ITIL® 4 Drive Stakeholder Value (DSV) E-Book

Claire Agutter

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 188

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The book explores the essential practices and strategies for driving stakeholder value, focusing on the ITIL® 4 framework. It begins with an in-depth analysis of the customer journey, including how to design and improve value streams, ensuring customer satisfaction and service quality. The book moves into targeting markets and stakeholders, offering methods for market segmentation and defining strategies for better customer engagement.

In subsequent chapters, the book delves into building strong relationships with both suppliers and customers, a cornerstone of service management success. The exploration of service offerings and demand management provides actionable insights into shaping and delivering services that meet customer needs and expectations. The process of aligning expectations through value co-creation and service agreements also becomes a focus, preparing readers to manage all stages of the service lifecycle effectively.

With detailed discussions on onboarding and offboarding, continual value co-creation, and service value measurement, the book provides a holistic approach to creating sustainable value for all stakeholders. This text is invaluable for professionals seeking to understand and apply ITIL® 4’s principles in real-world scenarios.

Leseprobe

ITIL® 4 Drive Stakeholder Value (DSV)

Your companion to the ITIL 4 Managing Professional DSV certification

ITIL® 4 Drive Stakeholder Value (DSV)

Your companion to the ITIL 4 Managing Professional DSV certification

CLAIRE AGUTTER

Every possible effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this book is accurate at the time of going to press, and the publisher and the author cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions, however caused. Any opinions expressed in this book are those of the author, not the publisher. Websites identified are for reference only, not endorsement, and any website visits are at the reader’s own risk. No responsibility for loss or damage occasioned to any person acting, or refraining from action, as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by the publisher or the author.

ITIL® is a registered trade mark of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publisher at the following address:

IT Governance Publishing Ltd

Unit 3, Clive Court

Bartholomew’s Walk

Cambridgeshire Business Park

Ely, Cambridgeshire

CB7 4EA

United Kingdom

www.itgovernancepublishing.co.uk

© Claire Agutter 2022

The author has asserted the rights of the author under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First edition published in the United Kingdom in 2022 by IT Governance Publishing

ISBN 978-1-78778-353-9

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Claire Agutter is a service management trainer, consultant and author. In 2020, she was one of Computer Weekly’s Top 50 Most Influential Women in Tech. In 2018 and 2019, she was recognised as an HDI Top 25 Thought Leader and was part of the team that won itSMF UK’s 2017 Thought Leadership Award. Claire provides regular, free content to the IT service management (ITSM) community as the host of the popular ITSM Crowd hangouts, and is the chief architect for VeriSM™, the service management approach for the digital age. Claire is the director of ITSM Zone, which provides online ITSM training, and Scopism. She has worked with IT Governance Publishing to publish Service Integration and Management (SIAM™) Foundation Body of Knowledge (BoK), Second edition and Service Integration and Management (SIAM™) Professional Body of Knowledge (BoK), Second edition, the official guides for the EXIN SIAM™ Foundation and Professional certifications.

After providing support to thousands of people taking ITIL training and certification from version 2 onwards, Claire has created this series of books for those studying towards ITIL 4 Managing Professional and Strategic Leader status.

For more information, please visit:

•https://itsm.zone

•www.scopism.com

Contact:

•www.linkedin.com/in/claireagutter/

For more information about Claire’s other publications with ITGP, visit:

www.itgovernancepublishing.co.uk/author/claire-agutter

CONTENTS

Introduction

How to use this book

Chapter 1: The customer journey

Value streams and customer journeys

Customer journey design

Customer journey key concepts

Designing and improving the customer journey

Chapter 2: Targeting markets and stakeholders

Understanding markets

Market segmentation

Targeting markets

Understanding customers and service providers

Chapter 3: Fostering stakeholder relationships

Supplier and partner relationships

Customer relationships

Analysing customer needs

The relationship management practice

The supplier management practice

Chapter 4: How to shape demand and define service offerings

Designing digital service experiences

Approaches for selling and obtaining service offerings

Managing demand and opportunities

Managing requirements

The business analysis practice

Chapter 5: How to align expectations and agree service details

Value co-creation, negotiations and agreement

The service level management practice

Chapter 6: Onboarding and offboarding

Onboarding, offboarding and user relationships

Planning onboarding and offboarding, user engagement

The service catalogue management practice

The service desk practice

Chapter 7: Continual value co-creation

Fostering a service mindset

Service request and provision

The service request management practice

Chapter 8: Realising and validating service value

Service and value measurement and validation

The portfolio management practice

Chapter 9: Exam preparation

Appendix A: Banksbest case study

Company overview

Company structure

Future plans

IT services

IT department

IT service management

Sample employee biographies

Further reading

INTRODUCTION

How to use this book

The majority of this book is based on the ITIL 4 Drive Stakeholder Value (DSV) publication and the associated ITIL 4 Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value syllabus.

The ITIL 4 Drive Stakeholder Value publication describes “the steps of co-creating value through services in significant detail and is beneficial to both customers and service providers”. It explains how to “optimize the value of the journey for all stakeholders, for example, to convert opportunity and demand into value and to drive stakeholder value”.

The key themes related to driving stakeholder value and its supporting management practices are the focus of the DSV publication and associated training and examination.

In this companion publication to DSV, in addition to helping you prepare for your certification, I also want to give you advice and guidance that will lead to you using this book once your training and exam are complete. I’ve added my own practical experience and given you advice and points to think about along the way. My goal is for you to refer back to this book in years to come, not just put it away once you’ve passed your exam. With this additional content, you’ll find this book is an excellent supplement to any training course and a useful tool in your ongoing career.

As you read the book, assume that all the content is related to the syllabus unless it is highlighted in one of two ways:

Something for you: an exercise for you to complete to apply the ITIL 4 concepts in your own role, or a point for you to think about. This content is not examinable.

Practical experiences: any content marked out with this image is based on my own experience and is not examinable.

The content highlighted as something for you to think about or practical experience might also refer to the Banksbest case study you can find in Appendix A. I’ll use the case study to give an example of how something would work in the real world, or to help you apply what you’re reading about. Case studies can really help to bring abstract concepts to life. The case study is not examinable, but using it will help you get a deeper understanding of the DSV concepts you are learning.

Let’s start with something for you now:

Why not read the case study and make a note of your first impressions of the Banksbest organisation and its plans before you start to study the DSV content in this book?

Unless stated otherwise, all quotations are from ITIL® 4 Drive Stakeholder Value and Practice Guides published by AXELOS in 2020. Copyright © AXELOS Limited 2020. Used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1: THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

In this introductory chapter, we’ll review a key concept for DSV – the customer journey. The content includes:

• The concept of the customer journey; and

• How to design and improve customer journeys.

ITIL 4 describes a customer journey as “the complete end-to-end experience customers have with one or more service providers and/or their products through the touchpoints and service interactions”.

Value streams and customer journeys

Figure 1 shows the relationships between value streams and customer journeys.

Figure 1: Relationships between value streams and customer journeys1

A customer journey will always rely on one or more value streams from one or more service providers. A customer journey can include multiple value streams from one service provider, or value streams from different service providers.

A value stream can support multiple customer journeys. The customer journey includes value stream activities that are part of what is known as the ‘band of visibility’. There will be other value stream activities that are not visible to the customer, so these value streams don’t form part of the customer journey.

The customer journey isn’t always linear. It can involve moving around between different touchpoints, and repeated contact at some touchpoints. The customer might start in the middle of the expected customer journey, so the service provider needs to continually monitor customer journeys and improve its understanding of customer behaviour.

Think about your own customer journeys for the services you use every day. For example, a TV streaming service, or an insurance product. Where did your customer journey start? Has it finished? What value streams have supported your journey? You could think about new user onboarding, billing, customer service, etc. as examples of value streams.

Customer journeys are an important part of the overall customer and user experience. Customer experience (CX) is “the sum of functional and emotional interactions with a service and service provider as perceived by a customer”. User experience (UX) is “the sum of the functional and emotional interactions with a service and service provider as perceived by a user”.

The customer journey forms part of the customer’s overall perception of a service provider, along with other influencing factors like brand, reputation, previous experiences, etc.

Figure 2 shows the three aspects of customer and user experience.

Figure 2: Three aspects of the customer and user experience2

The definitions for both customer and user experience mention ‘emotional interactions’. This is an important point for you to consider as a service provider or in a service management role. In the past, we’ve not always considered the human element of service interactions. I’ve worked with organisations where there has been fierce resistance to change because the end users have an emotional attachment to a system they are using. It might not work very well, the new system might be a huge improvement, but I’ve seen a real sense of affection for older systems that can lead to a reluctance to change.

As service providers, we can focus too much on the facts (“Why wouldn’t you want this? It’s twice as fast!”) and miss the emotional elements. It’s really important to have proper conversations with end users and customers so that we have the full picture and can carry out our role more effectively.

Customer journey design

Customer journey design is based on these principles:

• How you deliver a service is as important as what is delivered.

• The overall journey is more important than each individual touchpoint.

• Understanding the customer journey allows providers to focus on maximising value, and on experiences over outcomes.

The ITIL 4 Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value syllabus and related publication are based around the steps in a customer journey.

These steps are:

• Explore

• Engage

• Offer

• Agree

• Onboard

• Co-create

• Realise

Before you move on and learn about the customer journey in more detail, why not try creating your own customer journey map? You can use a product or service from your own organisation, or perhaps use Mortbank from the Banksbest case study. Note down what happens in each step of the customer journey, and refer back to it when we study the customer journey in more detail.

Customer journey key concepts

The key concepts related to a customer journey are:

• Benefits

• Stakeholder aspirations

• Journey mapping

• Personas

• Scenarios

• Maps

• Understanding the customer experience

We’ll review them one by one in this section.

Benefits

Understanding the customer journey delivers benefits for the service consumer and the service provider, as shown in table 1.

Table 1: Customer Journey Mapping Benefits

For the service consumer

For the service provider

Facilitate outcome

Gain optimal service value and experience

Get what you need, not just what you asked for

Identify and support service consumer behaviours and outcomes

Optimise/improve products, services and journeys

Optimise risk and comply

Ensure key business risks are identified and addressed

Focus on customer satisfaction and maximise benefits for the investments

Reduce cost and optimise resources

Work together to optimise use of resources through the whole service lifecycle

Work together to optimise use of resources through the whole service lifecycle

Stakeholder aspirations

Stakeholders make choices based on their requirements. Value can be defined in the context of functional, social and emotional dimensions. Service providers need to define the stakeholder experience aspiration, which is based on their needs, wants, stereotypes and emotions. Service choices are not always rational and logical, for example why would anyone pay more for a luxury hotel when a basic hotel option still delivers a bed in a room? What are the extra tangible and intangible service elements they are willing to pay for?

Defining the stakeholder experience aspiration allows the service provider to identify, understand and master the customer journey. Figure 3 shows the design steps.

Figure 3: The stages involved in designing end-to-end customer journeys and experiences3

Journey mapping

Customer journey mapping includes an understanding of touchpoints and service interactions.

“A touchpoint is any event where a service consumer or potential service consumer has an encounter with the service provider and/or its products and resources.”

“A service interaction is a reciprocal action between a service provider and a service consumer that co-creates value.”

Effective customer journey mapping optimises the whole journey; it is possible to have excellent touchpoints but a terrible overall experience. Customer journey maps need to take into account the mental models of the customer, and what level of service they expect.

A customer journey map helps an organisation understand its stakeholders. The journey map will include:

• Stakeholders;

• Time frame;

• Channels (e.g. social media, email, video, portals);

• Actions before the product or service experience;

• Actions during the product or service experience; and

• Actions after the product or service experience.

Personas

“A persona is a fictitious, yet realistic, description of a typical or target customer or user of a service or product.”

Creating personas can help support journey mapping exercises. It’s not possible to map every single user journey, so personas are used to create generic flows. Personas are described as if they are real people, rather than being impersonal stereotypes.

One of Banksbest’s customer groups is residential landlords, who want mortgages for properties that they intend to rent out. Create a customer persona for a landlord, adding as much detail as you can based on your own experience and research. You could include a name, some personal and demographical information, their desired outcome, their motivations, what worries them, etc. You can also try this exercise for your own organisation’s customers. How much do you know about them?

Scenarios

Scenarios are “short stories about personas trying to achieve their goals by using the service or product in their contexts”. Service providers apply scenarios to customer segments and contexts.

Scenarios help the service provider to understand the ideal experience for each customer segment. These experiences can then be combined into a customer journey map that applies across segments.

A scenario will address these questions:

• Who is the user?

• Why does the service consumer want the service?

• What goals does the service consumer have?

• How can the service consumer achieve its goals?

I’ve had discussions with organisations about using tools and techniques including personas, scenarios, etc. Sometimes, I get feedback that “this will all take too long, why do we need to do it, things are going fine”. The work required can seem daunting, but the benefits should not be underestimated. If you’re starting this process in your own organisation, start small – for example, getting some key people together as a pilot to try to create a persona, or map a scenario. I often find an introductory session like this quickly highlights where assumptions are being made, or that there are gaps in organisational knowledge, and even where one team has a completely different perspective to another team. You can use these lessons to promote the effectiveness of these tools and techniques.

Maps

Figure 44 shows an example of a customer journey map.

Figure 4: Example of a customer journey map

Simple customer journey maps will include:

• Steps

• Duration

• Touchpoints and interactions

• Personas

• Service experience

• Service provider teams and roles involved in customer interactions

Understanding the customer experience

A customer’s perception of services is shaped by many factors. Some of these factors can’t be controlled by the service provider. To understand the customer experience, service providers need to look beyond the customer journey map, although it does provide a useful starting point.

Customer feedback surveys can help to provide valuable information. For example, consider asking questions like:

• What is the customer doing during a step in the customer journey?

• How do they feel?

• Are there any uncertainties that might stop them progressing through the journey?

• What cost and risk factors influence them?

• Do they have questions they can’t find answers to?

Figure 5 shows the Johari Window, which can be used for service analysis.

Figure 5: The Johari Window5

Digital products and services can give us much more opportunity to collect information about the customer experience. For example, my organisation has a website that sells online training. We can use analytical tools to see which page our customers arrive on, which areas of the page they spend the most time interacting with and how far they get into the purchase journey. We can see where they drop out, how much time they spend on the site, and measure how many visits they make before going ahead with a purchase.

We don’t have a direct relationship with these customers because of the nature of interaction. We can’t lean over their shoulders and talk to them and ask them what they are doing and why, but we can use the data we collect to understand their behaviour and try to improve our services accordingly. Once we make improvements, we can collect more data and check if we are getting the outcomes that we want.

As service providers, we need to consider how we get the information we require to understand the customer experience. For my organisation, data is good, but we also need to find a way to have direct conversations and understand the emotional factors that are involved. As well as relying on what the technology can tell us, we need to speak to a sample of our customers and have a deeper conversation. Think about this in the context of your own organisation – how are you communicating with your customers?

Designing and improving the customer journey

As a service management practitioner, it’s important to understand how to design and improve a customer journey, including:

• Design thinking;

• Leveraging behavioural psychology;

• Designing for different cultures; and

• Measuring and improving the customer journey.

Customer journeys need to be planned and designed to support optimal value co-creation and deliver the desired customer experiences. Customer journeys may include multiple products and services, and individual products and services may form part of multiple customer journeys. The customer journey can only be designed once the customer’s desired outcome and customer and user experience have been defined.

Design thinking

Design thinking puts the user at the centre of the design process. Designers need to engage with real users to be effective. One way to approach this is to use the 5 principles of design thinking. (Schneider and Stickdorn, 2012). The principles are shown in table 2.

Table 2: 5 Principles of Design Thinking

User-centred

Customers and users are at the heart of the design process; real customers and users are consulted, without making assumptions based on data and averages.

Co-creative

Designs emerge from groups of stakeholders, including customers and users. The service provider isn’t forcing a design onto its users, it is working co-creatively with them.

Sequencing

The customer journey is divided into touchpoints and service interactions. This allows the steps in the customer journey to be analysed individually, from pre-service, through to service delivery, and to the post-service period.

Evidencing

Intangible services can be visualised as physical artefacts. These act as ‘service evidence’ that creates a response in the customer and builds an emotional association.

Holistic

The entire customer journey environment must be considered, including all the senses (hear, see, smell, touch, taste, feel).

I’m sure that many of you reading this are feeling incredulous. Who doesn’t do user-centred design? Why on earth would any service provider develop a product or service without speaking to the people who will use it? Sadly, my experience shows that many organisations still make mistakes here. They assume they know what their users want, or they think it will be too time-consuming to have proper conversations, or they fall in love with a piece of technology and create a solution that then needs to find a problem to solve.

The shift to Agile development is delivering real benefits. If an organisation is heading off down the wrong track, at least it will find out relatively early as it progresses through the iterative and incremental development process. A waterfall project could run for months or even years before potential problems are highlighted.

Customer journey design follows an iterative process, similar to product and service design.

Table 3: Customer Journey Design

Empathise

Learn as much as possible about the stakeholders you are designing for, and their human needs. This includes building and testing personas and scenarios. Try to avoid assumptions as much as possible.

Define

This step builds a point of view based on user needs and the insights gained about them. This allows the definition of a plan for the desired outcome, experience and value. Goals and metrics can also be defined.

Ideate

In this step, brainstorming is used to identify creative solutions. This step gives the designers a variety of problem-solving ideas to work on, rather than a single perfect solution.

Prototype

A prototype could be an example customer journey map or service blueprint. The output should address frequency of activities, sequence and importance. The prototype helps to verify if the design helps deliver the planned outcome, experience and value.

Test

The original stakeholder group will provide feedback on the idea in this step. Testing should uncover errors or mistakes in the design, and can include usability testing, role-play and A/B testing.

Customer journey design requires many skills, and can include product designers, graphic designers, interaction, social and ethnography designers, and more. Tools and techniques include stakeholder maps, storytelling, A/B testing, blueprints and the operating model canvas. These techniques are not examinable, but you may wish to do further research after your course if this is relevant for your career.

The types of roles that are involved in customer journey design highlight one of the fundamental principles of digital transformation. Technology is now a core business capability, and isn’t confined to the IT department. If our organisation relies on digital products and services, then all areas of the organisation could be involved in the design process. We need to stop thinking about ‘IT and the business’ as two completely separate domains.

Leveraging behavioural psychology