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ITIL Service Design - Publication Review by Lou Hunnebeck

ITIL Service Design'ITIL Service Design' provides guidance for the design of appropriate and innovative IT services to meet current and future agreed business requirements. It describes the principles of service design and looks at identifying, defining and aligning the IT solution with the business requirement. It also introduces the concept of the service design package and looks at selecting the appropriate service design model. This publication covers the methods, practices and tools to achieve excellence in service design. It discusses the fundamentals of the design processes and attends to what are called the 'five aspects of service design'.

The accurate identification, documentation and agreement of customer and business requirements are fundamental to the production of good service solution designs. ITIL Service Design enforces the principle that the initial service design should be driven by a number of factors, including the functional requirements, the requirements within service level agreements (SLAs), the business benefits and the overall design constraints.

ITIL Service Design concerns itself with the design of:

  • New or changed IT services (including designs to retire IT services)
  • Governing IT practices, processes and policies
  • Everything needed to facilitate the successful introduction of IT services into supported environments.

Continual improvement should be embedded in all service design activities to ensure that the solutions and designs become even more effective over time, and to identify changing trends in the business that may offer improvement opportunities. Service design activities can be periodic or exception-based when they may be triggered by a specific business need or event.

The processes considered important to successful service design are design coordination, service catalogue management, service level management, availability management, capacity management, IT service continuity management, information security management and supplier management. Although these processes are described in detail in ITIL Service Design, it should be noted that almost all of them are also active throughout the other stages of the service lifecycle. All processes within the service lifecycle must be linked closely together for managing, designing, supporting and maintaining the services, the IT infrastructure, the environment, the applications and the data.

The guidance in ITIL Service Design is relevant to all IT organizations, from the smallest internal IT department to the largest external service provider, in both public and private sectors, and in all kinds of industry. It is concerned not just with the technical aspects of service design, but also with the non-technical aspects such as the design of training, documentation and communications and marketing.

Service design produces a service design package (SDP) that enables the build, test and release activities of service transition, and the operation, support and improvement activities of service operation and continual service improvement to occur.

Any IT service provider who is expected to deliver quality to the business customer must have the capability to design services that meet the customer's expectations, and then go on to continually improve further over time. The guidance in this publication will help organizations to do this consistently.

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