CMMI 2.0 or version 2.0 came into being with the release of the Development view in March 2018.
This was closely followed by the subsequent release of the Services and Supplier Management views in December 2018.
This post is exclusively focused upon the Services view of CMMI V2.0 model.
It provides high level description of the four practice areas that come under the "Services" category.
The above four practice areas are described in a more detailed manner in the following sections of this post.
Strategic Service Management (STSM)
STSM relates to designing, developing and deploying new or upgraded services. It also conceptually relates to decisions regarding downsizing or discontinuing of services that are in operation.
The key point here is ensuring there is deep and strategic connect of the service offerings with the business objectives, needs and directions.
Key elements that need consideration in this practice area include:
STSM takes care of which services should be offered. SDM takes care of service delivery system to ensure services are delivered as planned.
SDM relates to the provisioning and delivery of the selected services. It also conceptually relates to decisions regarding enhancements, changes and improvements to the services that are in operation.
The key point here is ensuring there is clear operational connect of services with the service catalog and the SOPs for the services that are on offer.
Key elements that need consideration in this practice area include:
Incident Resolution and Prevention (IRP)
SDM takes care of the actual delivery of services on the ground. IRP ensures incidents and issues that disrupt service delivery are addressed promptly to ensure high availability to the end-user of the services.
IRP relates to identification and resolution of incidents and issues that disrupt or degrade the delivered services and in selected cases investigate the underlying causes to prevent recurrence of certain incidents and issues.
The key point here is ensuring that any disruption of degradation in services is restored and the service operations brought back to normal state at the earliest so that services continue to be delivered in line with the SLA commitments.
Key elements that need consideration in this practice area include:
Continuity (CONT)
IRP takes care of resolving incidents and issues that disrupt or degrade the services being delivered by a service system.
This was closely followed by the subsequent release of the Services and Supplier Management views in December 2018.
This post is exclusively focused upon the Services view of CMMI V2.0 model.
It provides high level description of the four practice areas that come under the "Services" category.
- Strategic Service Management (STSM) - what services to provide?
- Service Delivery Management (SDM) - how to ensure delivery of selected services?
- Incident Resolution and Prevention (IRP) - how to ensure smooth service delivery?
- Continuity (CONT) - how to ensure disruption-free service delivery?
The above four practice areas are described in a more detailed manner in the following sections of this post.
Strategic Service Management (STSM)
STSM relates to designing, developing and deploying new or upgraded services. It also conceptually relates to decisions regarding downsizing or discontinuing of services that are in operation.
The key point here is ensuring there is deep and strategic connect of the service offerings with the business objectives, needs and directions.
Key elements that need consideration in this practice area include:
- Creating and maintaining a service catalogue that lists down all types of service offerings with different levels of support (like standard, premium)
- An example of this could be a bank offering different facilities/services like ATM, lockers, teller, FD opening/closure, etc.
- Again, there could be different SLAs/levels of the above services based upon customer types like regular. privilege, etc.
- Creating and maintaining the SOP for providing the services with detailed description of the work flow
- Creating and maintaining the SOP for introducing a new or upgraded service and also for downsizing or discontinuing an existing service
- Analyzing the services portfolio to keep it aligned with the business objectives, needs and directions of the organization.
- An example of this could be a bank offering new facilities/services in the branch operating in a specific locality based upon that locality's unique characteristics.
- Again, the bank can discontinue certain services in the branch operating in a specific locality including even shutting down the branch (which essentially means all services get discontinued!)
STSM takes care of which services should be offered. SDM takes care of service delivery system to ensure services are delivered as planned.
SDM relates to the provisioning and delivery of the selected services. It also conceptually relates to decisions regarding enhancements, changes and improvements to the services that are in operation.
The key point here is ensuring there is clear operational connect of services with the service catalog and the SOPs for the services that are on offer.
Key elements that need consideration in this practice area include:
- Provide services (which essentially means handle incoming traffic of service requests/tickets) in line with SLAs or service performance contracts and includes services scope, service window (time/availability), SLA commitments, etc.
- Operate and maintain the end-to-end system for service delivery including introducing changes to enhance or improve the parameters related to effectiveness and efficiency.
- Analyze service performance to identify improvements in service delivery like cycle time reduction, response within SLA, resolution with SLA, SLA tightening, etc.
- Evaluate the suitability of service delivery system in terms of its capacity and its actual performance in catering to the incoming traffic of service requests (this would also feed into SSM for the top-level intervention at the service catalog level)
Incident Resolution and Prevention (IRP)
SDM takes care of the actual delivery of services on the ground. IRP ensures incidents and issues that disrupt service delivery are addressed promptly to ensure high availability to the end-user of the services.
IRP relates to identification and resolution of incidents and issues that disrupt or degrade the delivered services and in selected cases investigate the underlying causes to prevent recurrence of certain incidents and issues.
The key point here is ensuring that any disruption of degradation in services is restored and the service operations brought back to normal state at the earliest so that services continue to be delivered in line with the SLA commitments.
Key elements that need consideration in this practice area include:
- Identification of incidents and issues (both in a reactive mode as well as anticipatory/proactive mode) that disrupt or degrade service delivery or may do so
- The definition of incident can be extended beyond issues or problems faced by an end-user to include requests regarding some help or query related to something where the user may have got stuck.
- The incidents, issues and user requests can be logged as service request or problem ticket or service issue or service ticket, etc.
- Logging and tracking the incidents and issues to their resolution and eventual closure
- Resolving incidents and issues in a systematic manner in accordance with the SOP for the same - this SOP should have steps like:
- analyzing the incident or issue
- classifying the incident or issue correctly
- assigning to the right team/personnel
- identifying the fix or workaround needed
- verifying that the proposed fix or workaround will actually resolve the incident or issue
- implementing the proposed fix and pushing that into production
- verifying the fix or workaround is actually working as was thought
- informing the concerned stakeholders and/or the requester that the incident or issue has been resolved
- obtaining concurrence of the requester that the incident or issue has indeed been resolved
- closing the service request or ticket
- Investigating the underlying causes of selected set of incidents or issues and take measures to prevent their recurrence either by eliminating them altogether or minimizing their frequency of occurrence - this is recommended in following situations:
- an incident is occurring very frequently or becomes a pain point for the end-users
- an incident is not occurring very frequently but has significant disruptive or degrading impact on the service delivery system
- an incident is not occurring very frequently but has end-users like the CEO, senior management whose down-time is pretty expensive
Continuity (CONT)
IRP takes care of resolving incidents and issues that disrupt or degrade the services being delivered by a service system.
CONT ensures mitigating measures or controls are put in place to reduce the likelihood of serious disruptions or catastrophic events that have severe impact on the availability or performance of the service system and also the overall business operations.
An example of this could be the outage of the web portal of an e-retailer!
CONT relates to identification and implementation of mitigation measures to avoid the occurrence of serious disruptions or catastrophic events during the operation of the service delivery system.
CONT relates to identification and implementation of mitigation measures to avoid the occurrence of serious disruptions or catastrophic events during the operation of the service delivery system.
It also conceptually relates to the complete business operations which essentially means all services being delivered by the business.
This view has direct linkage with the business continuity and disaster recovery plan concept in the ISO 27001 standard as also ISO 22301 (ISO standard exclusively focused on business continuity management).
The key point here is ensuring some kind of FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) or FTA (Fault Tree Analysis) is done on the service delivery system (or even the overall business operations) so as to identify and address, in a proactive manner, things that could go wrong.
Key elements that need consideration in this practice area include:
The key point here is ensuring some kind of FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) or FTA (Fault Tree Analysis) is done on the service delivery system (or even the overall business operations) so as to identify and address, in a proactive manner, things that could go wrong.
Key elements that need consideration in this practice area include:
- Identification of the triggers that can lead to serious disruptions or catastrophic events
- Identification of the approaches to mitigate those triggers
- Implementation of the measures and controls in line with the selected approaches for mitigating the likelihood of the triggers
- At times, it may not be possible to influence the likelihood of a serious disruption or catastrophic event so in that case it is advisable to focus on reducing their impact should they happen (an example could be floods in an area where nothing can be done on the likelihood part but a better building design would lessen the impact)
- In addition to mitigation plan, there should be a contingency plan which would state what will be done should any serious disruptions or catastrophic event were to occur
- Preparation of a continuity plan for service operations which should include
- List of functions and services that are essential to ensure continuity of operations
- The sequence of restoration, RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective)
- Period verification and validation of the continuity plan which should include
- Training of the staff involved in ensuring continuity as well as recovery and restoration after the occurrence of any serious disruption or catastrophic event
- The trained staff should be fully aware of the contingency measures as documented in the continuity plan
- There should be periodic testing of the continuity plan to ensure the plan would "go right" when it needs to be invoked and this is important because it will be a situation of real crisis when it would need to be invoked, if ever
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