Service Level Management Annual Budgeting

[gmcgee]

This is my first year in service level management and services catalog. I would appreciate any advice from the community on what I should account for in my operating budget for service level management. Got any road blocks you found along the way and wished you had additional funding? I've gleaned the basics from the V2 ITIL Service Delivery manual page 30. I've even added a line item for "emergency service improvement opportunity". Are there others I should be aware of?

Thanks in advance.

Greg

[UKVIKING]

I dont understand the question.

ITIL is not insurance or any such

....Hmm I will spend 10K this year on ITIL.I guess that should be enough... to be ITIL compliant
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In my not so humble opinion - and i am never humble....

A IT department should spend money on training for ITIL as follows

all front line staff should get ITIL foundation
all team leads should get Practitioners reflective of their areas
all management staff should get the manager's staff provided that they fit in the processes.
In addition, reward good team leads with the courses and get committment from them (cant quit for period / role must be related to ITIL)

Departments that deal with implementation should get the following training
ITIL Foundation
Change configuration and release practitioners (to understand the change/release / config process)
PRINCE2 Foundation for the team leads and the PROJECT Managers

Have the PM department adopt PRINCE2 (other Project methodology if not prince2 standard in your area)

then as your staff gets promoted / transfered within the company, up skill their ITIL level and get them to apply it

-----------thats training ----------------------------------------------------------

from an operational point of view

You need the following role or persons filled

Service Desk Manager & Staff
Incident Manager & Staff
Problem Manager & staff
Change Manager & staff depending on a lot of factor. You may need a admin / staff person to handle volume and other details
Release Manager & staff - same as above
Config manager, librarian and even a s/w license staff

That is just operations

For operational support or delivery

There needs to be a role / team to provide an interface twix the business and IT. This would be the SLM roles
Capacity, Availability, Disaster recovery (continuity) are also roles that need filling
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so how should you assign budget for ITIL

IT DEPENDS

I can give you a line item /by line item analysis with what you should do but that is consluting and I am already in a commited relationship

Some other Roxanne may be available on the next corner
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter

[gmcgee]

Thanks for all the advice.

I will clarify. Most of the other ITIL based positions are staffed and funded (change, incident, problem, service desk). Our organization is fairly well down the road in aligning with the ITIL practices. We also have a full compliment of Relationship Managers tasked with producing business technology plans and identifying service level agreements with our lines of business.

Service level management, my position, is just getting going as of this May. My tactical objective is to roll out a services catalog with work flow automation behind the scenes next April.

I have been asked to look at my budgeting needs for next year. It sounds like training is key to success. I'm happy to report we have planned Practitioner training next month.

[UKVIKING]

Training (staff) is always the key to success. The hard part for this issues

is as follows (as I see it)

1 - The Service catelogue depends on the services being understood in the same manner by the business and by IT (hmm training / exposure for business to concepts- bill the departments)

2 - The services in order to be defined - need to have IT people define it as a chain of IT services

3 - The IT side of SLM would need to work with the Business side of SLM and discuss the SLR for the service before they can discuss the SLA. The service once defined would most likely need OLAs for the internal groups supporting the service as well as UC for the external groups that support aspects of the service

4 - The SC depends on some sort of Central repositoryof information and a team to manage it (I would call this config mgmt and stay away fromt eh term CMDB - which is like the etheral unicorn.

Let me put this using a simple example

Mid and senior level management have Blackberrys

This is a service in itself
what are the hours of service / availability
There is usually a 3rd party Unless you are a telco yourself - managing the telco / phone side
The Crackberry service also depends on the corporate mail service
the corp mail service depends on the network service, the backup service and the monitoring service.
the network service depends on the internal network service and the external network services (telcos again)

As each service identified here has its own 'hours', SLAs, UC, the aggregate of this service would look kind of ugly

Now when the berry service is presented to mid / senior level mgmt and the available hours - state

Best endevours as the service is dependent upon the external vendor (telco) for cellular connectivity


....... hmmm...... and the mgmt does not understand.... you have your issues
_________________
John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

Change Management is POWER & CONTROL. /....evil laughter