Where do I start to draw up my catalogue of services?
The worst part of many projects is right before we initiate them, these first steps until we get going. Something similar happens when it comes to drawing up a service catalogue: Where do we start? Here are some simple tips...
Facing a black page can be discouraging, especially when we know that the task that awaits us will be lengthy and very important for the subsequent implementation of other ITSM processes.
Where do we start to define catalogue of services? What are the services that we are really offering to our users?
The answers seem simple, but maybe they are not as simple as they seem. To break the ice, here are some tips that could help us start to identify services:
Do you have a list of corporate applications? This could be a good place to start, because if you have applications, then they are probably of some use. This list of applications could give us the first clues about some services that are provided (supported in these applications). But be careful: a service is not an application, and vice versa, don’t make the mistake of mixing up the two.
Talk to your users, and ask them what their daily work routine is like, what they do, how they interact with IT, ... They will give us an untainted vision of the purpose served by the technology that we make available to them, and they will help us discover new services that we offer them. The benefit of these conversations is that we will get a glimpse of IT from the users’ standpoint, which is precisely how we must describe it in our service catalogue.
What projects have you been working on in recent weeks, months or even years? It is very possible that the goal of these projects is to roll out new services, and there you have them!!!
Do you have a list of incidents and a history of requests? Is it assumed that all these records should be linked with services offered to the users, and so by reviewing this list perhaps we will also find clues about our services. This review is not only useful when it is time to search for new services: it can also help validate the catalogue once completed (everything that the users request must be linked with a service that we have defined in our catalogue, right?)
The truth is that the tips given above are not magic, and perhaps they will not enable you to identify 100% of the services provided by IT, but they will help “getting the machine going,” and without a doubt, once we start searching, it will gradually become easier to identify the services that are missing until we complete our shiny, new service catalogue.
Jandro Castro
