Early life support

Early life support (ELS) provides the opportunity to transition the new or changed service to Service Operations in a controlled manner and establish the new service capability and resources. An example of the ELS activities is shown in Figure 4.24.

Figure 4.24 Example of early life support activities

In Service Design, the stakeholders will have agreed the entry and exit criteria from early life support but it may be necessary to finalize the performance targets and exit criteria early in this stage. This can help to understand the deployment verification process and set customer and stakeholder expectations about the handover of the service to Service Operation s.

ELS provides appropriate resources to resolve operational and support issues quickly, centrally and locally, to ensure that the users can use the service to support their business activities without unwarranted disruption. The deployment teams should analyse where users and support resources will experience issues and problem s, perhaps based on previous experience; for example, clarification about:

• Role assignments, roles and responsibilities
• Financial and funding arrangements
• Procurement and request fulfilment
• Security policies and procedure s
• Raising incident s and change request s
• Escalation procedures
• Complaints procedure
• Using diagnostics tools and aids
• Software licensing rules.

During ELS, the deployment team implements improvements and resolves problems that help to stabilize the service. The Continual Service Improvement publication provides relevant information on measurement and service improvements. The deployment resource s will gradually back out from providing the additional support as the user s and service teams become familiar with the changes and the incidents and risks reduce.

Metrics for the target deployment group or environment measure service performance, performance of the Service Management and operations processes and teams and the number of incidents and problems by type. The deployment team’s aim is to stabilize the service for the target deployment group or environment as quickly and effectively as possible. An example of a deployment performance graph is shown in Figure 4.25.

Variation in performance between different deployment groups and service units should be analysed and lessons learned from one deployment used to improve subsequent deployments.

Figure 4.25 Illustration of the benefits of targeted early life support

The example shown in Figure 4.25 shows the number of incident s for two branches of a retail organization that have the same number of users and the same deployment schedule. In deployment A the incident levels have reduced faster. On further investigation the Service Transition manager discovered that the team responsible for Deployment A was more competent at training users and transferring knowledge to the service desk so that they could help users to be more effective more quickly.

During ELS, the deployment team should ensure that the documentation and knowledge base are updated with additional diagnostics, known error s, workaround s and frequently asked questions. The team should also resolve any knowledge transfer or training gaps.

At agreed milestones in early life support, it is important to assess the issues and risks, particularly those that impact the handover schedule and costs. Service Transition monitors the performance of the new or changed service in early life support until the exit criteria are achieved. These include when:

Дата добавления: 2015-10-29