ITSM part 4

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
Benjamin Franklin.

ITSM’s most oft-used framework, ITIL, is built around a service lifecycle which includes:

1. Service strategy,
2. Service design,
3. Service transition,
4. Service operation and
5. Continual service improvement.

There are certainly parallels in OSS. However in my years in OSS, it is the last dot-point that seems to be most commonly overlooked. Unfortunately there are many aspects of an OSS where continual improvement is overlooked:

• The most important is in data integrity – if the data is rubbish, the user experience is rubbish. There must be a feedback loop to continually improve on data integrity from the designers through to the installers. This can be done by automations (eg reconciliation scripts) but also requires process adherence (eg if a field tech notices erroneous data, they need to remedy the data or flag for remedial activities)
• The next is in the area of efficiency – this is where the spend on an OSS is most commonly justified as many of the other benefits are less tangible. Interestingly, post project implementation the efficiency gains aren’t always measured, managed or continually improved. Examples might be using real data to tweak processes to improve them, or measuring all operators to identify what the most efficient do better than the others and then replicating