ITIL Service Design

The Service Design stage of the ITIL Service Lifecycle provides guidance for the design and development of services and Service Management processes. It covers design principles and methods for converting strategic objectives into portfolios of services and service assets. The scope of Service Design is not limited to new services. It includes the changes and improvements necessary to increase or maintain value to customers over the lifecycle of services, the continuity of services, achievement of service levels and conformance to standards and regulations. It guides organizations on how to develop design capabilities for Service Management. The Service Design stage of the lifecycle starts with a set of new or changed business requirements and ends with the development of a service solution designed to meet the documented needs of the business.

Principles of ITIL Service Design

The overall approach of ITIL Service Design is to represent the fundamentals of designing services. The five key aspects of Service Design process are as follows –

• Designing Service Solution: At the planning stage, the service team chalks a plan of producing services with balancing cost, deadline, budget and business requirements.
• Designing Management Information Systems and Tools: ITIL service design defines some important Management Information System (MIS), such as service portfolio, configuration management system, capacity management information system and security management information system.
• Designing of Technology and Architecture: Designing technology brings in technological competencies which take care of designs, plan, and processes aligning with IT policies and strategies.
• Designing Processes: The process model is one of the elaborate paradigms in ITIL and it helps in the transition, operation, and improvement of services.
• Designing Measurements and Metrics: Process metrics must be aligned with organizational goals and drilled down to each individual role as in balanced scorecard metrics.

Major Aspects of Service Design

There are five major aspects of service design.

• Service Solutions: These are service solutions, management information systems and tools, technology and management architectures and tools, processes and measurement systems. Service solutions are about including the functional requirements, resources, and capabilities needed in service design. The process must be iterative and incremental to satisfy the customers’ changing requirements.
• Management Information Systems: Management information systems and tools are an essential part of service design. These especially include the service portfolio for the management and control of services throughout their lifecycle. The service portfolio is the most critical management system for supporting all service management processes. It describes service delivery in terms of value for the customer and must include all service information and their status.
• Technology and Management Architectures: Technology and management architectures and tools include the preparation of blueprints for the development and deployment of an IT infrastructure. These also include data, applications, and infrastructure that are used in the service.
• Processes: Processes are required to design, transition, operate and improve services. A process model helps to articulate the distinctive features of a process. By defining the activities, inputs, and outputs in the lifecycle phases, it is possible to work in a customer-oriented way.
• Measurement Systems: These are methods and metrics for the services, as well as their architectures, components, and processes. Measurement systems are required to regularly assess and optimize the service quality delivered to customers.

The key aspect in the design of new or changed services is to meet the changing business needs. Every time a new service solution is created, it needs to be checked against all aspects of existing services to find out if it can be interfaced or integrated with the latter.

ITIL Service Design Processes

According to official ITIL v3 Documents, there are Eight Well-Defined processes under ITIL Service Design module. Along with that, there are Three Processes which are implicitly-defined by ITIL Documents but those are needed or need to be used throughout this process group.

• 1) Design Coordination (ITIL Defined): Responsible for proper coordination between all service design activities, processes, and resources. Design coordination ensures the reliable and effective design of new or changed IT services, service management information systems, architectures, technology, processes, information, and metrics.
• 2) Service Catalogue Management (ITIL Defined): Used to ensure that a Service Catalogue is produced, maintained, and the catalogue contains accurate information about all operational services along with those being prepared to be run operationally.
• 3) Service Level Management (ITIL Defined): Responsible to negotiate Service Level Agreements with the customers and to design services in accordance with the agreed service level targets. Service Level Management also responsible for monitoring, reporting all Operational Level Agreements and Underpinning Contracts to ensure their appropriateness.
• 4) Capacity Management (ITIL Defined): Ensures that the capacity of IT services and the IT infrastructure is adequate to deliver the agreed service level targets in a cost-effective and timely manner. Ideally, Capacity Management considers all resources required to deliver the IT service, and plans for short, medium and long-term business requirements.
• 5) Availability Management (ITIL Defined): Used to define, analyze, plan, measure and improve all aspects of the availability of IT services. It is also responsible for ensuring that all IT infrastructure, processes, tools, roles etc. are appropriate to meet the SLA.
• 6) IT Service Continuity Management (ITIL Defined): To manage risks that could seriously impact IT services. ITSCM ensures that the service provider, in any situation can meet the minimum agreed Service Levels.
• 7) Information Security Management (ITIL Defined): Responsible for ensuring the confidentiality, integrity and availability of an organization's information, data and IT services.
• 8) Supplier Management (ITIL Defined): It ensures that all contracts with suppliers aligned with the business requirement, and that all suppliers meet their contractual commitments.
• 9) Risk Management: To identify, assess and control risks. This includes analyzing the business assets, identifying threats to those assets, and evaluating the vulnerability of each asset is to those threats.
• 10) Compliance Management: To ensure IT services, processes and systems comply with organization policies and legal requirements.
• 11) Architecture Management: To define an outline for the future development of the technology, taking into account the Service Strategy and newly available technologies.

The Below diagram illustrates the process flow and connection between each of the processes mentioned above: