Topics Covered

What is Your Service Portfolio
The Service Portfolio is the “spine” that connects the lifecycle stages of ITIL Version 3 together. In this course you learn the answer to the common question, “What is a service?”, and uncover the difference between the Service Portfolio, the Service Catalogue, and the Service Pipeline. The journey begins with documenting standardised service offerings required by the business – and this course teaches you how to identify and define your organisation’s services from the business perspective.
 
Defining a Service Catalogue
The first questions that people who have been tasked with creating a Service Catalogue ask are, “What is a Service Catalogue? What does one look like? What should be in it?” Participants have the opportunity to see a variety of example Service Catalogues like those in production at leading representative IT organisations.

Core Service Catalogue Elements
A Service Catalogue may contain many different elements, which can initially lead to confusion. The course will focus on the foundational elements of an effective Service Catalogue.
 

Among the topics covered are
Setting appropriate expectations	Improving quality while reducing cost
Enabling governance	Categorising services
Documenting service level commitments	Enabling efficiency and speed
Achieving consistency	Establishing controls
Standardising service parameters	Leveraging automation

IT Services and SLAs that Align with Business Needs
The Service Catalogue should be created with an unwavering focus on the needs of the internal customer. Sit down with your business customers and users to understand what IT services mean to them, and then define services from their perspective – rather than a technology-centric perspective. Similarly, SLAs must be expressed in business terms and communicated in language that is widely understood by all parties.

Ensuring Success in your ITIL Initiative
ITIL Version 3 advocates that IT organisations begin their service management initiatives by creating a Service Catalogue to define and describe standard services offerings. As prescribed in the most recent ITIL Version 3 publications from the Office of Government Commerce, the Service Catalogue is the focal point for communication between IT and the business – and an essential vehicle for marketing what IT does and how well it does it.

Creating an Actionable Service Catalogue
Services should not be merely static documents, they should also be readily accessible at the moment an end user wants to order services – or when a business unit executive wants to review budgets and track service level compliance. You will learn how to make your Service Catalogue actionable – by linking service descriptions to the Request Fulfillment process.

How to Avoid Common Pitfalls
To succeed, the Service Catalogue must be in the language of the customer. Learn the secrets to avoiding this mistake and nine other common pitfalls in a Service Catalogue project. And discover best practices in merchandising and other IT marketing techniques – invaluable tips that can help you to drive broad Service Catalogue adoption and ensure project success.

Beyond the Service Catalogue
Once you have created the basic Service Catalogue, where do you go next? Many IT organisations are embarking on Service Catalogue initiatives, but the vision sometimes becomes unclear after the initial Service Catalogue is built. In this course, you will learn what other industry-leading companies have done to rapidly deploy their Service Catalogue, achieve realistic and achievable goals, ensure ongoing refinement and continuous improvement, and maintain their catalogue as their organisations change. This course makes use of pre-built templates and examples deployed and successful at IT organisations today. It is not a newScale product or software training course. The concepts and principles taught in the course are designed to be software agnostic and can be applied towards any Service Catalogue initiative.

More Information

If you are interested in attending this training course, please contact us for more details

“The Service Catalog is a key tenet of ITIL, which explains the rise of interest and adoption. It delivers a clear, intuitive way for business customers to understand and request the services that IT provides. It also provides a platform for tracking the status of requests and performance against the services offered through the catalogue. The Takeaway: Service Catalogs are often cited as the quickest win for the IT organization.” – Dennis Gaughan, Research Director, AMR Research, Inc., “Improving Business and IT Alignment With a Service Catalog”.