Service Management Plan

The Service Management Plan is a document where you define how the Service Management System (SMS) will be established. The aim of this document is to define the objectives, requirements, responsibilities, and resources needed to run the services. Although the standard’s requirements regarding the SMS Plan are extensive, this document is usually four to five pages long and references other documents.

ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018 Requirements

ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018 provides some guidance for the policy, but doesn’t go into details. What follows are general requirements for the content of the policy, required by the standard:

• Circumstances of the organisation – this requirement states that the policy should be specific to the business case you have. Meaning, it should be specific to the services you provide and the customers you serve.
• Service requirements – top management should commit in the policy to fulfil the service requirements (agreed upon with the customer). To avoid such statement being too general, there must be a mechanism to provide evidence that this has been fulfilled. For example, customer requirements are part of the SLA (Service Level Agreement), as well as measurable targets to confirm requirements have been fulfilled.
• Communication – the policy must be communicated to all employees. The SMS policy can also be communicated to other interested parties, like your customers or suppliers. The policy must also be understood by your employees. That means that you have to prove a link between the statement in the policy and the result of your employees’ work (e.g., the policy can state that one of the goals is satisfied customers, and proof for that can be a customer satisfaction survey that has the efficiency of your employees in the background).
• Improvement – improvement needs to be clearly stated in the policy, for both the SMS as well as the suitability of the policy to the business needs and customer requirements.