Introduction and Overview

•  Analyzing and exploring the importance of the Service Capability stream

•  Service Management as a practice

•  The Service value proposition

•  How the Release, Control and Validation capabilities support the Service Lifecycle

Core Release, Control and Validation Processes: Change Management

•  Purpose, goals and objectives

•  Implementing change with minimum disruption and rework

•  Evaluating business, technical and financial aspects

•  Achieving successful service transition

•  Activities, methods and techniques

•  Post-implementation review

•  Key metrics to measure success

Service Asset and Configuration Management

•  Business value of monitoring service transition

•  Activities, methods and techniques

•  Establishing configuration baselines

•  Correlating IT services with need components

•  Tracking and reporting asset values

•  Establishing metrics that measure success

Service Validation and Testing

•  How Service Validation and Testing creates business value

•  Assuring transition integrity and quality

•  The Service V Model

•  Fit for purpose : Fit for Use

•  Acquiring relevant test data

Release and Deployment Management

•  Analyzing how services are released into production to enable effective use of services

•  Planning, scheduling and controlling releases

•  Moving to the live environment

•  Illustrating the main activities and how they relate to the capability of Release, Control and Validation

•  Maintaining information on service deployment

•  Defining metrics for process quality

Request Fulfillment and Service Evaluation: Analyzing how service requests should be handled

•  Avoiding congestion and obstruction of the normal incident and change management processes

•  Process scope and objectives

•  The triggers, input and output of request fulfillment

Evaluating services against target performance in the context of change

•  Meeting committed service level performance

•  Activities, methods and techniques

•  Key metrics to measure success

Knowledge Management

•  Purpose, goals and objectives

•  Enhancing decision support

•  Activities, methods and techniques

•  Establishing metrics to measure service delivery quality

Roles and Responsibilities

•  Change management

•  Service asset and configuration management

•  Service validation and testing

•  Release and deployment

•  Service desk (fulfillment) and service evaluation

Technology and Implementation Considerations

•  Technology as part of implementing service management

•  Special technology features related to Release, Control and Validation

•  Generic requirements and evaluation criteria

•  Good practices for implementation

•  Challenges, critical success factors and risks

Common Service Activities

•  Service monitoring and control

•  Deming cycle

•  CSI techniques

Continual Service Improvement

•  The relationship of CSI in respect to organizational change

•  Implementing an effective CSI program

•  Service reporting

•  Cost benefit justification