ITIL Service Delivery – In A Nutshell

Pretty much all of IT is run under the ITIL framework nowadays, and it has been for some time. Along with the new best practices and methodologies have come a number of new roles and working disciplines. This article looks at the world of ITIL Service Delivery.

What Is Service Delivery?

The term Service Delivery is used to define the business of IT itself. It is an integral part of ITIL Service Management and it uses specific Service Delivery processes to:

• Define expectations of service availability, timelines and quality.
• Explain and define the specific roles and responsibilities of Service Providers, users and customers.
• To define the actual roles of the services themselves.

What Does It Actually Do?

Service Delivery provides processes that help IT staff to design processes that meet the business needs in a way that is cost efficient to the business. These processes enable the services to be defined in a way that allows them to be provisioned between internal staff, external vendors with equal effort. The processes provide a way for staff to measure how efficient various services are in a way that allows a continuous improvement process if required.

What Teams Are Part Of Service Delivery?

Because Service Delivery needs to be able to define and manage expectations in various parts of the IT Infrastructure business, it is comprised of 5 separate teams:

• Service Level Management
• Financial Management
• Capacity Management
• Availability Management
• Continuity Management

Service Level Management

Service Level Management provides a framework that defines services and agrees on levels of service that support business processes. It is probably the most important set of process within ITIL. Service Level Agreements and Operational Level Agreements are developed to satisfy these agreements.

Financial Management

Financial Management deals with the costs of the services that are agreed by Service Level Management. It also supplies a support system to the accounting process and ensures that all expenditure is accounted for and spent wisely. Depending on the particular IT Company, Financial Management can be seen as the cost centre, the profit centre or the expense centre.

Capacity Management

Capacity Management ensures that IT infrastructure has the resources in place to keep the business needs happy and catered for correctly. Capacity Management enters the application life cycle at an early stage and deals with the costs incurred by new applications and releases. It deals with potential future issues in a way that helps fix these infrastructure problems should they ever arise.

Availability Management

Availability Management deals with ensuring that vital online applications remain in an available state for users and customers. They must adhere to the Service Level Agreement conditions. They also play a big role in the Service Outage Analysis initiatives and Component Failure Impact Analysis.

Continuity Management

IT Continuity Management deals with the disaster recover aspect that is apparent in all IT services. It provides a framework that allows recovery to take place in a timely and cost effective manner. The individual Continuity plan can vary from each IT company, and they can cover such diverse risks as flooding, terrorist activities and tornados.

How Does Service Delivery Help?

As outlined above, Service Delivery is set up in order to predefine the best ways to achieve a cost effective outcome to most, if not all, IT related processes. It is constantly being updated and is a fantastic aspect to the ITIL set of processes.

Attached Images:

•  License: Creative Commons image source 
•  License: Creative Commons image source 
•  License: Creative Commons image source 

Thomas Ethan is a project management consultant. He conducts business analysis training in Toronto and is one of the most sought after consultants in Canada. He shares his ideas and experiences through his blogs.

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