Effective Service planning must clearly define the role of Services within your company, prioritize service initiatives necessary to attain prioritized results, and establish metrics to track service performance and outcomes.
Service Planning Drives Results
To be successful with Services, you must establish a Service plan. To be effective, the Service plan must be aligned to corporate objectives, clearly define how Services will contribute, prioritize key initiatives, and have established metrics to track service performance and outcomes. Service team results are driven with a Service plan that incorporates the following actions.
Align service objectives to strategic business goals, objectives, and outcomes
Service teams should be focused on activities that contribute to attaining strategic business goals and objectives.
To align Service initiatives to corporate outcomes:
- Understand corporate goals and objectives.
- Establish which goals Services can contribute to.
- Define the extent to which Services can contribute.
Identify and focus on priority initiatives
Resist the temptation to spend time on less important things – you can’t accomplish everything. Practical resource limits demand that you focus on what is most important.
To prioritize Service initiates:
- Determine which Service initiatives are critical to Service delivery.
- Identify Service initiatives that will yield the greatest benefits.
- Focus on initiatives that are attainable given available resources, budget, and time
For more information read:
How to Prioritize Service Initiatives
Align individual and team goals with priority Service initiatives
Every individual and team must contribute to the attainment of Service outcomes.
To connect individual performance to strategic service objectives:
- Align Services organizational goals to corporate goals.
- Align each Service teams’ goals to Services organizational goals.
- Align individual goals to team goals.
- Create performance management guidelines to evaluate performance at every level.
Define metrics for tracking Service performance
Modernize Service metrics to clearly correlate Service performance to tangible outcomes. To accomplish this:
- Establish key indicators for expected Service outcomes.
- Monitor Service performance for each indicator.
- Correlate Service performance to tangible outcomes.
Daunting but necessary
The Service planning process can be daunting – especially when there is so much to do, but not enough resources. As difficult as it may be to develop a Service plan, it is fundamental to attaining successful Service outcomes.
A plan is only as good as your ability to execute
Successful Service plans need to focus on attaining expected results, with the flexibility to adjust as circumstances change. Plans fail when they are underfunded, understaffed, or beholden to established practices and outdated measures of performance just because “it has always been done that way.”
