This week I’m going to tackle Service Design, specifically how it applies to you messaging and collaboration environment.  Service Design is actually quite a large topic, so I’ll be cutting it half delivering Part 3a: Service Design today and Part 3b: Service Design on Thursday.

As I mentioned in Part 1 Service Design includes all aspects of new services and the changes or improvements of existing services. This covers their architecture, processes, policies and documentation, in order to meet current and future business requirements.  As of ITIL 2011 there are eight main processes associated with Service Design, this article will focus on the first four and their associated process owners, or Roles.

Ok, let’s jump right in.

Design Coordination

Design Coordination is concerned with the coordination of all activities, processes and resources entailed in Service Design.  The goal is to ensure design activities are consistent, efficient and thorough. Design Coordination is a function of the Service Design Manager, this role is accountable for all planning and coordination as well as maintaining all design documentation.

So how does this impact your Messaging and Collaboration environment?

Messaging and Collaboration teams can expect to work within the processes and policies set by the Service Design Manager. This area of Service Design is largely about setting standards and methods for quality, efficient design activities. The Service Design Manager will review projects to determine if they are required to take part in the formal Service Design process. If required the Service Design Manager will then work with potentially impacted teams to determine which components of the IT organization are affected and how the new service will be provided. As part of the Design Coordination process the Service Design Manager will also work to determine the feasibility of a new service and the financial impact.

It is important to note that Design Coordination and Project Management are not the same things. While there are certainly many similar qualities, Design Coordination is based on a lifecycle, it is continuous and its goal is efficient, quality design. Project Management is finite; there are deadlines, scope and budgets. Project Management functions alongside Design Coordination assigned one project at a time. Design Coordination encompasses all design related activities project independent.

Service Catalogue Management

The objective of Service Catalogue Management is to produce and maintain a catalogue regarding information on all operational services and those being developed. The information contained in the Service Catalogue will be used in the other Service Management processes. This information includes the service details, its current status and potential interdependencies.

Service Catalogue Management is maintained by the Service Catalogue Manager. The Service catalogue Manager ensures that the information in the Service Catalogue is accurate and up-to-date.

So how does this impact your Messaging and Collaboration environment?

A basic customer facing Service Catalogue will contain the information below:

Service type, name and description-Just as it says, what family does the service belong to, what is it called, and what does it do?

Features-What different thing are offered by the service, what can users expect?

Expectations-Availability, incident and problem resolution, standard request process.

Metrics-How the service is measured in terms of availability and performance

Pricing-How much does it cost? Are there different tiers of service?

From a Messaging and Collaboration perspective this information can be critical when working with customers to develop and deploy new services, upgrade existing services or manage day to day service expectations. Having a better understanding of the service you provide and the operational commitments behind them provides a clearer picture to your overall capabilities. From an individual department standpoint a Service Catalogue can be fairly simple to create and maintain, publishing this to your customers creates an awareness around what you do and what potential value your services can provide to the company at large.

Service Level Management

Service Level Management is tasked with negotiating Service Level Agreements with customers and ensuring that services are designed to meet agreed service level targets. Service Level Management is also concerned with any underlying Operational Level Agreements and third party contracts. These activities are managed by the Service Level Manager who is the process owner. The Service Level Manager is also responsible for Monitoring and reporting Service Levels and their performance with the SLA.

So how does this impact your Messaging and Collaboration environment?

Service Level Management is often critical for Messaging and Collaboration services. Many of the services we provide are mission critical, meaning that any disruption of service will have a severe negative impact to your customers. For some services even a very short disruption can cost thousands of dollars, in larger organizations service disruptions can run into the tens or hundreds of thousands. Your customers want to know what your previous performance is and what you’re willing to guarantee with a Service Level Agreement.

Service Level Management and Service Level Agreements are very often dependent on demand and capacity management.  Each component is critical to balance; too little capacity can lead to service disruptions, which in turn impact the SLA. At this point there are a few simple options, renegotiate the SLA, increase capacity at the expense of the customer due to increased demand, or increase capacity from an IT perspective. The nice part of ITIL is that whichever option you need to pursue, you should already have all of the information you need to support it.

Capacity Management

The object of Capacity Management is to ensure that agreed service level targets are met from a capacity standpoint.  Capacity Management covers all IT resources required in order to deliver a service. This process is governed by the Capacity Manager, who creates plans for not only the short term but the medium and long term as well.

So how does this impact your Messaging and Collaboration environment?

From a Messaging and Collaboration perspective this means not only the capacity of you servers but the entire underlying infrastructure that supports them. This could be Active Directory, network bandwidth, disk capacity or even personnel (From the help desk to the architect). Capacity Management takes all of these things into consideration in order to manage, control and predict what the availability and performance of your services.

In order to manage Capacity Management properly you need to have the right metrics, in this case the more information the better.  If collected properly or with the proper tools trends can be of tremendous value. The ability to show growth and usage over time leaves little room for doubt upon the need for additional capacity or newer solutions to old problems.

Thursday I will publish Part 3a on Service Design where I will cover the final four processes. If you missed my previous posts you can find them here.

As with the rest of the articles in this series this is just an introduction, ITIL is vast, and in order to full advantage of the framework I would recommend additional research.  If you have any specific questions or would like to continue the conversation further please reach out in the comment section, I'd be happy to respond to any questions.

Also, please take a moment to learn a little more about our company.

Recent Blog Posts

22

How do you Measure a Cloud? Tue, May 22nd 2012 2:12p Carl Drechsel The GSX Blog For the quick answer click here. Ok, now seriously. After my previous article on the cloud and messaging, we’ve received a fair amount of feedback and questions on how Exchange and ITIL relate to the cloud and in particular how can we measure and monitor cloud services. This topic is dear to our heart. As a Microsoft partner we are a modest but focused provider of tools that are centered on monitoring your critical services and delivering a satisfactory user experience. In [read] Keywords: collaboration email exchange exchange microsoft mobile office wiki

7

Webinar: How to keep your Collaborative environment up & running with GSX' solutions Tue, May 22nd 2012 11:11a Juliette Ollagnier The GSX BlogThanks to everyone who joined Steve Bystran today to learn how to keep your collaborative environment up & running with GSX Monitor and Analyzer. During this webinar we will look at the challenges involved in running an effective and efficient messaging and collaboration environment in today's organizations: Delivering an integrated suite of messaging and collaboration services while managing the associated complexity Making decisions to improve performance of the messaging a [read] Keywords: collaboration exchange exchange podcast

39

Exchange DAG Monitoring- 3 main admin challenges Fri, May 18th 2012 6:12a Meryll Moreau The GSX BlogWith Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft introduced the concept of the Database Availability Group (DAG). A DAG contains Mailbox servers that become members of the DAG. Once a Mailbox server is a member of a DAG, the Mailbox Databases on that server can be copied to other members of the DAG. The Exchange Server 2007 Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR) and Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) features are now combined into one new feature called Database Availability in Exchange 2010. Da [read] Keywords: admin database exchange exchange microsoft network security server

98

The Ever-Expanding Roles of an Exchange Administrator Wed, May 16th 2012 12:12p Carl Drechsel The GSX Blog Ok everyone, I'm looking for some feedback from the community. In a few weeks I’m going to be hosting a Birds of a Feather session at TechEd North America 2012 regarding The Ever-Expanding Roles and Responsibilities of an Exchange Administrator. Up until then I am going to devote a blog article to the topic each week. I’ve had a fair amount of feedback on the topic already and have identified the following as some of the top concerns. Grassroots Innovation (Int [read] Keywords: archiving community exchange exchange mobile sharepoint

43

Webinar: How to track and enhance Exchange availability and performance? Tue, May 15th 2012 11:12a Juliette Ollagnier The GSX BlogThanks to everyone who joined Steve Bystran today to learn how to track and enhance Exchange availability and performance with the new version of GSX Monitor and Analyzer for Microsoft Exchange. During this webinar we saw how our monitoring and reporting solutions provide administrators with relevant alerts and real time overview of the services that their infrastructure is truly delivering to the business lines. We showed you how our solutions test the availability, the performance [read] Keywords: exchange exchange microsoft sharepoint

146

BYOD, Concerns for the Enterprise Wed, May 9th 2012 11:12a Carl Drechsel The GSX BlogBring Your Own Device (BYOD) is one of the topics that was addressed at the day two keynote of MMS 2012. It’s a trend in companies worldwide that has been increasing in practice with the success and popularity of the iphone, the ipad and Android based devices. With their adoption this has led many employees to use those devices to be more productive and, as a result, use those devices to access company data such as e-mail, applications, files and systems. This in turn has l [read] Keywords: collaboration application applications enterprise exchange exchange iphone microsoft mobile network security server sharepoint

74

Who let the DAG out? Wed, May 9th 2012 6:12a Juliette Ollagnier The GSX BlogMessaging is mission critical in today’s organizations; the Exchange server is the lifeblood of the business. IT Profesionnals face a number of challenges in the on-going day to day operations: They cannot afford any downtime or end-user outages that can impact the business. They need to monitor and anticipate overall usage and growth from the user perspective They need to get advanced alerts that pinpoint the source of emerging issue As a result, IT professionals are rus [read] Keywords: administration exchange exchange microsoft server

93

Microsoft Management Summit 2012 In Review Wed, Apr 25th 2012 3:12p Carl Drechsel The GSX Blog Last week we attended the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas (MMS 2012), and by all accounts the conference was a success. This year there were around 5300 attendees, over 160 sessions and 5 technical tracks. There were announcements, new technologies, a great deal of technical content and a host of companies whose products help simplify IT systems management. In this post I’m going to attempt to summarize some of the key points and takeaways as well as let you in on [read] Keywords: desktop microsoft mobile security server virtualization vmware

75

GSX at MMS 2012, Day Four Fri, Apr 20th 2012 6:13p Carl Drechsel The GSX Blog Day Four at MMS 2012 and you could tell things are starting to wind down, not to say that there still wasn’t a lot of good content, there was, but you could tell the week was coming to an end. Steve and the team spoke to attendees in the Expo Hall from 9:45 until closing at 2:00, at which time we drew a winner for our AR Drone Quadrocopter. I don’t have the details but I’m sure we’ll be posting another update. I attended a few sessions today s [read] Keywords: application enterprise twitter

67

GSX at MMS 2012, Day Three Thu, Apr 19th 2012 12:13p Carl Drechsel The GSX Blog Day three at MMS 2012 and another keynote, a host of sessions and of course, some time spent in the Expo Hall. Speaking of the Expo Hall, there’s been a steady stream of attendees giving Steve and the team a chance to speak about monitoring and analytics for their Messaging and Collaboration environments. So far our product seems pretty well received, one of the key takeaways has been delivering IT service, and GSX Monitor and Analyzer bring service delivery to the forefro [read] Keywords: collaboration apple applications facebook google integration microsoft mobile network security twitter