Key Points

1. services management has defined goals, models for delivery, operations, support, maintenance, retirement
2. services delivery process defined
3. services operations standards defined as operations service tiers normally
4. services measured at runtime based on execution with results captured summarized by tools like Promtheus, Grafana
5. services maturity models exist for referemce
6. services catalog can be reviewed to assess current maturity levels vs planned service strategies to identify opportunities

References

Architecture Themes

ascrum definitions

https://f.hubspotusercontent00.net/hubfs/159855/2020%20Guides/Field%20Service%20Maturity%20Guide%20-%20MSI%20Data.pdf

Concepts on Service Maturity

https://servicestrategies.com/how-mature-is-your-service-delivery-model/#:~:text=The%20Service%20Maturity%20Model%20helps,a%20process%20and%20technology%20perspective.

https://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/latest/RESTREF/RESTmetrics

https://spiresearch.com/psmaturitymodel/service-maturity-levels.html

https://plextrac.com/capability-maturity-model-cmm/

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/cmmi/cmmi-maturity-levels.htm

https://www.megatronicstech.com/maturity-level-of-technology/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model

Key Concepts

Key Concepts for Service Maturity

1. Correctness: The microservice does what it is intended to do without causing errors.
2. Reliability: The microservice can perform its intended function consistently over time.
3. Efficiency: The microservice provides value for the resources it consumes (like memory, CPU time, etc.).
4. Resilience: The microservice can handle failures gracefully, both within itself and when other services fail.
5. Scalability: The microservice can handle increased load by either scaling up (using more resources on a single node) or scaling out (distributing the load across multiple nodes).
6. Manageability: The ease with which the microservice can be monitored, managed, and updated.
7. Operability: The degree to which the microservice supports the tasks that operators need to do, like deploying new versions, scaling, diagnosing problems, etc.

Reference: The Maturity of Microservices

Importance of Measuring Service Maturity

Measuring service maturity is crucial for several reasons:

1. Quality Assurance: Helps to ensure that all microservices meet the organization's standards for performance and reliability.
2. Risk Mitigation: Identifies potential issues before they become larger problems.
3. Resource Allocation: Informs decisions about where to invest time and resources for improvement.
4. Performance Benchmarking: Provides a means of tracking improvement over time.
5. Return on Investment: Mature services provide more value for the resources consumed, increasing the return on investment.

Reference: Microservices Maturity Assessment

Ideas for Measuring Service Maturity

1. Establish Metrics: Define what constitutes maturity for your microservices, considering aspects like reliability, scalability, resilience, etc.
2. Automated Testing and Monitoring: Use automated tools to continuously monitor and test your microservices, providing real-time feedback on their performance and maturity.
3. Service-Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service-Level Indicators (SLIs): SLOs define the level of service you aim to provide, and SLIs are the metrics that measure your actual performance against these objectives.
4. Incident Response and Postmortem Analysis: When something goes wrong, have a plan to fix it quickly and then conduct a postmortem analysis to learn from it and improve the maturity of the service.
5. Regular Reviews: Regularly review the maturity of your services to identify trends, pinpoint areas for improvement, and track progress over time.

ITIL 4 Summary

ITIL SVS - Service Value System - Foundation for Service Management

https://www.owlpoint.com/itil-4/itil-service-value-system/

Governance

Governance ensures that the actions of the organization are aligned properly with the strategic direction and goals established by the sponsor groups or governing bodies.  It is governance that ensures that value is actually achieved, not just talked about as a target.

Practices

Practices are the evolution of processes and functions from previous versions of ITIL.  They are a set of organizational resources, based on the elements of the four dimensions of service management, designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective.

Continual Improvement

Continual Improvement is an ongoing set of organizational activities at all levels that ensure that the organization’s performance continues to meet the evolving objectives of its key stakeholders.

ITIL Maturity Assessments

https://www.owlpoint.com/itil-maturity-model-and-itil-assessment-qa/

Maturity Model vs Maturity Assessment

The ITIL Maturity Model establishes the criteria to achieve each level of maturity of the Service Value System and the capability of each of the 34 ITIL 4 Practices.  The ITIL Assessment is a process of evaluating an organization against a specific set of practices and usually the organization’s adoption of a Service Value System using the criteria established by the ITIL Maturity Model.

3 types of Assessments

There are 3 types of assessments that have been defined by AXELOS.  They are:

• Comprehensive Assessment – The evaluation of 7 or more practices as well as the components of the ITIL Service Value System
• Capability Assessment – The assessment of selected practices but does not include the SVS components
• Maturity Assessment – The review of the SVS components and up to 6 practices

Capability Maturity Model

CMM Level 1 — Initial

Organizations in the Initial level of the CMM are getting real work done, but often are finishing this work on a delayed timeframe and over their allotted budget

Goal > track work to budget

CMM Level 2 — Managed

Organizational process in the Managed level of the CMM is being managed at least on the project level. This is a huge area of improvement, as the work of the collective is able to be planned, performed, measured, and controlled. 

Goal > move to proactive vs reactive projects and solutions

CMM Level 3 — Defined

Organizations in the Defined level of the CMM are on their way to a healthy composition and structure. Processes in level 3 are well characterized and understood, and often are described with standards, procedures, tools, and methods. What really makes the Defined level stand out from the Managed level is the scope of the standards, process descriptions, and overall procedures.

Goal > more usage monitoring and opportunity to expand quantification in all activities along with automation

CMM Level 4 — Quantitatively Managed

Organizations in the Quantitatively Managed level of the CMM are realizing most of their full potential. The big drive in organizations and teams working at level 4 is the inclusions of data and other quantitative information in their processes. The improvement objectives for these individuals are predictable, and all align to meet the expectations of both internal and external stakeholders. These objectives are made based on the needs of the customer, end users, organization, and process implementers.

Goal > automation of service capabilities to fit demand patterns based on quantitative inputs

CMM Level 5 — Optimizing

The ultimate level of maturity for organizations and teams is level 5, Optimizing. The Optimizing level is focused on continuous improvement, and is built to pivot and respond to opportunity and change as it presents itself. This agility is based on the level of stability that the organization has built up over time. This stability allows a baseline of processes that can then be tweaked to better serve the needs of the organization at that present moment. To speak simply: This is an organization firing on all cylinders

Goal > continue optimization and adaptivity as organization grows, changes

CIP - Continuous Improvement Process

BWC defined in. 1985

The purpose of Continual Improvement is to ensure service and products align – and remain aligned – to the Business continuously. 

https://www.infopulse.com/blog/itsm-maturity-assessment-checklist

itsm-ebook-modernizing-it-services-with-itsm.  link

itsm-ebook-modernizing-it-services-with-itsm.pdf file

https://www.infopulse.com/blog/itsm-maturity-assessment-checklist

4 Signs Your ITSM is Not Mature:

• Your ITSM processes are ad hoc and undocumented.
• Your processes are repeatable but uncoordinated.
• Your ITIL procedures are in place, but not followed.
• You have set practices and SLAs, but not full automation.

How to resolve Level 1 issues:

• Focus on redefining IT service management practices and processes. Each process needs to be aligned with the relevant business context for higher efficiency. Introduce repeatability into all the daily actions and promote the habit of acting according to the set practices.
• Create preliminary Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Work with the IT leaders to determine the optimal set of procedures for common tasks and requests. Create the necessary documentation and consider training to build up the lacking IT service management skills.
• Start building a business case for automation. Based on the defined processes and SOPs, start assessing IT service management software vendors that could provide toolkits for automation. JIRA service desk is a basic solution, popular with technical teams. ServiceNow is a more comprehensive, enterprise-grade platform.

How to resolve Level 2 issues:

• Resolve IT isolation. On an inner level, focus on further process formalization, documentation, and automation. Commit to creating a more diverse range of resources and SOPs every individual can refer to. Set clear communication policies to promote a timely escalation of issues and increase collaboration between individuals. Start involving more business stakeholders to reduce the confusion around priorities, requirements, and overall strategic direction.
• Procedure standardization. Continue your efforts of consolidating redundant processes, adding automation, and increasing the levels of standardization across all repeatable procedures. ITSM software offers a wide range of benefits to help standardize your processes. It can be used to centralize and automate repetitive tasks, reduce errors, and improve efficiency.
• Adopt tiered support/service desk. To improve service level consistency, start breaking down your ITSM center into tiers to “filter” different issues by type, priority, and complexity. Introduce automation (self-service) for Tier 0 issue resolution and map out proper escalation procedures for more complex ones. Ensure that each Tier is adequately staffed, and every specialist has sufficient access, knowledge, and tools for resolving their set of tasks. Consider an external IT infrastructure management service provider if you lack in-house resources.

How to resolve Level 3 issues:

• Address cultural resistance. Work further with individuals to encourage the adoption of the set policies. Gather feedback for improvements and promote further knowledge sharing practices to speed up the adoption of new ITIL procedures. Address issues both at the grassroots and at management levels.
• Adopt integrated IT service management solutions. IT service management tools provide real-time visibility into the performance of an organization’s applications and devices. To ensure consistency and higher levels of coordination of all IT management and maintenance activities, address multi-capabilities vendors that provide consolidated visibility into different functions and assets, as well as enable centralized monitoring of tasks execution.

How to resolve Level 4 issues:

• Introduce a greater extent of automation: At this point, your company needs to focus on optimization to improve the team’s performance, reduce execution times, and improve customer services. Robotic process automation (RPA) solutions for ITSM process automation are one option to consider. ML-powered predictive infrastructure monitoring systems and intelligent ticket routing engines are another area of interest for ITSM leaders. In 2022, improving the team's productivity through the use of automation solutions was named a top priority for 57% of organizations.

Potential Value Opportunities

Potential Challenges

ITSM and Service Maturity Assessments

Service Maturity Concepts

Resources 

https://itsmacademy.com/content/WHATIS_The_ITIL_Maturity_Model.pdf 

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/infrastructure/service-maturity-model/

ITSM

ITSM platform functional concepts. - Gartner

ITSM levels

https://www.infopulse.com/blog/itsm-maturity-assessment-checklist

https://www.infotech.com/research/service-management-maturity-assessment-tool 

https://docs.servicenow.com/en-US/bundle/utah-impact/page/product/impact/reference/itsm-maturity-assessment.html

W3school on api / capabilities

Oai 

Api design patterns

Api design practices

ETE

Functional, NFR, linting for patterns / reuse

E2M2 for higher reuse

Smarter apps, services using interfaces in xucs to find / gen / apply ABC parts

https://www.ibm.com/garage/method/practices/code/tool_lint/

Topics

Background 

ITSM, ITSM levels, 

Service criticality

Service SLA, SLOs, SLIs

Environment policies

SDP life cycle

Maturity Dimenions

Management models

Service Dimensions and related Policies

Functional 

NFR

Economic

Governance

Operations

Support

Capability Mapping

Service maturity is a general conceptual framework to measure service maturity

If the solution and the environment are measuring KPIs, SLOs, incidents by severity level, automated operations management etc then service maturity isn’t a desk exercise with limited validity but a sustainable  reflection of the quality of the managed environment covering the SDP for clients and operators of the environment.

CMM levels applied to Service Maturity

Modes 

Definition, delivery, operation, support, improvement

Each mode has operational features / attributes

ascrum NFR can be applied by use case to each mode

Service Assessment Audit 

Service 5WH

Definition

Clients

Client survey results

ITSM - SLA, SLO, SLI, incidents, root cause summary

Alignment with IT Strategy, Operations

Environments

Audit Areas > VCRS for each Dimension

Findings

Recommendations by area

Improvement Priorities

Budgeted Projects

Candidate Solutions

http://www.project-open.com/en/module-itsm

Covers

• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Change Management
• Configuration Management
• Release Management
• Service Level Management
• Defect Management
• SLA Management
• Configuration Management

http://www.project-open.com/en/process-itsm-service-level-management

Step-by-step guide for Example

sample code block

Recommended Next Steps

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