How to create a service catalog?
How to create a service catalog from scratch in four phases.
1. Identify existing products and services
2. Design: Describe the service offerings and their delivery
Currently, employees can’t find the right service, so they submit requests indirectly. As a result, IT spends a lot of time on follow-up questions, corrections, and manual clarifications.
This “sneaker-style IT” approach involves a lot of wasted effort.
The first step to improving this “maturity level” is to create a central service catalog. To create a service catalog from scratch, follow these four steps:
Identify – Capture existing products and services.
Design – Describe service offerings and delivery.
Implement – Catalog and offer services
Measure – Demonstrate benefits and identify new potential.
1. Identify existing products and services
During interviews with each service team, identify products and services that are already in use. Record the responses in a table categorized by product and service.
Helpful open-ended interview questions include:
What do your users want from you?
Which products do you support?
What do you work on every day?
What do you install or configure?
What data do you change, and where?
Which products do you use?
For each product, document which aspects are business-critical and which are not, as well as which requests are made frequently and which are made rarely. This information will help with prioritization in the further course of action.
This realistic overview provides:
Transparency about all existing products and services.
It identifies redundant and unofficial products and services.
It provides a shared basic understanding of the service catalog.
2. Design: Describe the service offerings and their delivery
Provide details about the service offerings and how they will be delivered. You can invest the most effort in this phase. Initially, however, only carry this out for business-critical and frequently requested services.
During individual workshops with each service team, document the information required to process requests and their procedural flow.
Refrain from creating elaborate process flowcharts. Instead, use BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation), which is easy to read and standardized.
The input is the information required for processing, and the output is the delivery of the service offering.
Good design means: “As lean as possible, as robust as necessary.”
For each service offering, clarify who is authorized to use it, who needs to approve it, and who is responsible for the costs.
The documentation from the design phase forms the basis for subsequent implementation in a service management tool.
3. Implement: Catalog and offer services
You can implement the service catalog and request forms either yourself in central software or by handing over the documentation to the responsible team or an external partner.
In any case, log each service offering as a work package to maintain an overview and report on implementation progress. For this purpose, a task or project management tool is recommended.
Before activating the implementations in the software for users and communicating them as a success within the company, have the service teams thoroughly test and confirm them.
Implementation delivers several benefits:
Anchoring standards in forms and workflows: fewer errors
Centralizing services and their offerings (SPOC): more efficient flow
Data collection for reporting and management: better decisions
Creation of opportunities for automation: automation
Transparency for users and management: high acceptance
4. Measure: Demonstrate benefits and identify new potential
This final phase begins several weeks or months after implementation. Analyze the collected data by service and visualize it as a Pareto chart. This allows you to see which services are being used and which are not yet standardized.
The former represent automation potential. You will evaluate the latter with the service team before adding them to the design phase as new service offerings, which will then be scheduled for implementation.
You have now reached the Continuous Service Improvement (CSI) phase and significantly increased the maturity level of your services.
Congratulations! You have arrived at Service Management:
Continuous improvement of the user experience.
Accelerated processing times.
You will make fewer efforts and errors per ticket.
Keep pace with business requirements.
Uncovering automation potential.
The service catalog is a value driver, not just a exercise
Users perceive efficient services as "good" when they are clearly described and linked to well-structured requests from forms and workflows. This ensures repeatable and predictable delivery.
We are happy to support you in building and implementing your service catalog. We are vendor-independent and methodologically sound, delivering added value without burdening you.
