Nowadays IT departments must continually improve their services in order to remain appealing to the business. ITIL version 3 places this within the lifecycle phase of Continual Service Improvement (CSI).
In English, there is a difference between continual and continuous:
Continuous means that the organization is involved in an activity without interruption; the efforts are constantly at the same level; for example, continuous operation
Continual means a succession of closely placed activities; in this way a sequence of improvement efforts is created: continual improvement.
An IT service is created by a number of activities. The quality of these activities and the process which links these activities determine the quality of the eventual service. CSI focuses on the activities and processes to improve the quality of services. To this end, it uses the Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle of Deming (P-D-C-A). This cycle prescribes a consolidation phase for each improvement, to engrain the new procedures in the organization. This implies a repeating pattern of improvement efforts with varying levels of intensity, instead of a single continuing improvement effort which is always on the same level. This is the reason why, in ITIL version 3, the 'C' of CSI stands for continual and not continuous.
Measuring and analyzing is crucial to CSI; by measuring it is possible to identify which services are profitable and which services can do better. The CSI improvement process has a seven step plan. Creating a Service Improvement Plan (SIP) is a Service Level Management activity within the CSI scope. The Section 'Processes and other activities' pursues this matter in more depth. Next we will describe the roles which execute the core activities, followed by the methods, techniques and technology which assist them. The interfaces between service level management and CSI are dealt with in the last section on interfaces with the other phases and IT Service Management processes from the ITIL lifecycle. First of all, we will consider the justification of CSI and a number of basic concepts.
Goal and Objectives
The goal of CSI is for continual improvement of the effectiveness and efficiency of IT services, allowing them to meet the business requirements better. This entails both achieving and surpassing the objectives (effectiveness), and obtaining these objectives at the lowest cost possible (efficiency). To increase the effectiveness you can, for instance, reduce the number of errors in a process. To make a process more efficient you can eliminate unnecessary activities or automate manual operations.
By measuring and analyzing the process results in all Service Lifecycle phases you can determine which results are structurally worse than others. These offer the highest improvement probability.
CSI mainly measures and monitors the following matters:
Process compliance - Does the organization follow the new or modified service management processes and does it use the new tools?
Quality - Do the various process activities meet their goals?
Performance - How efficient is the process? What are the elapsed times?
Business value of a process - Does the process make a difference? Is it effective? How does the client rate the process?
The main objectives of CSI are:
To measure and analyze Service Level Achievements by comparing them to the requirements in the Service Level Agreement (SLA)
To recommend improvements in all phases of the lifecycle
To introduce activities which will increase the quality, efficiency, effectiveness and customer satisfaction of the services and the IT Service Management processes
To operate more cost effective IT services without sacrificing customer satisfaction
To use suitable quality management methods for improvement activities.
Scope
The scope of CSI contains three important areas:
General quality of the IT management
Continual tuning of the IT services to the current and future needs of the business
Continual tuning of the IT Service Portfolio
The maturity of the IT processes which make the services possible.
