What is VeriSM?

What is VeriSM?

In an industry with numerous service-management frameworks and standards, yet another service-management approach may simply add to the confusion, but not if that approach provides a method to integrate all of the frameworks. This is just what VeriSM seeks to accomplish. VeriSM was developed as a new approach to service management, suited for the digital age and enabling practitioners to gather appropriate resources to achieve an intended outcome.

It is a softer approach, focused on the relationship between service providers and service consumers, with a strong emphasis on governance. It is also appropriate for all types of providers to use it, enabling true enterprise service management in virtually any type of organization. VeriSM’s capability to support a diverse set of providers, both internal and external to an organization, and with its capability to pull best-of-breed strategies from multiple frameworks give it a decided advantage over many other service-management approaches.

VeriSM provides an agile, adaptable approach that can be customized for any organization and any type of initiative or service delivery. This flexibility enables organizations to craft an operating model that is both distinct and customized for their unique needs.

What is the VeriSM approach?

VeriSM approaches the provider-consumer relationship with a focus on working together to create services of value to the consumer:

• It works equally well when used internally or externally, as the principles are the same: An investment in a jointly developed service yields a return on that investment that provides value to an organization in terms of revenues generated or efficiencies gained.

• It leverages an organization’s capabilities, or resources, which are gathered as needed to create the practices that will be used to create the service. By placing all providers into a service-management role, it also ensures the customer is front and center in all transactions and everyone engaged in an initiative sees themselves in a service role.

The focus on the customer changes the way people work:

• A deadline doesn’t drive a developer seeking to promote code to a production environment, rather it is driven from the need to deliver a stable, working product from which a company’s customers derive value.

• This drives a different outcome: The need to develop, test and review the work being performed to ensure it delivers the value proposition and it can be delivered into the operational environment without unintended consequence.

• As a service provider in a service-management role, their focus is on the outcome of the service not the output of code deployed to production. This creates a very different outcome within IT.

Governance and organizational culture are at the source of this approach:

• Executives or leadership establish the values and culture of an organization and define the initiatives. Then, the providers and people with required abilities are gathered.

• The team then uses the management mesh to build an operating model that supports the initiative. This operating model can pull the best aspects from all service management and process frameworks and standards for delivery of the new service or initiative.

To support this capability, the VeriSM foundational text includes descriptions of a number of modern frameworks and how they can be used in the management mesh to achieve a particular outcome, but it also focuses on developing the individual knowledge and abilities of all team members. Placing a value on lifelong learning demonstrates how gaining knowledge about a variety of approaches can help an individual leverage these approaches when an organization needs it.

In the development experience mentioned above, for example, concepts from DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering can be merged with ITIL’s Change-Management process to ensure developers can operate autonomously, in service to the consumer while changes are properly recorded in case there are future issues in the production environment.

Why is VeriSM different than other operating models?

A key component of VeriSM that distinguishes it from other operating models and frameworks is its focus on everyone understanding their responsibility to deliver service management; the concept that everyone is involved.

• Adopting VeriSM requires everyone to realize service management is at the heart of all they do, and service management touches every role in an organization. One can say VeriSM is the first service-management approach that truly reaches the entire enterprise, rather than attempting to expand an IT service management  approach to other providers.

• VeriSM focuses heavily on providers and abilities outside an IT organization. This expansion can yield tremendous benefits when applied to organization-wide initiatives. After chartering an initiative, leadership can assemble members with the required abilities (think departments or groups of people with specific abilities that match the initiative) and build an operating model that suits the specific initiative using the management mesh. Adding the governance and metrics needed to evaluate progress then ensures departments or groups of people have everything needed for success.

It is this flexibility that makes this operating model so powerful and different from other models and frameworks. While ITIL and other IT frameworks have components that can be used in a similar manner, convincing business executives to buy into an IT framework is more difficult than gaining adoption for an operating model that emphasizes providers and consumers, rather than IT alignment with the business. Additionally, VeriSM focuses on service management in the digital age, an important distinction given that business is now almost wholly reliant on technology. By crafting an operating model that supports multiple providers and the gathering of organizational capabilities, it gives organizations the capability to drive consistent values and practices throughout the organization. In short, VeriSM can be brought directly to business executives for adoption. Ultimately, VeriSM is a service-management mindset, rather than a set of processes that comprise a framework or standard.

VeriSM vs. ITIL

Ultimately, the biggest difference between VeriSM and ITIL is that ITIL is a set of best practices that enable IT to work effectively with the business and align its activities to those of the business. Conversely, VeriSM seeks to support an enterprise service-management approach, one where the business drives the values, initiatives and operating model used to provide them.

• In VeriSM, the consumer is front and center, with everyone understanding his or her service-management role across all capabilities and providers and working together to support consumers’ needs. In ITIL, IT wants to develop the capability to align with the organization to ensure the organizational strategy is considered in IT, both from a service and operational perspective. Even though many ITIL experts talk about taking IT from ITSM or ITIL, it’s difficult to accomplish this when the texts and processes are IT-centric. At best, ITIL and other ITSM frameworks ensure that IT seeks to align its efforts with those of the business.
• VeriSM is capable of starting with the consumer and ending with the business, leveraging all capabilities to deliver goods and services to the consumer. This moves the IT focus from the start and uses business language to enable an organization to build an operating structure for the enterprise, with initiative-driven structures underpinning it. If you give a VeriSM book to a business person, then he or will stop reading it after five minutes, labeling it as information for IT. Even though many of the examples in the book are business-focused: A global bank using VeriSM to fulfill regulatory and financial compliance requirements and a jewelry company seeing the impact of consumer opinions concerning product quality. These are real-world examples that have nothing to do with IT.

This doesn’t mean VeriSM leaves IT outside the picture, but rather brings IT into the circle of capabilities that will deliver solutions, engaging IT within initiatives, rather than leaving it to support initiatives from within the IT silo. This shift makes it easier for organizations to adopt VeriSM enterprise-wide, as it doesn’t rely on IT pushing a framework towards the business, but rather focuses on enterprise-level adoption from the start.