Challenges for Service Operation Managers

The following is a list of some of the challenges that Managers in Service Operation should expect to face. There is no easy solution to these challenges, mainly because they are by-products of the organization culture and the decisions made during the process of deciding the organizational structure. The purpose of including the list is to ensure that Service Operation Managers are conscious of them and can create a plan to deal with them.

The differences between Design activities and Operational activities will continue to present challenges. This is for a number of reasons, including the following.

• Service Design may tend to focus on an individual service at a time, whereas Service Operation tends to focus on delivering and supporting all services at the same time. Operation Managers should work closely with Service Design and Service Transition to provide the Operation perspective to ensure that design and transition outcomes support the overall operational needs.
• Service Design will often be conducted in projects, while Service Operation focuses on ongoing, repeatable management processes and activities. The result of this is that operational staff are often not available to participate in Service Design project activities, which in turn results in IT services that are difficult to operate, or which do not include adequate manageability design elements. In addition, once project staff have finished the design of one IT Service they could move onto the next project and not be available to support difficulties in the operational environment. Overcoming this challenge requires Service Operation to plan for its staff to be actively involved in design projects, to resource the transition activities and participate in Early Life Support of services introduced in the operational environment.
• The two stages in the lifecycle have different metrics, which encourages Service Design to complete the project on time, to specification and in budget. In many cases it is difficult to forecast what the service will look like and how much it will cost after it has been deployed and operated for some time. When it does not run as expected, IT Operations Management is held responsible. While this challenge will always be a reality in Service Management, this can be addressed by active involvement in the Service Transition stage of the lifecycle. The objective of Service Transition is to ensure that designed services will operate as expected and the Operations Manager can provide the knowledge needed to Service Transition to assess, and remedy, issues before they become issues in the operational environment.
• Service Transition that is not used effectively to manage the transition between the Design and Operation phases. For example, some organizations may only use Change Management to schedule the deployment of changes that have already been made – rather than testing to see whether the change will successfully make the transition between Design and Operation. It is imperative that the practices of Service Transition are followed and organization policies to prevent poorly managed Change practices are in place. Operation, Change and Transition Managers must have the authority to deny any changes into the operational environment, without exception, that are not thoroughly tested.

These challenges can only be dealt with if Service Operation staff are involved in Service Design and Transition, and this will require that they are formally tasked and measured to do this. Roles identified in the Service Design processes should be included in Technical and IT Application Management staff job descriptions and their time allocated on a project-by-project basis.

Another set of challenges relates to measurement. Each alternative structure will introduce different combinations of items that are easy or difficult to measure. For example measuring the performance of a device or team could be relatively easy, but determining whether that performance is good or bad for the overall IT service is another matter altogether. A good Service Level Management process will help to resolve this, but this means that Service Operation teams must be an integral part of that process (see Continual Service Improvement publication).

A third set of challenges relates to the use of Virtual Teams. Traditional, hierarchical management structures are becoming inadequate because of the complexity and diversity of most organizations. A management paradigm (Matrix Management) has emerged where employees report to different sources for different tasks. This has resulted in a complex web of accountability and an increased risk of activities falling through the cracks. On the other hand, it also enables the organization to make skills and knowledge available where they are most needed to support the business. Knowledge Management and the mapping of authority structures will become increasingly important as organizations expand and diversify. This is discussed in the ITIL Service Strategy publication.

One of the most significant challenges faced by Service Operation Managers is the balancing of many internal and external relationships. Most IT organizations today are complex and as services become more commoditized there is an increased use of value networks, partnerships and shared services models. While a significant advantage to dynamically evolving business needs, this increases the complexity of managing services cohesively, efficiently and providing the invisible seam between the customer and the intricate web of how services are actually delivered. A Service Operation Manager should invest in relationship management knowledge and skills to help deal with the complexity of this challenge.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 1339