement.

The Scope of Service Design

ITIL service design considers not only the current requirement; it extrapolates from this to identify possible future needs and ensures that the service being designed will be able to be developed to meet these requirements too. It ensures that the design fits the requirements, and tries to take advantage of technical developments to deliver an innovative service.

It is essential that the service is aligned with the business need, so service design describes how to identify these requirements and ensure that the service delivers what the customer requires. It considers the functional requirements that must be delivered as well as the required service levels. It ensures that any design constraints are identified and adhered to.

The processes included within service design are as follows:

• Design coordination
• Service catalog management
• Service level management
• Availability management
• Capacity management
• IT service continuity management
• Information security management
• Supplier management

We will be examining these processes in later chapters. It is important to remember that these processes are considered during the design stage, but many of their activities also take place during other lifecycle stages. Service level management, for example, has to be considered during design to ensure the service is designed to meet the service level requirements. Once the service is operational, however, service level management is involved in monitoring, reporting, and improving the level of service being delivered and works closely with continual service improvement to implement any service improvement plans.

All processes across the lifecycle must be linked; it is important to understand how these various processes interact so that an amendment to one process does not have unintended consequences on another.

The Value Service Design Provides to the Business

As we mentioned, good service design delivers high-performing services that match the business requirement and are delivered at an affordable cost. Following the service design guidelines in the ITIL framework will have a number of positive outcomes for the business.

Foremost among these is a lower total cost of ownership across the lifetime of the service, because all aspects of the design, processes, and technology have been considered and designed to work together, therefore minimizing later rework. Good design will also consider the corporate strategy and existing architecture, as well as any design constraints, to ensure that the service operates within these parameters.

By ensuring that the warranty aspects of the service are included during the design stages, the service design delivers a reliable, effective service that meets the customer requirement. The service will be designed to meet the agreed service level requirements and will ensure the required capacity, availability, and service continuity requirements are met cost-effectively.

Service design considers not only how the service will perform in the live operational environment; it also considers the most effective way of enabling the transition from design to live, ensuring that all the required information for this transition stage is captured in a service design package (SDP).

Service design will consider what metrics and controls may be required for good governance and ensure that these are part of the design. Ensuring that the design gathers the appropriate metrics will assist in the continual service improvement of the service in the future. It will also consider what processes are required and ensure that these are designed to be both effective and efficient.

Finally, service design will consider particular strategic requirements, such as using cloud technologies or delivering services with the lowest possible carbon footprint, ensuring that the design is aligned with these business requirements.