ISO/IEC 20000-1 (Part 1) is an international standard for service management specifying requirements for an organisation to deliver managed services of an acceptable quality for its customers using a service management system (SMS).
Not all organisations want to gain a certificate of conformity. For some, it is enough to put in place a good management system to support effective and sustainable service management practices to ensure delivery of reliable high-quality services.
Many organisations reach for a service management framework such as ITIL®, VeriSM™, IT4IT™, SIAM®, or Agile/DevOps. These frameworks offer guidance and, by their very nature, are lengthy. Often an organisation can become overwhelmed and confused with the number of options proposed, wondering where to start or what is essential. Other organisations have implemented service management practices already but want to make improvements in specific areas.
ISO/IEC 20000-1 states the requirements for service management in 20 pages. For each topic, there are a series of ‘shall’ statements which can involve as few as one or as many as 12 requirements. Compare this to the number of pages for just one process in ITIL or other frameworks!
These requirements from ISO/IEC 20000-1 can be used as a plan to focus the organisation on the essentials for a service management implementation or improvement programme.
The requirements from ISO/IEC 20000-1 should be listed and further references made to the wider ISO/IEC 20000 series guidance and/or frameworks as relevant. If you are using ITIL, then ISO/IEC 20000-11: Guidance on the relationship between ISO/IEC 20000‐1 and service management frameworks: ITIL has excellent explanations about similarities and differences between ISO/IEC 20000-1 requirements and ITIL4 as well as 2-way mappings.
If the organisation uses SIAM or Agile/DevOps, there are two new parts of the ISO/IEC 20000 series being developed which will provide guidance on the use of these with an SMS, again including mappings. Additionally, the ISO/IEC 20000 series has other guidance documents to help you to interpret and implement the requirements.
Internal audits can be used to check on the effectiveness of service management and identify any opportunities for improvement.
It can be seen from this that ISO/IEC 20000-1 is beneficial to organisations who do not need or want to be certified but want a clear industry-accepted focus to identify the key requirements for service management to support their implementation or improvement programme.
If the organisation is interested in gaining a certificate for conformity, all requirements must be met, independently assessed by a certification body, and then a certificate will be issued which states that the organisation is conformant to ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018.
Good luck with your next steps into ISO/IEC 20000-1, whether or not you opt for certification!
Lynda Cooper
Lynda is an independent consultant and trainer, and is the project editor for ISO/IEC 20000-1. She chairs the BSI committee for service management and sits on various ISO/IEC committees representing the UK. She can be contacted via LinkedIn or at [email protected].
