Introducing An Important New Model To Help You Improve The Quality Of Your Service Delivery Today

The IT Service Capability Maturity Model (IT Service CMM®) is a maturity growth model aimed at providers of IT services, such as management of hardware and software, operations, and software maintenance.

The structure of the model is equal to that of the Software CMM, the contents of the IT Service CMM, however, are key process areas needed for mature IT service provision.

What is the IT Service CMM?

The objective of the IT Service CMM is twofold:-

1. To enable IT service providers to assess their capabilities with respect to the delivery of IT services.

2. To provide IT service providers with directions and steps for further improvement of their service capability.

The IT Service CMM aims to fulfill these goals by measuring the capability of the IT service processes of organizations on a five level ordinal scale. Each level prescribes certain key processes that have to be in place before an organization resides on that level.

Key processes implement a set of related activities that, when performed collectively, achieve a set of goals considered important for enhancing service process capability. Hence, organizations can improve their service capability by implementing these key processes.

We measure the service process maturity of organizations on a five level ordinal scale.

i) The first "initial" level has no associated key process areas. This is the level where all IT service organizations reside that have not implemented the level two key process areas.

ii) Level two is the repeatable level. Organizations that have reached level two will be able to repeat earlier successes in similar circumstances. Thus the emphasis of level two is on getting the IT services right for one customer.

iii) On level three, the defined level, the service organization has defined its processes and is using tailored versions of these standard processes to deliver the services. By using common organization-wide standard processes, the process capability to deliver services consistently is improved.

iv) At level four, the managed level, organizations gain quantitative insight into their service processes and service quality. By using measurements and an organization-wide measurement database organizations are able to set and achieve quantitative quality goals.

v) Finally, at level five, the optimizing level, the entire organization is focused on continuous process and service improvement. Using the quantitative measurements the organization prevents problems from recurring by changing the processes. The organization is able to introduce new technologies and services into the organization in an orderly manner.


How can the IT Service CMM be used?

As the IT Service CMM has two main goals, there are two main ways in which the model can be applied: as a guide for the implementation of IT service processes and as a means to assess the current state of the IT service organization. In the latter case, a process assessment is done to investigate the current state of affairs and to generate improvement actions.

The A2I: Assess to Improve assessment approach can be used to perform a self-assessment against the IT Service CMM. The A2I approach consists of three phases:

- Preparation: during the preparation phase a sponsor is appointed, budgets are set, the assessment team is established and the assessment participants are determined.

- Execution: during the execution phase the following activities are performed:

~ kick-off meeting with all employees present
~ assessment participants fill in questionnaires
~ questionnaires are analysed by the assessment team
~ assessment participants are interviewed by the assessment team based on the questionnaires and interviews, a preliminary list of strong and weak points of the organization is made during several key process area discussions, the strong and weak points are discussed, (directions for) solutions are determined and action items are defined
~ this phase is ended with a feedback meeting, again with all employees present, to report on the results of the assessment This phase takes one to two weeks, depending on the size of the organization.

- Aftercare: after the assessment a written report is delivered to the sponsor, and the assessment team is debriefed. The sponsor is responsible for monitoring the implementation of the improvement actions.


To learn more about the IT Service Capability Maturiy Model please click the links below:-

Introducing the ITSCMM

Download the ITSCMM