Complete guide to VeriSM in ITSM

While traditional IT service management (ITSM) frameworks, like Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT), may be most commonly used, many companies operating in dynamic environments require a more flexible set of practices that accommodate their ever-changing needs. For these organizations, VeriSM often serves as a more applicable approach, as its desirable adaptability and focus on business operations as a whole may be better suited for their requirements.

Rather than providing a rigid set of guidelines, VeriSM instead borrows its components from several distinct methodologies to ensure that businesses can leverage a well-rounded strategy that emphasizes driving value for end-users and constantly improving services delivered.

Today, we’ll take a look at what VeriSM is, the components that comprise its framework, and the differences between it and more traditional ITSM methodologies.

What is VeriSM?

Value-driven, evolving, responsive, integrated service management, or VeriSM, is a service management approach designed to help organizations deliver value in the digital age. It emphasizes a flexible approach to service management, allowing businesses to tailor their practices based on their unique requirements. Unlike traditional frameworks that are often more structured, VeriSM encourages a more adaptive methodology, incorporating best practices from various disciplines to optimize service delivery.

What does VeriSM stand for?

There are six unique elements included in the VeriSM acronym, all of which command equal importance in contributing to desired outcomes. It’s paramount that users of the framework regularly consider all of these components in their decision-making processes to ensure the overall success of their VeriSM approach.

Value-driven

In VeriSM, the ‘value-driven’ component refers to the focus on delivering tangible benefits that are meaningful to both the business and its stakeholders, including customers, employees, and partners. It prioritizes the creation of value through every aspect of service management, ensuring that all activities are aligned with the goal of maximizing positive impact. 

This typically involves emphasizing customer-centricity, verifying that services are delivered in a way that provides real value to the end users. It also prioritizes aligning services with company-wide objectives, ensuring that every decision is evaluated based on how it contributes to the business's goals. Continuous improvement is another key consideration, as all initiatives should play a part in helping the organization remain competitive and adapt to changing market conditions.

Evolving

Evolving requires the continuous adaptation of service management practices to meet changing organizational needs and environmental conditions. In a rapidly changing technological landscape, companies must be agile and responsive. VeriSM emphasizes the importance of staying current with the latest trends, methodologies, and technologies, allowing businesses to not only keep up with developments, but also leverage new opportunities to enhance their service delivery.

Additionally, the evolving aspect of VeriSM recognizes that service management isn’t a static discipline. It must adapt to new challenges such as emerging technologies, shifting customer expectations, and evolving regulatory requirements. The framework encourages organizations to regularly refine their service management processes, incorporating lessons learned from past experiences. 

Responsive

VeriSM also advocates for a responsive approach to service management, which means being proactive in implementing necessary adjustments. This responsiveness verifies that services remain relevant and effective, meeting the immediate needs of various stakeholders.

To support these efforts, VeriSM utilizes advanced analytics, automation, and other technological tools to assist companies in monitoring performance, identifying trends, and predicting potential disruptions. This data-driven approach enables businesses to respond quickly to changes, minimizing downtime and optimizing resource allocation. 

Integrated

The 'integrated' element of VeriSM involves the seamless incorporation of various management practices and technologies across an organization to create a cohesive service management approach. Unlike frameworks that focus solely on IT, VeriSM encourages the integration of a wide range of disciplines to optimize service delivery. This integration ensures that all parts of the organization work together harmoniously, leveraging all of their strengths to enhance overall performance.

Moreover, VeriSM focuses on the holistic management of services throughout their entire lifecycle. It prompts businesses to consider all aspects of service management, from initial design and development to deployment and continuous improvement. This end-to-end oversight verifies that every stage of the service lifecycle is optimized and that there are no gaps or redundancies.

Service

VeriSM processes stress that services aren’t just technical solutions, but comprehensive offerings that meet the complex needs of users. It urges companies to view services from a customer-centric perspective, ensuring that all aspects of service delivery, from design to operation, are aligned with providing exceptional value. 

Furthermore, VeriSM underscores the importance of end-to-end service management. It involves overseeing the entire lifecycle of a service, enabling organizations to manage services comprehensively, verifying consistency, reliability, and quality in every phase.

Management

Management in VeriSM includes strategic planning, resource allocation, performance monitoring, and continuous improvement. Effective management ensures that all aspects of service delivery are coordinated and aligned with a business’s broader objectives. By implementing robust management practices, VeriSM helps to maintain control over service management activities, ensuring that they’re efficient and capable of delivering consistent value to stakeholders.

Management also emphasizes the importance of governance and accountability. It establishes clear responsibilities for individuals involved in service management, verifying that all team members understand their role in the process. This structure serves to promote transparency, making it easier to track progress and identify areas for improvement.

What are the benefits of VeriSM?

Employing VeriSM practices can provide a plethora of benefits for the organizations that use it, with most of them centering around the comprehensive approach and continuous improvement facilitated by it. This dynamic approach aims to verify that all employees and initiatives are serving common objectives and that innovations are customer-centric, while also offering significant potential benefit at a reasonable cost.

Greater perspective

While traditional frameworks usually focus narrowly on IT service management, VeriSM integrates organization-wide perspectives, ensuring that service management aligns with overall business strategies. This approach encourages all departments to work cohesively towards common goals, leveraging various management principles and technological advancements to deliver value.

Furthermore, VeriSM is designed to be responsive to the ever-changing business landscape. It recognizes that companies operate in dynamic markets where customer expectations and competitive pressures are constantly evolving. Thus, the framework encourages continuous improvement and agility, empowering organizations to swiftly adapt their service management practices to new challenges and opportunities. 

Holistic view

By emphasizing customer-centricity and continuous improvement, VeriSM encourages businesses to regularly enhance their service delivery processes. This holistic philosophy verifies that all aspects of service management, from strategy to execution, are aligned with the goal of providing exceptional value.

Even more, VeriSM practices incorporate the importance of regular stakeholder communication. It highlights the need for regular feedback from all relevant stakeholders, including customers, employees, and partners. This inclusive approach ensures that diverse perspectives are considered and that service management practices are informed by real-world experiences.

Evaluate new technologies

One of the core principles of VeriSM is to stay current with technological advancements and leverage them to enhance service delivery. By promoting a mindset that values ongoing assessment and adoption of new technologies, VeriSM ensures that businesses remain competitive and are able to offer cutting-edge solutions to their customers. 

VeriSM also provides a systematic framework for assessing the potential impact of emerging technologies on service management processes. This structured evaluation process includes analyzing the benefits, risks, and resource requirements associated with new technologies. By following this methodical approach, companies can be confident that they’re making strategic and well-informed decisions about technology adoption, balancing innovation with practicality.

Key concepts in VeriSM

VeriSM is based on the premise that we all consume services and products which providers offer (as they say, “consumers consume and providers provide”); thus, these practices place a strong emphasis on services and their value. 

VeriSM enables providers to respond to the demand for services by:

• Helping them define and develop useful solutions based on consumer needs. These offerings can be technology- or people-driven utilities which may provide support or digital services.

• Transforming service management from IT only to being usable by all enterprise providers. In our increasingly digital-first world, this is recognized in the relationships of commercial-service providers and how their customer service, technical support, legal, and other personnel deliver the final product. All of these providers require service management to attract and retain consumers. In order to achieve success in this area, they must all operate together, rather than in their individual silos.

• Bridging the gap between technology-focused service management frameworks and business-focused approaches.

• Focusing on governance to establish providers’ values, principles, and goals as the foundation for building an operating model. Governance sets the guardrails, within which a group of providers can establish joint operations. It’s the creation of a governance-based operating model that makes VeriSM so flexible and responsive.

Additionally, the ‘management mesh’ mechanism is commonly leveraged for developing an operating model that considers a business’s environment, resources, management practices, and the emerging technologies available to it. The mesh enables individuals to set their own framework, establishing processes, communications, and other operational standards to which they’ll adhere. This clarifies roles across all teams involved in the initiative, promoting clear expectations and ultimately the success of the project.

Each area within the management mesh is comprised of multiple factors:

• Integration of management tools: A management mesh integrates various management platforms, such as monitoring systems, logging frameworks, and automation tools

• Visibility and control: The mesh provides comprehensive visibility into the performance, health, and status of IT systems and services

• Scalability and flexibility: It’s designed to scale with the organization's needs, accommodating growth and changes in the IT landscape

• Automation and orchestration: Automation is a key component of a management mesh, helping to reduce manual interventions and improve efficiency. Orchestration tools coordinate automated tasks across different services to ensure smooth operations.

Businesses adopt their management practices based on how they’re integrated, using service stabilizers, such as process, tools, and measurement, with them. To build the mesh, organizations should begin with their governance foundation and service management principles, building the mesh on top of these.

Ultimately, VeriSM ensures that solutions are based on need. The provider-consumer loop below shows that companies invest in solutions to achieve value through enhanced productivity or by enabling them to implement revenue-generating services that provide the best possible return on investment (ROI).

What is the VeriSM approach?

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

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

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

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’s driven from the need to deliver a stable, working product from which a company’s customers derive value

• This supports a different outcome: The need to develop, test, and review work to ensure that it delivers the value proposition and can be implemented into the operational environment without unintended consequences

• As a service provider in a service management role, the developer’s focus is on the outcome of the service, not the output of code deployed to production

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

• Leadership establishes the values and culture of a business environment and defines the initiatives. Then, the providers and staff with required abilities are gathered.

• The team then uses the management mesh to build an operating model that supports these initiatives. This model pulls the most desirable aspects from all service management frameworks for the delivery of the new service or project.

To support these efforts, the VeriSM foundational text includes descriptions of a number of modern frameworks. It delves into how they can be used in the management mesh to achieve a particular outcome, while also focusing on developing the individual abilities of all team members. Placing a value on continuous learning allows individuals to acquire knowledge on a variety of distinct approaches, which can help in leveraging collective expertise when an organization needs it.

For example, concepts from DevOps and site reliability engineering can be merged with ITIL’s change management processes to ensure developers can operate autonomously and in service to the consumer. All the while, changes are recorded and documented in case there are future issues within the production environment.

Why is VeriSM different from other operating models?

A key component of VeriSM that distinguishes it from other operating models is its focus on a comprehensive understanding of service management responsibilities, in which everyone is involved.

• Adopting VeriSM requires all team members to realize service management is at the heart of every activity and it affects every role across the organization. Essentially, VeriSM is the only service-management approach that truly spans the range of the entire enterprise, rather than attempting to expand an ITSM approach to other providers.

• VeriSM focuses heavily on providers and abilities outside of IT operations. This expansion can yield tremendous benefits when applied to organization-wide initiatives. Upon formulating an initiative, leadership can assemble staff with the required abilities (think groups of people with specific skill sets that align with the project), building an operating model that suits the specific initiative using the management mesh. Adding the governance and metrics required to evaluate progress further ensures that teams have all the tools needed for success.

It’s this flexibility that makes the VeriSM model so powerful and distinct from other ITSM frameworks. While ITIL practices do have components that can be leveraged in a similar manner, convincing business leaders to buy into these frameworks is typically more difficult than gaining adoption for an operating model that emphasizes providers and consumers.

Even more, VeriSM focuses on service management in the digital age, an important distinction given that businesses are now almost entirely reliant on technology. Crafting an operating model that supports multiple providers and the gathering of organizational capabilities provides companies with the capability to drive consistent practices throughout the business structure.

Ultimately, VeriSM acts as a comprehensive service-management mindset, rather than a set of rigid processes that comprise a specific framework.

Basics of VeriSM

The foundation of VeriSM is built on four distinct pillars: governance and values, customer satisfaction, the abilities of team members involved, and an enhanced focus on outcomes. When all of these elements are kept in mind throughout VeriSM processes, it generally results in the framework’s success as a whole.

Governance and Values

Governance in VeriSM verifies that all service management activities align with an organization’s strategic objectives and comply with industry standards. It involves designating clear roles, establishing accountability, and creating mechanisms for oversight and evaluation. Effective governance ensures that decision-making is always transparent, consistent, and based on accurate information.

Similarly, VeriSM values shape how services are delivered and how employees interact with customers and each other. These guidelines typically emphasize the importance of customer-centricity, continuous improvement, and collaboration. By embedding pertinent values into the organizational culture, VeriSM verifies that all service management practices are geared towards delivering optimal value to customers and supporting larger business strategies.

The Consumer

The importance of the customer is emphasized throughout VeriSM's approach, reflecting a deep commitment to meeting individuals’ expectations. In contrast to traditional service management frameworks that may focus primarily on internal processes, VeriSM places a strong emphasis on delivering value to consumers as the ultimate goal of all initiatives.

VeriSM recognizes that in today's digital landscape, customers have higher expectations for service quality, responsiveness, and personalization. Therefore, organizations adopting VeriSM practices prioritize gathering feedback, understanding customer journeys, and using this information to continuously improve service offerings.

Abilities

By focusing on the unique capabilities that individuals bring to the table, VeriSM encourages companies to break down silos and foster cross-functional collaboration. This approach allows teams to leverage expertise from distinct disciplines, such as IT, customer service, marketing, and operations, to address complex service management challenges comprehensively.

The knowledge and skills of various employees can be effectively leveraged within VeriSM efforts to enhance these processes in several ways. For instance, IT professionals may bring technical proficiency in implementing various ITSM methodologies, while customer service representatives could offer insights into customer preferences and pain points. Similarly, marketing teams can contribute expertise in understanding market trends and shaping service offerings, while operations personnel provide practical insights into optimizing processes and resources.

Focus on Outcomes

VeriSM places a strong emphasis on outcomes rather than outputs, recognizing that true value in service management is derived from achieving desired results. Outputs refer to the tangible deliverables of a process, such as completing a task, generating a report, or deploying a software update. While outputs are important indicators of progress, VeriSM distinguishes that they don’t necessarily signify success or value.

Conversely, outcomes refer to the actual results that are achieved from delivering services or implementing changes. They’re often directly tied to business objectives and customer needs, focusing on the value delivered. For example, an outcome might include improved customer satisfaction, reduced downtime, or enhanced revenue generation. By focusing on outcomes, VeriSM ensures that service management efforts are aligned with delivering tangible benefits that contribute to the organization's overall success.

VeriSM vs. ITIL

VeriSM differs from ITIL primarily in its flexibility and holistic approach.

While ITIL is a well-established framework that provides detailed best practices for ITSM, it can be seen as prescriptive and sometimes inflexible. These practices emphasize a set of defined processes, such as service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation, and continual service improvement.

VeriSM, on the other hand, is more adaptable and encourages organizations to integrate various management methodologies, including ITIL, Agile, DevOps, and Lean, depending on their specific needs and context.

VeriSM and ITSM

VeriSM's relationship to ITSM is characterized by its integrative and adaptive approach, which enhances traditional ITSM practices. 

While traditional ITSM frameworks focus on managing technical services efficiently, VeriSM expands this scope by encouraging the integration of multiple service management practices tailored to an organization's specific context. By doing so, VeriSM ensures that ITSM isn’t practiced in isolation but rather as part of a broader service management strategy that aligns with overall business objectives.

Moreover, VeriSM emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach to service management. It encourages collaboration across all departments within a company, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and alignment with organizational goals. This comprehensive stance verifies that ITSM practices are integrated with other service management practices, leading to a more cohesive service delivery model.

The VeriSM model

The VeriSM model is centered around governance and basic service-management principles, with the management mesh at the core, focusing on delivering services with the consumer in mind.

The diagram that follows demonstrates this model and adds four key principles that overlay the management mesh and activities that leverage the operating model to help achieve desired results.

These four principles are:

• Define: Develop the service to be provided based on the consumer’s requirements

• Produce: Create the solution or service, including its build, test and deployment

• Provide: Enable consumers to access and use the service

• Respond: Support and improve the service during its lifecycle

The model supports these activities based on:

• Governance: An organization’s culture, values, and policies that direct activities within its structure

• Service management principles: Based on a company’s governance, these are the practices that define how activities will be executed

• Management mesh: Defines how a business will combine resources, capabilities, and its environment when creating and providing services

Together, these components comprise the operating model that organizations use to deliver services related to any particular initiative. The value here comes from the flexibility of how these elements are integrated for each initiative. While governance and principles may be relatively static, the structure of the management mesh – for example, which resources and technologies are used – will vary from project to project. This empowers businesses to create a variety of operating models, each tailored to their specific needs at any given time a project is being carried out.

Target audience of VeriSM

VeriSM is perhaps most valuable for companies that must adapt quickly to changing market conditions and technological advancements. These organizations benefit from the framework’s ability to integrate various service management methodologies, allowing them to create a personalized approach that aligns with their particular business goals and customer needs.

Within these businesses, VeriSM is aimed at service management professionals, including IT managers, service delivery managers, and operations teams, who are responsible for ensuring that services are delivered efficiently and effectively. These individuals can leverage VeriSM’s flexible framework to improve service quality, reduce downtime, and enhance customer satisfaction.

Scope of VeriSM

VeriSM is designed to be applicable to an entire organization, integrating various service management practices to deliver value in a comprehensive manner. This includes not only technical services, but also other areas such as HR, finance, customer service, and operations. This approach enables businesses to tailor their service management processes based on their specific context, incorporating elements from different frameworks to create a cohesive service management strategy.

At the heart of VeriSM is the management mesh, which dynamically integrates resources, emerging technologies, and management practices. The mesh verifies that service management efforts remain responsive to changes in the business landscape, ensuring they’re continuously capable of delivering optimal value to customers.

Start implementing VeriSM into your business approach with Freshservice!

Freshworks’ Freshservice acts as the market’s premier ITSM platform, providing organizations with an abundance of tools designed to help enhance both IT operations and VeriSM practices.

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