Strategy Generation

Creating your strategic plans with tacticle wins.

DO NOT SKIP THIS PROCESS.  Many companies do.  Yet, its the most important process of the ITIL Framework.   Its not about ITIL.  ITIL is just a framework.  What is important is how you approach it or tailor it to your business needs.  Many companies make the mistake of focusing on one particular pain point or need.  To do so is warranted but at a minimum it should not be done out of context.  In other words, why focus on Incident Management or Change Management if you don't have a clear approach to where these processes fit in the overall IT strategy or how that strategy aligns to the business strategy. 

Strategy focuses on the principles underpinning the practice of Service Management that are useful for developing service management policies, guidelines and Processes across the ITIL Service Lifecycle. Key areas of this volume are Service Portfolio Management, Financial Management and Demand Management.

When you generate a strategy focus you emphasis is on developing and deploying Service Management in such a way that it becomes a strategic asset to the organization.  A good start is to coordinate activities which become visible through objects such as mission and vision statements, planning and budgeting documents, strategy documents and tools available in industry.  Examples include: Strategy Maps, Policy Objective Matrix’s and Balance Scorecards.  

There are four defined coordinated activities for Strategy Generation.  They are:

•        Defining the Market - understanding the opportunities available to the Service Provider is the starting point and at the heart of defining the market.  First understand the customer’s required outcomes and then provide a service to enable that outcome. 

•        Develop Offerings - focusing on the market space where opportunities exist and where service providers can provide value to customers through provisioning of one or more services.  The market space is the main concept raised under - develop offerings. 

•        Developing the Strategic Assets - achievement of strategic goals or objectives requires the use of strategic assets.  A strategic asset in a Service Strategy can be identified as the physical assets, products and services contained in the service lifecycle.  Therefore, generating a strategy that transforms service management into a strategic asset is one way of ensuring a successful service delivery.

•        Preparing for Execution – understanding the strategy (what works, doesn’t work) is the first step in determining the strategy objectives.  Objectives are presented as solutions, specifications, needs or benefits; these benefits include one or more information elements including but not limited to customer tasks, outcomes and constraints.

These activities help drive value for the customer by aligning service assets with customer outcomes.  Understanding the Critical Success Factors (CSF) for each service also provides an opportunity to analyze the competitive situation and distinct value proposition in meeting the strategic objective(s).

Many IT organizations have applications and may even list those application in a portfolio but more often these same organizations do not have a list of services in the form of a service catalog or even map the service or its service offerings to the underlying applications and infrastructure which supports the service(s).  Therefore, if the objective of Service Strategy is to design, develop and implement Service Management achieving operational effectiveness and offer distinctive services to meet this objective the following is important:

•        Develop a phased deployment which gradually builds and transitions services.

•        Identify Service Owners who participate in Service Design and assist representing the organization's need for defining SLAs.

To learn more about the relationships, inputs, outputs, roles, operational metrics, key performance indicators, critical success factors, process requirements, dependencies, tools and process design flow contact Simple Secure IT.