Don’t wait until you have your Service Catalogue “closed”: that’s not happening (if you do things the right way…)

Moses introducing Service Catalogue v1.0

While reviewing a few requests for change to be submitted to the weekly CAB meeting, I told my manager about 2 of them in which there was no affected service recorded; well, in fact there was something written in the field “Affected Service”, but it was not present in the Service Catalogue.

My boss didn’t want to change it for one of the services that actually exist in our Service Catalogue as he says “the Service Catalogue is not closed yet”. I thought he meant our current Service Catalogue was only a draft pending of validation or whatever, but he didn’t: what he meant is that our Service Catalogue has not been carved in stone yet, if you let me put it that way. That’s what he means with “closed”. Well I’m afraid I have to tell him that’s never happening, if we do things the way God dictates…

The Service Catalogue is not an easily attainable, but it’s so maybe because it’s utility is poorly explained. Or maybe, the way I see it, what is not widely spread is from which point of view we should look at a Service Catalogue: it’s a tool meant to be created from a customer focus, customer oriented, and that’s the weakest point of many service providers, whether they’re in-sourced, outsourced, co-sourced or whatever combination of the previous.

“Customer oriented” and “customer focus” mean to me something beyond servility some practice, neither accepting whatever request a client makes crazy as it might be or absolutely out of the scope of a contract or an agreement. Customer focus is wanting to deliver the services the customer needs (and has bought) in the most adjusted way to what’s been considered a functional, economic, capacity, utility or availability requirement in the contracting process and on the day-to-day client’s business operation. The Service Catalogue must reflect accurately this customer orientation; the best example of what this means I found it on this post of Joseba Enjuto’s blog (sorry, only available in Spanish, you may try this -I decline any responsibility on the results…)

This customer focus and an ever-changing world as IT world is by nature, requires the Service Catalogue to be something organic, flexible and dynamic enough. The Service Catalogue is not to be engraved in stone as the Ten Commandments; ITIL V3 picks up with this brilliantly (and is IMHO the star feature of V2 revision) putting the Service Catalogue Management on the Service Strategy phase as the core of the Service Lifecycle, as the axis around the whole life cycle spins, as the genuine rotor.

And now, for someone who can tell about it far better than I do.