ISO 20000 Documents - Purpose of the IT SMS Plan

The International Standard for IT Service Management is ISO 20000. It is description of an integrated set of management processes which form a service management system (SMS) for the effective delivery of services to the business. The ISO 20000 standard allows IT service provider organizations to get accordance to a service management system to improve delivery of IT services frequently.When starting the ISO 20000 implementation, you have to interpret your own approach toward documents, which requires to be created in the scope of your Service Management System (SMS).

For achieving effective IT service management, the ISO 20000 standard is based on key processes differ from service level management reporting, budgeting and accounting for IT services, to information security, supplier, and change and release management.

Following are the contents of sample ISO 20000 documents kit for certification:

IT SMS Manual

IT SMS plan

Mandatory Procedures

IT SMS Policies

Standard operating procedures

Forms/ Record templates

ISO 20000 Audit Checklist

The Content of the ITSMS Plan

The SMS Plan, as an ISO 20000 document, is not only a logical step in the implementation of SMS, but also a requirement of the ISO 20000 standard. ISO 20000-1 standard is quite large to define requirements for the SMS Plan.

Requirements for SMS plan are as follows:

All aspects of the service – considering technology used to support the SMS, the scope of the SMS and limitations that can affect the SMS, and related policies, standards, and frameworks in place.

Service requirements – The SMS Plan, including related policies, should be in line with the service requirements.

Human side – roles, responsibilities, and authorities should be defined, as well as relationships with other parties.

Processes and their interfaces – defined processes required to have clear responsibilities and authorities, as well as defined interfaces with other processes in the scope of the Service Management System.

Purpose of the IT SMS Plan

The SMS Plan is a kind of document that reflects the organization’s approach to IT Service Management (ITSM). The Goal of such a plan is to define the scope, requirements, responsibilities, and resources required to run the services.

If checking of the requirements of the standard, note that there are some other plans that are mandatory while building and running the SMS. These are the plans which are specific for certain processes, such as the Capacity Plan, Availability Plan, Service Continuity Plan, etc. Compared to these other plans, the SMS Plan is a high-level document to which all other plans required to be aligned.

For example, SMS Plan it should be described how the company defines the responsibilities in the scope of the processes included in the SMS, or how to approach risk management, etc.

Source: https://20000procedures.wordpress.com/

About The Author

Charles Wilson is an independent ISO 20000 IT Service Management Consultant based in USA. He is an expert IT Service management system plan which meets the requirement for certification. and on the ISO 20000 Certification in particular. He had published many articles regarding IT Service management system (ITMS).

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