Hitting the Moving Target That Is CSI
Perfection in service is a moving target; one that we all are aiming toward, but can never truly hope to hit. While working toward service protection, what we’re actually aiming for is continual service improvement, as our understanding of optimal continues to shift under constantly evolving objectives, goals, and service requirements. Continual service improvement (CSI) throughout the ITIL lifecycle is incredibly important, both internally and externally. You can never rest, assured that your organization, your team, and your internal stakeholders are delivering optimal service because of the inherently shifting nature of the target. That is why establishing and refining CSI goals, metrics, and overall strategy, ensuring that they are rooted in both your organizational mission and your long-term IT vision, is so important. In this article, we’ll look at several concrete ways to continually improve your service throughout the ITIL lifecycle.Defining Your CSI Strategy, Goals, and Metrics in an Evolving ITIL Environment
Everything originates in your business model – your company’s mission and values, your IT vision, and everything else, including your CSI goals. Defining what you hope to accomplish in service is the first step toward realizing CSI. From the exercise of defining your goals, a strategy will emerge. Once a strategy is identified and refined, the metrics needed to measure the effectiveness of employing that strategy should be reasonably clear. After all, what gets measured has a greater tendency to get prioritized and accomplished. You can hold yourself and your stakeholders accountable to the strategy and your CSI goals by making the metrics as internally visible as possible.Measuring Your Success and Creating Wisdom From the Knowledge You Gain
Once you have defined your CSI strategy and the metrics that you will use to measure its effectiveness over time, you will need to employ that strategy. Focus on collecting the data necessary to continually measure the success of its implementation through the ITIL lifecycle. But tracking data and evaluating the ongoing effectiveness of your CSI strategy in meeting your goals is only part of the solution. You must also make efforts to translate the technical knowledge you gain through your metrics into practical knowledge that your team can put into action to create the positive CSI you are working toward.Continual Service Improvement and Its Lasting Impact Throughout the ITIL Lifecycle
Continual service improvement has real and lasting impacts on your customers. We have helped one of the largest regulated water and wastewater companies in the United Kingdom, Yorkshire Water, realize the continual service improvement goals they were aiming for. The result of this partnership was so successful that two service desk admins were ultimately capable of delivering services to the company’s 6,000 customers. Further, the company started routing tickets from not only IT, but also health, finance, governance and compliance, and property calls into the system to track their work, streamlining service delivery in the process. The benefits of defining your CSI goals, crafting a CSI strategy, and measuring your success while working toward continual service improvement can have benefits that spread far beyond the service desk, and the internal and external stakeholders that the service desk supports and serves. CSI can be a driving force in the ongoing success of your entire organization.
