Services

A service record gives operational work a stable point of reference. It has a service name, owner, criticality and status. Requests, incidents, changes, problems and assets can all point to it. That connection helps the Service Manager see whether several issues affect the same service and who owns the follow-up.

For example, a collaboration service may have an active status and high criticality. An incident affecting a related asset and a planned change can both reference that service. Their records still answer different questions: the incident describes interruption, while the change describes planned work and its review. The service owner can compare them without merging their histories.

• Owner. Link a person who can answer operational questions about the service.
• Criticality. Choose the applicable low, medium or high level for review and prioritization.
• Status. Mark the service active, in maintenance or retired as its operating state changes.

Agree the service naming convention and who is allowed to create or retire a service. Decide how criticality is chosen and when it is reviewed. A service should be recognizable to the people submitting requests and recording incidents. If a subscription supports a service, keep the relationship understandable through the application name and operational conventions; the subscription record itself carries its own owner and commercial dates.

The Service Manager should decide how to handle a service in maintenance when new incidents or requests arrive. The status describes the service, while each work item has its own status. A maintenance state should not erase an open incident or completed request. Preserve their separate records for the history of what happened.

Create a service with its owner and criticality. Link an asset and an incident to it. Submit a request against the same service and prepare a change with a scheduled window. Ask the Service Manager to find the service from each work item, confirm the owner is the same person and explain which item needs immediate attention.

Next change the service status to maintenance. Verify that the incident and request still retain their own statuses and dates. The owner should be able to see an unresolved incident without treating maintenance as incident resolution. When the service is retired, confirm the team has addressed open operational work before leaving the portfolio record in that state.

• Service catalog — Active services with their owner and criticality.
• Open incidents — Current interruptions grouped around the services they affect.

See incident response and change control.