Lesson 02: Introduction to the Service Value System

Now that we have an overall understanding of IT Service Management, let’s take a look at ITIL’s Service Value System.

00:06 – So, welcome back. We’ve talked in general about IT Service Management.
00:11 – We’re now going to get into it and we’re going in some detail at what ITIL tells us.
00:17 – I’ve mentioned a few times ITIL 4.
00:20 – Let’s live in the present day and let’s just call it ITIL these days.
00:25 – So, let’s introduce ourselves to what ITIL tells us about.
00:29 – Why are we looking at ITIL? Because it’s going to provide us guidance.
00:34 – It’s going to provide the guidance that is needed, as I said before, to address these new challenges and to make best use of our modern technology.
00:43 – Now, don’t let’s get too hung up on the technology, and we’ll see as we go through, there’s a lot more to delivering a service than the technology.
00:51 – People and how we do things, the practices we use, they’re all really important too.
00:57 – And, in fact, you could argue that technology is the easy bit for most of us in IT.
01:02 – Let’s be honest, we joined IT to play with the toys.
01:05 – Service Management makes us look at the other aspects as well, and ITIL is going to give us that sort of flexible approach.
01:13 – We’re going to hear words like coordinated and integrated, and they’re not just place-maker words, they’re really important.
01:23 – All of the things we talk about as we go through this course, it’s important to remember that these are aspects of a bigger thing.
01:31 – If at the of end this course, we’ve talked through many practices and processes and parts of value chains and all sorts of other things; if at the end of the course, it’s totally clear to you where each one ends and the next one begins, then trust me, you’ve misunderstood.
01:47 – This is all about overlaps and interfaces and coordinations, so just don’t worry too much sometimes if you can’t see a line between the things we talk about.
01:57 – It’s understanding the principles that matter and it’s actually coordinating that is your job.
02:03 – So, what we’re trying to do is to do all that so that we deliver management and governance of our services.
02:10 – Management and governance are not quite the same thing and we’ll address those as we go through, but just remember, what we’re trying to do is to make your lob more …
02:19 – sorry, we’re trying to make your job easier, a lot easier if I could talk, wouldn’t it?
02:25 – So, the key thing we’re going to talk about is the Service Value System, and you can see what the Service Value System looks like, and that’s a picture you’re going to get very used to in ITIL.
02:36 – It describes a range of components and activities.
02:40 – We’re going to introduce you to the names of those now, but again a reminder that this is one system we work together to enable value creation.
02:52 – So, let’s look at those parts.
02:56 – We’re just going to go through the terms at the moment.
02:58 – You could say that what we’re doing now is just helping you to say hello to these new words.
03:03 – They’re words that you’re going to live with.
03:05 – They’re words that are going to become friends and familiar to over the next few hours of listening to me go on about them.
03:13 – So, first, Guiding Principles.
03:16 – These are basic approaches that help us get things right.
03:21 – Recommendations that guide us in all circumstances.
03:26 – Now, ITIL is best practice and guidance and when it uses a word like all, it means it, and so these guiding principles help us in all circumstances, and we really do mean that.
03:42 – Underneath that, we’ve got the word Governance and the fancy term for that, means by which an organization is directed and controlled.
03:51 – Let’s think about governance as two parts.
03:55 – It’s about setting rules and enforcing those rules.
03:59 – It’s wonderfully described by a friend of mine as the management of management, and I love that definition because it means nobody can do their own governance.
04:10 – You have to be governed from outside.
04:12 – IT cannot do IT governance, it can only do IT management.
04:17 – Those are sort of familiar concepts really.
04:22 – The Service Value Chain at the heart of this is not quite as intuitive as it might seem, but it’s a set of conn … activities interconnected into dependent activities that we perform to deliver something.
04:35 – Now, we’re going to look at that clearly in some more detail later on, but just remember that it’s a chain at the heart of things, it’s activities, and it’s widely applicable, in fact, to almost every situation.
04:47 – So, we’re going … again, going to see a lot of value chains as we go through.
04:52 – We’ve got Practices, which is an ITIL 4 word.
04:55 – I’ve come back to use that 4 number again now.
04:59 – So, if you’re familiar with previous versions of ITIL, this is a new word for you to learn.
05:03 – Practices. Familiar concepts, but practice is a good word.
05:08 – Practice is a phrase that means we do this.
05:13 – We actually put this into practice. We make it happen.
05:17 – So, I think it’s a word you will like and a word you will be comfortable with.
05:22 – So, it’s really how organizational resources fit together, how we do things, how we design our structures to deliver useful work, and seen there at the bottom of this picture, but actually pervading everything, is our need to continually improve.
05:42 – Stability is not an option in our modern world.
05:46 – Therefore, you either get better or you get worse, and I would strongly counsel getting better as the more useful of those two options.
05:54 – So, continual improvement is everywhere. It’s pervasive.
05:58 – We’re always trying to improve.
06:01 – We should always be looking at what we do, what we’ve done, and what we can do for ways to do it better and we should be generous about those ideas for getting better.
06:11 – We should help other people and expect them to help us.
06:15 – The other core idea that you can be introduced to now, again just saying hello to your new friends, are these terms here.
06:26 – The four dimensions of Service Management.
06:30 – So, we live in a four-dimensional universe, at least, apparently, so these four dimensions are the four ways of doing things.
06:38 – They’re critical to both effective and efficient value creation, creating products and services for others to use, and it’s like the four walls of a house.
06:51 – If you build those walls separately, then I would strongly advise you not to stand near the house in a strong wind.
07:01 – The sensible thing to do is to build those walls all together, to think about all four walls while you’re building things, or more generically, if we’re talking about building a property, you don’t just build the walls and then thing about putting the plumbing in and then think about putting the electricity in.
07:18 – The wise person runs the cables and the water and the telephones, and all the other things you need in the house as you’re building it, and that’s why we’re talking about integrating these four dimensions together, thinking about them all the time.
07:32 – So, Organizations and People, the human aspect of these things.
07:38 – The Information and the Technology and the information technology.
07:43 – The data and how we process those things.
07:47 – Our Value Streams, the interconnected links and the mechanisms by which we do things and deliver things and help to satisfy the needs of others, and our Partners and Supplies because we can’t do this alone.
08:01 – We need to think about all those four aspects of everything we do, and again, when we use the word everything, we mean it.
08:10 – Every dimension and every situation is affected by all four factors.
08:18 – Sometimes one more than others, but we will get things wrong if we don’t actually think about those four approaches.
08:27 – So, that’s the new core pictures.
08:31 – Those are the new core ideas that you need to take forward for the rest of this course.
08:37 – We need to think constantly about the Service Value System, about which element we’re sitting in, about integrating the parts of it, about making sure that we’ve thought holistically about it, that we’re concerned as much about governance as we are improvement, as we are about the value chain and the practices that help us deliver it.
08:57 – We need to think about those four aspects and four dimensions of Service Management, and make sure that we’re building our walls together, knitted together, so that they stand up to the worst weather that we get thrown at us.
09:09 – In order to build those elements and to build successful Service Management, we need to build it from the basic blocks, and those basic blocks are the key concepts of ITIL, and what we’re going to look next is those key concepts, and those blocks you’ve got, those connectors you’ve got, and how we can use those to build something that works for you and your environment, not just some bland vanilla issue that fails to work everywhere.

Next, we will take a look at the key concepts and building blocks of ITIL.

Lesson 02: Introduction to the Service Value System

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