When planning to implement service management it is important to understand that it is a set in the information technology infrastructure library framework. The set is about the alignment of the organization's needs and the IT provision requirements.

This set also describes how to implement or improve IT service management within the organization, it describes the steps needed to ensure that the organizations needs and IT requirements are satisfied as well.

Moreover, the planning to implement a service management set is essentially focused on the service management processes, as well as generically applicable to other ITIL sets.

The Continuous Service Improvement Program is one approach to implementing or approving service management. CSIP is defined as an ongoing official program undertaken within the organization to categorize and bring in measurable improvements with in a particular work area or work process.

All of the behaviors within a CSIP concerning one improvement can be visualized in general simply by using the meta-modeling technique. This often results in a process-data diagram which does not describe the constant development actions of the program.

The process-data activities:

* Creates Vision* Analyze Your Organization* Set Goals* Implementation of IT Service Management* Measure set goals

Now let us go forward and explore the actual steps involved with planning to implement a service management set.

Here we will go into further detail about the steps that we defined above. We will begin with Create Vision.

Create a Vision

As you can see from above the first step that is listed is Create Vision. This is the action of creating a CSIP vision statement. So what exactly is a Vision Statement? Well this is basically used to mission or objection of the CSIP.

Communication is very important here, an organization wants to make sure that all of the stakeholders are well education about the CSIP. It is also important that the vision statement also matches up the different methods that are used by the organization and IT.

Analyze Your Organization

Once the organization has created a vision it should then analyze itself, this refers to asking questions like “What is the status of our business right now?” and this needs to be answered before the organization can move forward.

A helpful method to determine the current status is the IT organization growth model. This is a model that determines the maturity level of the IT organization is based on the Process Maturity Framework or PMF, as well as the Capacity Maturity Model or the CMM.

How maturity is measured has a lot to do with the aspects that affect the organization. This could be anything ranging from strategy and processes to the culture and the people.

Perhaps equally important is understanding the stakeholders involved. Understanding who the stakeholders are can be accomplished by defining, identifying, and mapping them.

Also the individual needs of the stakeholders need to be identified and this can often result in a stakeholder assessment report. Next the current report and measurement systems will be assessed.

By knowing the current way of using and producing reports, facts, and figures the organization is give priceless insight on how well the organization is steered.

Set Goals

After the step of analyzing the organization we have set goals. This is about the agreement between the organization and IT pertaining the required and expected future roles and characteristics of the organization.

The first step in this activity that needs to be taken is the creation of a business case to explain the added value and the validation of the CSIP.

The business case is then determined but the present development of the organization and the organizational approach.

A stakeholder evaluation, which should have been conducted in the preceding activity, can be contributed to the center of attention on the consequences and the endeavor of the enhancement program as well.

Once you have created a business case, a gap assessment report should then be completes, the gap assessment report is meant to compare the current state of the organization with the future state of the organization. This will result in gaps. It also provides information about those gaps, risks, and the priority when deciding where to begin.

Once a gap evaluation report has been accomplished, there will be a need for understanding and intelligibility. This means that the tribulations and the subsequent steps will have to be offered to the stakeholders, to establish creditability for the evaluation and the support concerning the change.

The subsequent step is the construction for a plan for swift success. A swift success is a timely success in an enhancement program. In the plan for swift success short-range success should be acknowledged and attained to keep the enhancement program operating and to keep the commitment intensity high during the enhancement program.  Then the organization can set goals pertaining to the enhancement program in relation to the previously defined stakeholder needs.

A management tool for setting such goals and measuring the performance is known as the balanced scorecard.

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