Service Design

Question 1

What is the purpose of the service design stage?

Answer 1

The purpose of the service design stage is to actually design IT services, along with any governing practices, processes, & policies, in order to fully realize the provider’s strategy.
After this, it’s to aid in the introduction of these services to the supported environments.

Question 2

What is the scope of the service design?

Answer 2

The scope of service design encompasses four main points:

• The alignment of IT services/solutions with business requirements
• The principles of service design
• The concept of a service design package
• Methods, practices, and tools designed to achieve excellence in service design

Question 3

What are the five main benefits of having a consistent approach to service design?

Answer 3

The five main benefits of having a consistent approach for service design are:

• Reduced total cost of ownership
• Improved quality and consistency of service
• Ease of implementation for new or changed services
• Improved effectiveness of service management and IT processes
• Improved service alignment

Question 4

What are the four Ps that good service design relies upon?

Answer 4

The four Ps of good service design are:

• People
• Processes
• Products
• Partners

Question 5

What is a service design package?

Answer 5

A service design package, or SDP, is a document or a set of documents that define all the aspects of an IT service, and its requirements, as it progresses through each stage of its lifecycle. There is one for each service, and beyond business and technical requirements, it also needs testing requirements, service level requirements, acceptance criteria, and so on.

Question 6

What is design coordination?

Answer 6

Design coordination is the process in which the coordination of all service design activities, processes, and resources are managed. Design coordination is meant to serve as a “core process”, a single point of coordination for everything that goes on during service design.

Question 7

What is service catalog management?

Answer 7

Service catalog management is exactly what it sounds like, the management of the service catalog, ensuring that it is a single source of information on all operational services, and those being prepared to run.

Question 8

What is service level management?

Answer 8

Service level management is the process of negotiating service level agreements, and ensuring that they are met. This includes determining appropriate service levels, and monitoring processes that have SLAs. This is usually a cyclical process, starting with negotiations, agreement, monitoring, reporting, and then review.

Question 9

What is a service level agreement?

Answer 9

A service level agreement is an agreement with an IT service provider and a customer which describes the service, service level targets, and the responsibilities of both the service provider and the customer.
One agreement may cover one or more customers or services.

Question 10

What is a service level requirement?

Answer 10

A service level requirement is a customer requirement for an aspect of service. These are usually based off business objectives, and are used to negotiate service level targets.

Question 11

What are the three types of service level agreements?

Answer 11

There are three types of service-level agreements:

• Service-Based SLAs - This agreement covers one service and all its customers.
• Customer-Based SLA - This agreement covers one customer, and all the services they use.
• Multi-level SLA - Multiple levels of agreement, each corresponding to a different category.

Question 12

What is an operational level agreement?

Answer 12

An operational level agreement is an agreement between an IT service provider and another part of the organization it belongs to.

Question 13

What is an underpinning contract?

Answer 13

An underpinning contract is a contract between an IT service provider and a third party, usually a supplier. The supplier provides goods/services that support delivery of an IT service to a customer.

Question 14

What is service level agreement monitoring?

Answer 14

Service level agreement monitoring is the process of monitoring and reporting achievements against service level targets. Generally, the charts that are used to graph this are plotted with red/amber/green cells against each service, over time. This gives them the name RAG charts, at times.

Question 15

What is a service improvement plan?

Answer 15

A service improvement plan is a formal plan to implement improvements to a process or service. Generally, these are build using the (usually) monthly reporting from service level agreement monitoring.

Question 16

What is supplier management?

Answer 16

Supplier management is the process of “obtaining value for money from suppliers”, ensuring all contracts and agreements with suppliers support business needs, and that all suppliers meet their agreements.

Question 17

What is availability management?

Answer 17

Availability management is the process of ensuring that IT services meet the current and future availability needs of the business.

Question 18

What are the two key activities of availability management?

Answer 18

The two key activities of availability management are:
Reactive activities - The monitoring, measuring, analysis, and management of anything involving unavailability.
Proactive activities - These involve the proactive planning, analysis and management of improvements to availability.

Question 19

What are the two forms of availability?

Answer 19

The two forms of availability are:
Service Availability
Component Availability

Question 20

Define availability.

Answer 20

Availability is the ability of an IT service or other configuration item (CI) to perform its agreed function when required.

Question 21

Define reliability.

Answer 21

Reliability is a measure of how long an IT service or other configuration item (CI) can perform its agreed function without interruption.

Question 22

Define maintainability.

Answer 22

Maintainability is a measure of how quickly and effectively an IT service or other configuration item can be restored to normal working after a failure.

Question 23

Define serviceability.

Answer 23

Serviceability is the ability of a third-party supplier o meet the terms of its contract. Generally, this includes availability, reliability, and/or maintainability levels for a supporting service or CI.

Question 24

Define Vital Business Function.

Answer 24

A vital business function (VBF) is a part of a business process that is critical to the success of the business.

Question 25

What are some special designs often required for vital business functions?

Answer 25

There are four main special designs required for vital business functions:

• High Availability
• Fault Tolerance: The ability for a service/CI/etc to continue operation after the failure of of a component part
• Continuous Operation: The ability to run without planned downtime. Components may be brought down possibly, so long as the VBF stays up.
• Continuous Availability: 100% availability.

Question 26

What is capacity management?

Answer 26

Capacity management is the process of ensuring that the capacity of IT services and infrastructure is able to meet the agreed capacity- and performance-related requirements.

Question 27

What are the three sub-processes of capacity management?

Answer 27

The three sub-processes of capacity management are:
Business capacity management - translation of business needs into technical requirements
Service capacity management - Focuses on the management of performance and capacity of services and workloads
Component capacity management - Focuses on the management of individual IT components, and their performance/utilization, etc.

Question 28

Define capacity plan.

Answer 28

A capacity plan is used to manage the resources required to deliver IT services. It looks at current and historic usage of IT services and components, and contains scenarios for different predicted demand situations.

Question 29

What is IT service continuity management?

Answer 29

IT service continuity management is the process of managing risks that could seriously affect IT services. It’s designed to ensure that services never fall below their minimum agreed service levels by reducing risks, and having contingency plans for recovery.

Question 30

Define business impact analysis.

Answer 30

Business impact analysis is the activity in business continuity management that identifies vital business functions and their dependencies, allowing for a proper assessment of the risk involved should a sup-component fail.

Question 31

Define risk assessment.

Answer 31

Risk assessment is the initial steps of risk management; analyzing the value of assets to the business, identifying the threats to those assets, and determining how vulnerable each asset is to those threats.

Question 32

What is information security management?

Answer 32

Information security management is the process of ensuring that the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of an organization’s assets, information, data, and IT services meet the agreed needs of the business. Its scope goes beyond that of the traditional IT provider.