ITIL v3 (Foundation) - Service Operation

THE PHASE WHICH ITIL REFERS TO AS SERVICE OPERATION is what is typically called steady state, or business as usual.  After a product or service is introduced into production, Service Operation entails the processes which support keeping that product or service available in the production environment:

• Event Management
• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Request Fulfillment
• Problem Management
• Access Management
• Facilities Management
• IT Operations Control
• Application Management
• Technical Management

In addition to these processes, it is also essential to understand standard roles in Service Operations such as:

• Service Desk Manager
• Super User
• Incident Manager
• Problem Manager

While project managers are typically not thought of in the context of Service Operations, it is important to recognize that project managers do often perform duties which work closely with Operations, such as in the case of major infrastructure upgrades or the deployment of new procedures, which often leverage project management techniques to ensure a clean handoff from Service Transition into Service Operation.

Key Concepts:

• Problem vs. Incident: An incident is something that needs to be resolved immediately. This can either be through a permanent fix, a workaround or a temporary fix. An example of an incident would be a server crash which causes a disruption in the business process. If a server is used only during office hours, a crash after office hours is, strictly speaking based on the definition, not yet an incident since the no service was affected. It becomes an incident only when the outage extends to the hours of use.

• Problems however are not incidents. An incident can raise a problem, specially if there is a high possibility that the incident might happen again. In the case of a server crash after office hours, the crash is a problem. This is a high priority problem because if this problem is not resolved, this will become an incident.

• The 9 activities in the incident management process are useful to know:

• Problem Management entails:

• Workaround: A method of avoiding an Incident or Problem, either by employing a temporary fix or technique that means a Customer is not reliant on a Configuration Item (CI) that is known to cause failure. 
• Service Request: a general description for a request from a user for information, advice, a standard change, or access to a service. These occur on a regular basis and involve little risk (e.g password resets or installation of software on a workstation) 
• Service Desk: A service desk is a functional unit with staff involved in differing service events. These events come in by phone, internet, or infrastructure. It's important to note that it is a SPOC (Single Point of Contact) for IT users and it deals with all incidents, access requests, and service requests. It can organized in many ways, depending on the needs of the organization: