What is Thin Slice Service Management?

Lee Healey
Oct 11, 2022
3 min read

Over the past 5 years we’ve seen a significant increase in the take-up of part time, or what we like to call ‘thin slice’ Service Management Consulting. In essence, this is the use of our experienced Service Management team, but just on a part-time basis, or for short assignments.

This can be anything from running a few workshops on a specific topic, or a day per week for a few weeks or months. Or of course it can be a longer-term initiative, but only working part time to meet the demand, without the need to justify a significant investment or overkill on the resourcing requirement.

This approach has significant benefits to our clients:

No long term / full time commit of a contractor
Rapid access to highly experienced Service Management specialists in ITIL, Agile, DevOps, SIAM etc
The ability to tap into external best practice knowledge and 20 years + experience
Clearly defined solutions with agreed outcomes and timeframes
The ability to work part time or ‘as a service’ i.e. ‘Problem Management as a Service’
Commercial flexibility, including fixed price, with tightly defined solutions
Off-Payroll experts working outside IR35 on outcome-based contracts
Management oversight from The ITSM People, de-risking the ‘contractor off the street' scenario

This style of engagement does not necessarily work for the large, long-term projects, where an individual or a team of consultants need to be dedicated to the task at hand, such as a large-scale transformation. However, this too can work as a blended model also.

For example, we are working with two large global clients currently, who are both being sold by their parent companies. This is resulting in the need to have an entire team supplied by us, to assess and benchmark the existing operating model to help them recreate their catalogue of services and create new support models for the new target operating model, as well as re-engineering all of their key ITIL processes. In both of these cases where different skills and activities are needed for different tasks within the workstream, we can blend a part time initiative for a few days per week, such as working with the internal team to build out the Service Catalogue, whilst working alongside other members of the full time team, who are re-engineering all of the processes and bedded in the new operating model.

Of course this can also be a stand-alone activity and the following list provides some example assignments where our ‘thin slice’ Service Consultants have parachuted in and provided that short-term/part-time help for our clients:

Bursts of specific initiatives, such as Problem Management or Service Improvement
Building Service Catalogues or documenting services
Driving specific Service Transition projects
Re-engineering and implementing individual or multiple processes
Advising on strategy or supporting large projects with Service related dependencies
Running Service Management related workshops, such as RACI sessions, or process overview sessions
Service Management related coaching to internal team members

This list is not exhaustive of course, but hopefully helps to outline that there are a great deal of important initiatives that often don’t start or get over-looked, because the existing internal team are too busy, or it’s just too difficult to justify going out to market to get a full time consultant for 3, 6, 9 or 12 months.

This is where we can step in, to help you consider and implement some of these important ‘mini’ projects that never get off the ground, or to help support those larger projects that only need a slice of someones time, but the existing internal team are already maxed out.

If this issue affects you and your team and you'd like to learn more, please contact us to discuss your challenges and we'll explain how flexible we can be to help you – hello@itsmpeople.co.uk

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What is ITSM?

Information Technology Service Management processes include a range of activities designed to deliver and support high-quality IT services for your business. These can include incident management, problem management, change management, and service-level management. Additionally, ITSM involves continuous enhancement processes to improve service delivery, increase efficiency and reduce costs. By adopting strong ITSM practices, your business can improve service quality, customer satisfaction and achieve greater alignment between IT and business objectives. This holistic approach ensures that IT services are effective and integrated with your overall business goals. As ITSM focuses on aligning IT services with your business’s needs, you can ensure that IT processes and services support and enhance business operations. This is achieved through a structured approach to managing IT services, guided by best practices and methodologies such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). These models provide guidance on best practices for delivering and supporting technology and other enterprise services and can help companies align their capabilities with their business goals and strategic objectives.
What is ITIL and how does it underpin ITSM?

We adhere to the ITIL Framework in delivering our ITSM consultancy services. ITIL is a globally recognised set of best practices for ITSM that helps businesses provide consistent, high-quality IT services. By implementing ITIL processes and principles, we ensure that your IT operations are standardised, efficient and aligned with industry standards. ITIL4 is the latest version of ITIL, designed to help enterprises navigate the new technological era known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This version introduces a more flexible, modern approach to ITSM, emphasising its integration with other areas of business management.
What are the core practices and processes in ITSM?

Effective ITSM revolves around a number of processes. Whilst there are 34 practice areas in ITIL4, there are often a core set of practices that many of our clients are particularly interested in optimising. As understanding and implementing these processes can significantly enhance the performance and quality of IT services within your organisation. Incident Management Restores all service operations back to normal as soon as possible, minimising to lessen the impact on your operations. This process might involve logging, categorising, prioritising, and resolving incidents, ensuring which can help mitigate disruption to users and the business. Configuration Management Keeps an updated record of IT infrastructure - hardware, software, and network components - in a centralised configuration management database (CMDB). This database provides accurate data on configuration items (CIs) and their relationships. Change Management Ensures any changes to your IT services are controlled and coordinated. This process evaluates the impact of changes, approving them through a structured workflow, and ensuring successful implementation with minimal risk. Service level Management Defines, negotiates, and monitors service level agreements (SLAs) between the service provider and the customer. This process ensures that agreed-upon service quality and performance levels are consistently met. Asset Management Tracks and manages your IT assets throughout their lifecycle to ensure efficient use and cost control. You maintain an accurate inventory of hardware, software, and other IT resources through this. Problem Management Identifies, analyses and resolves the root causes of incidents. Proactively addressing underlying issues can prevent recurring incidents. This, in turn, provides improved system stability and reduced downtime. Request Management Handles the lifecycle of user service requests, such as access to applications, software installations or information enquiries. It ensures requests are managed efficiently to provide a streamlined approach that fulfils user needs and enhances satisfaction. Knowledge Management Captures, organises and shares knowledge to improve efficiency and support decision-making. By leveraging a centralised knowledge base, your IT teams can quickly resolve incidents and problems, and end-users can find the right solutions to common issues.
Why is ITSM important to organisations and their IT (and Enterprise) teams?

Implementing the right ITSM strategy and optimising your tooling can provide a range of benefits for your company, including: Improved Efficiency and Cost Savings By streamlining processes and automating routine tasks, ITSM can help your enterprise work more efficiently and reduce the time and resources required to deliver and support IT services. Good ITSM is a silent enabler of success across a range of organisational goals. Improved Compliance and Risk Management ITSM can help you ensure that your IT systems and processes comply with industry regulations and standards. It also ensures that you are effectively managing risks associated with your IT operations. This can help you avoid costly disruptions and legal consequences. Increased Productivity Effective ITSM practices can help your business prevent problems and fix them quickly if they do occur. This can help you lower costs—outages cost money—and increase productivity and employee satisfaction. Better Customer Satisfaction You can improve customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships by delivering high-quality IT services that meet customers' needs. Improved Service Quality ITSM ensures that IT services are delivered consistently and meet agreed-upon service levels, leading to higher customer satisfaction and better overall service quality. Business Continuity ITSM processes like incident and problem management ensure that disruptions are minimised and services are quickly restored to ensure business continuity. Strategic Alignment ITSM aligns IT services with business objectives, ensuring that technology initiatives support and drive business growth. This alignment helps you make informed decisions and prioritise projects that add the most value. Enhanced Collaboration ITSM promotes a collaborative environment where IT teams can work together more effectively, sharing knowledge and best practices to improve your delivery of services. Proactive problem-solving Through problem management and a proactive approach, ITSM helps your IT teams identify and address the root causes of incidents to prevent future issues and reduce downtime. Continuous Improvement ITSM encourages continuous monitoring and improvement of IT processes, allowing your IT teams to refine and enhance their service delivery regularly. Better Resource Management With ITSM, IT teams can manage resources more effectively, ensuring that personnel, technology, and budget are allocated optimally to support business requirements.
Do you provide ITSM tooling support and what tools do you specialise in?

The ITSM People are completely agnostic with ITSM tools and not tied to any vendors. Given the close relationship between ITSM related processes and ITSM tools, we often get involved in tool selection projects, or making recommendations on how to improve tools and get the best value from them. We work with tools such as ServiceNow, BMC, Jira, ManageEngine, Fresh, Halo and Xurrent.