Deming Cycle used for improving services and service management processes

When applying CSI against services and service management process the last two stages of Check and Act play a significant role, however, there are still activities that take pace in the Plan and Do stages of the Deming Cycle.

• Planning for improvement initiatives (Plan) – At this stage goals and measures for success are established, a gap analysis is performed, action steps to close the gap are defined, and measures to ensure the gap was closed are established and implemented.
• Implementation of improvement initiative (Do) – This includes development and implementation of a project to close the identified gaps, implementation of the improvement to service management processes, and establishing the smooth operation of the process.
• Monitor, measure and review services and service management processes (Check) – During this stage the implemented improvements are compared to the measures of success established in the Plan phase. The comparison determines if a gap still exists between the improvement objectives and the operational process state. Gaps don’t necessarily require closure. A gap may be considered tolerable if the actual performance is within allowable limits of performance. At the Check stage, the expected output is recommendations for improvement. For example, recommendations to update or modify the Service Catalogue, measurements to be tracked in SLAs, Operating Level Agreements (OLAs) and Underpinning Contract s (UCs) could also come out of this stage.
• Continual service and service management process improvement (Act) – This stage requires implementing the actual service and service management process improvements. A decision to keep the status quo, close the gap or add necessary resources needs to be made to determine if further work is required to close remaining gaps and to allocate resources necessary to support another round of improvement. Project decisions at this stage are the input for the next round of the Plan–Do–Check–Act cycle, closing the loop as input to the next Plan stage.

Too many people and too many organizations are looking for the big-bang approach to improvements. It is important to understand that a succession or series of small, planned increments of improvements will not stress the infrastructure as much and will eventually amount to a large amount of improvement over time.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-02