5 Service Delivery

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The Service Delivery module of ITIL covers the more forward-looking delivery aspects of service provision and consists of Service Level Management, Financial Management for IT Services, Capacity Management, IT Service Continuity and Availability Management. These processes are principally concerned with developing plans for improving the quality of the IT services delivered.

Figure 4: The Service Delivery Processes

Figure 4 illustrates how Service Level Management (SLM) provides the major interface to the business and it also shows the major deliverables from each of the Service Delivery processes.

The SLM process negotiates, documents, agrees and reviews business service requirements and targets, within Service Level Requirements (SLRs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). These relate to the measurement, reporting and reviewing of service quality as delivered by IT to the business. The SLM process also negotiates and agrees the support targets contained in Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) with support teams and in underpinning contracts with suppliers, to ensure that these align with business targets contained within SLAs.

The other major roles of the SLM process are the production and maintenance of the Service Catalogue, which provides essential information on the complete portfolio of IT services provided, and the development, co-ordination and management of the Service Improvement Programme (SIP) or Continuous Service Improvement Programme (CSIP), which is the overall improvement plan for continuous improvement in the quality of IT services, as delivered to the business.

Financial Management for IT Services provides the basis for running IT as a business within a business and for developing a “cost conscious” and “cost effective” organisation. The principle activities consist of understanding and accounting for the costs of provision of each IT service or business unit and the forecasting of future expenditure within the IT Financial Plan. There is also another optional, but preferred activity, the implementation of a charging strategy, which attempts to recover the IT costs, from the business, in a fair and equitable manner.

SLM demonstrates the level of service being delivered to the businesses day in and day out. As long as the service meets the business’ specified requirements, when cost models or a charge back mechanism are implemented under Financial Management, you can show the financial value of those services. This provides a baseline for assessing the financial viability of a service or adjusting charges in line with changing service requirements i.e. in general, a better service costs more money.

The Capacity Management process ensures that adequate capacity is available at all times to meet the requirements of the business by balancing “business demand with IT supply”. In order to achieve this, a Capacity Plan closely linked to the business strategy and plans is produced and reviewed on a regular basis. This covers the three principle areas of Business, Service and Resource Capacity Management (BCM, SCM and RCM). These three areas comprise the activities necessary for ensuring that the IT capacity and the Capacity Plan are kept in line with business requirements. The common activities used within these areas are Performance Management, Workload Management, Demand Management and Application Sizing and Modelling.

IT Service Continuity produces recovery plans designed to ensure that, following any major Incident causing or potentially causing disruption of service, IT services are provided to an agreed level, within an agreed schedule. It is important for each organisation to recognise that IT Service Continuity is a component of Business Continuity Planning (BCP). The objective of IT Service Continuity is to assist the business and BCP to minimise the disruption of essential business processes during and following a major Incident. To ensure that plans are kept in line with changing business needs Business Impact Analysis, Risk Analysis and Risk Management exercises are undertaken on a regular basis together with the maintenance and testing of all recovery plans.

Availability is a key aspect of service quality. Availability Management is responsible for ensuring that the availability of each service meets or exceeds its availability targets and is proactively improved on an ongoing basis. In order to achieve this, Availability Management monitors, measures, reports and reviews a key set of metrics for each service and component, which includes availability, reliability, maintainability, serviceability and security.

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