DWS Service Desk Rescue Series: The 15 Core Operational Management Systems to Drive Operational Stability

Operational Management is one of the four most important management systems, which also include First-Line Management, Upline Management, and People Management.

It is a crucial component of every organisation and plays an essential role in its success.

The organization's capacity to guarantee product uptime and availability is impacted by operational management. It guarantees that internal clients are able to conduct their job productively, as well as that the product and services are accessible for purchase by external clients.

Despite the fact that the fundamental function of Operations Management is to keep the lights on, a crucial aspect of Operations Management is to also promote Continual Improvement. It accomplishes this by discovering new methods to reduce expenses and by offering a platform for sales teams to enhance revenue.

In another blog, we discussed the 23 key processes that fall within Operations Management. In this blog, we will focus on the core 15 processes that are essential to "keeping the lights on".

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Let us take the problem management process and explore It a bit further.

As service disruptions arise in organizations, they can result in the loss or potential loss of the availability or performance of services. The task of detecting, reporting, analyzing, tracking and correcting the service disruptions falls to the problem management team.

The problem management process is both a reactive process initiated after a major incident, or, a proactive process executed after an analysis of the environment is done, so improvement can be made.

The goal of the problem management process is to prevent problems and the resulting service disruptions or incidents from occurring. For those incidents that cannot be avoided, it is designed to minimize the impact. The problem management process overseas the lifecycle of the problems to ensure it is being executed as expected.

The key is to harvest insights from all the ITSM tickets to understand the repeat and chronic issues and other high-impact incidents affecting the business. Once you’ve identified what issues are occurring and why those issues are occurring, and more importantly, what actions need to be taken, you would provide that information to the problem management team to oversee the execution of the recommendations.

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Let's explore the Core Operational processes in more detail.

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CORE-A1- Major Incident Management

The objective of the Major Incident Management process is to ensure that when a major incident has been identified, the major incident manager will work with various resolver groups to restore the service in a timely manner. 

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CORE-A2- Problem Management

The objective of the Problem Management Process is to detect, report, analyze, track and correct service disruptions that are impacting operations.

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CORE-A3- Availability Management

The objective of Availability Management Is to ensure that all the IT services are available and are functioning correctly whenever customers and users want to make use of them.

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CORE-B1- Service Desk Management

The objective of the Service Desk process is to provide users with a single point of contact for all in-scope problems and requests. Provision of Service Desk Services will enable both direct and indirect (web, phone, e-mail, chat) interaction between the End User and the technical support organizations for the question and problem resolution.

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CORE B2- Service / Catalog Request Management

The objective of the Service Request Process is designed to ensure that a governance structure is established around how service requests are received, what types of requests are received, who they are received from, & what the S.L.A’s are for the requests.

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CORE B3- Incident Management

The objective of the Incident Management Process is to detect any service disruptions, log and classify these disruptions, and assign the right resources to restore service in the most effective manner to achieve the SLA targets.

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CORE-B4- Change Management

The objective of the Change Management Process is to ensure that all changes are implemented successfully, any failed change has a post-implementation review that is conducted, and proactive actions are taken to improve the environment.

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CORE B5- Release and Deployment Management

The objective of Release Management is to ensure the Releases are planned, designed, built, configured and tested in preparation for the rollout.

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CORE-B6– Request for Service (RFS)Management

The objective of the Project RFS Process Is designed to ensure that a governance structure is established around how RFS requests are received, what types of requests are received, whom they are received from, and what the S.l.a’s are for the requests.

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CORE-C1- Configuration Management

The objective of the Configuration Management process focuses on identifying, establishing, and maintaining accurate information and consistency of a system or product (CI) throughout its lifecycle.

CORE-C2- Asset Management

The objective of the Asset Management Process ensures that assets are tracked and reported on from acquisition to disposal in terms of value, ownership and location. 

CORE-C3- Performance & Capacity Management

The objective of the Performance & Capacity Management process ensures that the performance of the infrastructure hardware and software are operating at acceptable levels and services are not at risk. It ensures warnings, alerts, and utilization targets are established and tracked at defined intervals to ensure disruptions are avoided.

CORE-C4- Event Management and Monitoring & Alerting Management

The objective of the Event Management and Monitoring & Alerting Management processes is to ensure that the hardware, software, networking and applications supporting the business are monitored to ensure performance and availability. And, appropriate events are generated to identify if any issues are emerging or exist. It ensures proper notifications are set at agreed-to levels, monitoring is in place to track and trend performance data, and incidents are raised for conditions that meet the warning or alerting thresholds. 

CORE-C5- Firmware, Patch, & Currency Management

The objective of the Firmware, Patch, and currency Management process ensures that all systems have the most current firmware and patch levels. The process ensures that all SW and HW assets are proactively managed, and any new firmware or patch releases are studied, tested, and applied in a timely manner to avoid incidents.

CORE-C6- Backup & Recovery Management

The objective of the Backup & Recovery process ensures that data is backed up and made available in the event of a disaster to protect organizations against data loss. In the event of failure, the backup copy of the data can be used to restore critical information. 

For a detailed explanation of each of these processes, feel free to take a look at the book. journey to a unified delivery model, a framework for conducting operational health checks. The Management whisperer series or Contact us.