Assessing and managing risk in Service Operation

Service Operation and Project Management

Measurement of successful change

Change assessment

Service Operation staff must be involved in the assessment of all changes to ensure that operational issues are fully taken into account. This involvement should commence as soon as possible (see paragraph 4.6.1) not just at the later stages of change – i.e. CAB and ECAB membership – by which time many fundamental decisions will have been made and influence is likely to be very limited. The Change Manager should inform all affected parties of the change being assessed so input can be prepared and available prior to CAB meetings.

However, it is important that Service Operation staff are involved at these latter stages as they may be involved in the actual implementation and they will wish to ensure that careful scheduling takes place to avoid potential contentions or particularly sensitive periods.

The ultimate measure of success in respect of changes made to Service Operation is that customer s and user s do not experience any variation or outage of service. So far as possible, the effects of changes should be invisible, apart from any enhanced functionality, quality or financial savings resulting from the change.

Because Service Operation is generally viewed as ‘business as usual’ and often focused on executing defined procedures in a standard way, there is a tendency not to use Project Management processes when they would in fact be appropriate. For example, major infrastructure upgrades, or the deployment of new or changed procedures, are significant tasks where formal Project Management can be used to improve control and manage costs/resources.

Using Project Management to manage these types of activity would have the following benefits:

• The project benefits are clearly stated and agreed
• There is more visibility of what is being done and how it is being managed, which makes it easier for other IT groups and the business to quantify the contributions made by operational teams
• This in turn makes it easier to obtain funding for projects that have traditionally been difficult to cost justify
• Greater consistency and improved quality
• Achievement of objectives results in higher credibility for operational groups

There will be a number of occasions where it is imperative that risk assessment to Service Operation is quickly undertaken and acted upon.

The most obvious area is in assessing the risk of potential changes or Known Errors (already covered elsewhere) but in addition Service Operation staff may need to be involved in assessing the risk and impact of:

• Failures, or potential failures – either reported by Event Management or Incident/Problem Management, or warnings raised by manufacturers, suppliers or contractors
• New projects that will ultimately result in delivery into the live environment
• Environmental risk (encompassing IT service Continuity-type risks to the physical environment and locale as well as political, commercial or industrial-relations related risks)
• Suppliers, particularly where new suppliers are involved or where key service components are under the control of third parties
• Security risks – both theoretical or actual arising from security related incidents or events
• New customers/services to be supported

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23