Lesson 05: People

Let’s take a look at different people involved in IT Service Management.

00:06 – So, welcome to the people-oriented context and concepts.
00:13 – In this lesson, we’re going to look at roles and people and crucially some of the terminology that ITIL now uses to describe roles and peoples and groups of people, and again you need to be careful about the word.
00:30 – These words are used in a particular way within ITIL and you need to understand that, and the first of those words is Organization.
00:40 – Now, in everyday life, we may just use the term organization to mean the company we work for or the department or many more things.
00:48 – Specific meaning here in ITIL, an organization is a person or a group of people that have their own functions with responsibilities, authorities and relationships, and that’s in order to achieve objectives.
01:04 – So, that’s a very strict concept of organization.
01:09 – It can range from a single person or a team to a complex network, legal entities with common objectives and relationships.
01:18 – So, we can come back from one person to a major company to a multinational organization, you know, to the whole country, to a planet and if you’re into Star Trek, the entire federation across known space, all still an organization.
01:36 – Now, on the face of it, that’s not helpful because it’s confusing, but in practice it is important because we can see that an organization is the entity that does the service management or the receipt of it or the oversight, and we need to allow that role to range from one person to a multinational organization because if we don’t have that concept of organization, then we have to come up with different approaches for different situations and we don’t need that.
02:07 – We actually need to see this value concept and value stream running through things and the organization is a powerful tool to help us do that.
02:16 – And an organization can hold and will hold different roles depending on the perspective that we consider.
02:24 – So, that same organization may be a service consumer and a service provider, and we’ve seen that already in the service relationship flows.
02:34 – So, service providers, reminder, an organization takes on the role of service provider when it delivers services and it takes on the role of a service consumer when receiving them, and it will always be both in a conventional business chain.
02:51 – If you’re a taxi company, you are a consumer of services.
02:57 – People supply you with vehicles, they supply you with fuel and they supply you with labor to drive them.
03:03 – You are very much a service provider delivering rides to your customers, and we’re all of us in some degree in that situation.
03:12 – Now within those concepts of service consumer, ITIL has three specific roles and they are customer, user, and sponsor.
03:24 – It is important that we understand the issues here.
03:29 – The customer is the person who defines the requirements for the service.
03:34 – They can take the overall picture, they can see what is desired, and they can see the costs and constraints coming through, so they can understand the compromises that need to be made.
03:47 – You go out and talk to a supplier about a service provision.
03:54 – You say, “Well, we wanted to be supported 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” “Tell you what, you can have Christmas afternoon off, but that’s it,” and they say, “Yeah, we could do that, but we’re going to have to recruit ten extra staff to do that.” “It’s going to cost you an extra million Euros.” And you think, “I’m not going to be able to get the money for that.” “I’m certainly not going to justify that amount of effort in our company.
04:22 – So, let’s talk about something lower and you make those customer compromises.
04:27 – It’s like going to buy a new car. You might like the look of the Ferrari, but you’re probably going to go home with a Ford or a Renault because you can see that that’s not the best thing to spend all the family’s money on.
04:42 – And if you’re not into cars, the same thing with deal dresses.
04:47 – You will make those customer compromises.
04:49 – They define the requirements, they adjust that requirement in terms of common sense, and crucially they take responsibility for the outcomes of service.
05:01 – So, the customer role, we’re used to the customer role.
05:05 – If you’re a parent, trust me, you’re a customer, because we have the user role.
05:11 – The user uses the services, presses the buttons, drives the car, plays with the toys that we buy them.
05:18 – Again, we’re used to users and I will pick that toy analogy up.
05:24 – Customer will make sensible decisions about what toys their children have based upon, obviously, getting the money for it, but also on safety and on the way they wish to develop, generating particular motor skills or understandings.
05:41 – From the child’s perspective, you just give them something they play with.
05:46 – So, customer and user, basic concepts we have at home, very valuable concepts we have at work.
05:52 – Now, I’ve mentioned money a few times and the customer needs to be aware of them, but they’re not going to be the person that authorizes the budget at the end of the day.
06:01 – In most organizations, the customer will make the case for things, understand the balance, come up hopefully with a logical case.
06:09 – The user will use it, press the buttons, use the app, talk on the phone, whatever it is, but the sponsor, the sponsor will actually authorize the budget.
06:21 – Typically, the Chief Financial Officer or someone in their department who will approve the request for money.
06:28 – I’m sure we all, many of us worked in organizations where we’ve made a perfectly rational case for something, that the users require, that we want to put in place, to find it rejected at some point up the line.
06:41 – So, it’s important to see these three roles.
06:44 – You have to see it from the sponsor’s perspective; there’s only so much money going around.
06:48 – So, customer, user, sponsor. Specific roles, but they may be the same person at different times.
06:56 – The person who is the sponsor, the Chief Financial Officer, is actually a user of services as well.
07:02 – Someone in their department is probably making the justification for it that they will sign off.
07:07 – Users and customers can certainly be the same people at different times.
07:13 – So, remember they’re roles we’re talking about.
07:16 – A role is not the same as an individual.
07:19 – One person can have multiple roles at different times in different circumstances.
07:24 – So, those are sort of people-oriented things that we need to be aware of, and we’re going to keep referring to customers and users and sponsors, mostly to customers and users, I must say, over the rest of this course, and if you haven’t got that clarification clear in your mind, then you’re going to get confused later on.
07:43 – So, just realize where you’re a customer and where a user because I’m pretty certain you are both of those in different circumstances.
07:52 – Next, we’re going to look at costs and risks.
07:55 – We’re going to discuss whether you should take an umbrella out with you, and hopefully you can make those kind of decisions and that will help you to understand risk management.

So, there are three roles in the organization of a service consumer. Can you describe them?

Each entity has two sides when it comes to service, provider and consumer. What services do you consume (e.g., this course) and what services do you provide?

How about us? You know about the services we provide; what services do you think we’re consuming?

It’s interesting when we review the list of our corporate clients: we are delivering a service to them, and also, we consume the service of many of them (e.g., postal services, banks, car manufacturers, and cloud service providers). So, there’s a cycle of value creation… and there’s a lot of VAT involved ;)

Lesson 05: People

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