A Service Catalog defines the specifics of a service center's mission, down to the level of performance metrics and budgeting concerns. Unfortunately, many service centers do not actively maintain their service catalogs nor fully develop them. The result can be chaos for both managers and employees.Bushtrack catalogue
Evaluate it in the context of the Service Catalog function list from text files. Identify and document the shortcomings of the Service Catalog and make recommendations on how it could be improved. You do not need to rewrite the Catalog, simply critique its content.
Bushtrack catalogue.
Maintaining a Service Catalog:
A service catalog is a list of all the services you provide, and it has many implications for the service center. The service catalog will help you
• Define services. The catalog allows you to precisely describe the scope of each service, what is and is not included. You can also document the anticipated time it will take to perform the service (a service level):
• Communicate the scope of services. The service catalog is an excellent tool for clearly communicating the service centers' scope of work to management, customers, and service center employees.
• Define Responsibility. For each service in the catalog, you can define the service center's responsibility as well as the cus¬tomer's.
• Define the required resources. Identifying the services you will provide allows you to define the areas and levels of expertise required of your service agents, which will make staffing your service center a more decisive process. Defining the anticipated volume of requests for each service will help you to determine the number of resources required.
• Identify the support tools required. Choosing the right hard¬ware, software, communications equipment, and other tools (discussed further in Chapter 11, "Service Center Tools") is essential to the productivity of your service center. Your list of services will help you select the tools that enable your staff and customers to work efficiently.
• Develop a responsibility matrix. A responsibility matrix defines who is responsible for delivering each service on your list. Requests for service are routed to the service agents or resource pools best suited to deliver groups of services that require related skills.
• Define the structure of the organization. You can define number of tiers required and the pools within each of tiers required to field those calls by identifying the skills required to support each service and the anticipated volume (see Chapter 2, 'Service Cen¬ter Organization* for further discussion). Many service centers create pools of resources with common skills to deliver subsets of the services you provide. This accommodates the incredible variety of products that most service centers support. Based on the complexity of the environment (products and services) you support, you can determine the tiers of support required to han¬dle requests. In many service centers, the first tier of support handles the bulk of requests and therefore the most common requests. More complex problems are handled at a subsequent tier, tier 2. Tier 1 acts as a filter for all of the requests coming to the service center filtering out, in many cases, over 80 percent of the requests. Requests that take longer or require specialized skills, in-depth knowledge, or a dispatched agent are usually handled by tier 2. Those requests requiring even more skills or more time pass through to tier 3, and so on.
• Determine Service Levels. Determining the level of service you will provide for each service listed in your catalog will assist you in creating service level agreements (SLAs) and service contracts that (1) meet your customers' needs and (2) stay within the bounds of your center's capabilities.
• Develop projected costs. By determining the anticipated volume of requests for a service and the type of resources and amount of time required to provision the service, you can develop a service center budget.
• Identify service metrics. For each of the services in the catalog, identify the metrics you want to gather. You will see that many, if not most, of the metrics you identify will be the same across the services. However, you may also identify metrics that are unique to a particular service or group of services. For example, you may find that it is necessary to gather additional perfor-mance metrics for outsourced services in the catalog to ensure that your vendors are meeting their service commitments as doc¬umented in their service contracts.
Because the service catalog has such an important role within the ser-vice center, it should be formally maintained. Adding a new service can impact the structure of the organization and the skill sets required. A new service has to have service levels defined, escalation rules defined, and priority handling defined. There are costs associated with providing new services, and those costs must be evaluated. You may find that it is cheaper to outsource the service than to provide it internally.
Removing services from the catalog should be handled formally as well. They can be removed when they are no longer in use or when it is no longer cost effective to provide the service. In either case, removing services requires formal processing so as not to leave customers with¬out support.
Formally maintaining the catalog means using structured processes to keep the catalog up-to-date and accurate, with these key objectives in mind.
1. Formally evaluate the services you provide.
2. Maintain the service catalog so that it always reflects current services.