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When creating the YaSM process model, we took special care to ensure that it is perfectly aligned with ISO 20000 (ISO/IEC 20000:2018).
So the process diagrams and document templates contained in the YaSM model make the huge task of designing ISO 20000 compliant processes for your organization manageable: As you prepare for the ISO 20000 certification audit, you don’t need to start from nothing but are able to modify our process templates.
When creating YaSM®, we made sure it's perfectly aligned with ISO 20000, the international standard for service management. And we offer a product called the YaSM® - ISO 20000 Bridge that makes getting started with the standard a lot easier.
ISO 20000 is popular with some service providers, because the associated certificate helps them stand out in a crowded market and gain access to certain customers, for example in the public sector.
What's more, ISO 20000 provides orientation for organizations trying to navigate the many service management methods, frameworks, concepts and approaches on offer, such as ITIL®, COBIT®, CMMI-SVC®, USMBOK™, FitSM, SIAM® and VeriSM™.
Organizations are also advised to adopt agile and lean principles and, quite generally, to engage in digital transformation.
This has created some confusion, and many organizations are left wondering, what are the essential points and key elements they must get right to be successful providers of services? Here ISO 20000 can provide some answers:
It is maintained by an ISO technical committee of industry experts and, on some 30 pages, it sets out requirements for a service management system. ISO 20000 is thus something like a condensed description of key principles and can be used as a benchmark or checklist, to ensure all essential aspects of service management best practice have been considered.
To give you an idea of what ISO 20000 looks like, let's open the original ISO 20000 standard [the current edition of ISO 20000:2018] :
ISO provide it in electronic form as a PDF document, and it contains a long list of requirements, such as this one in the service level management section: "The organization and the customer shall agree the services to be delivered."
To comply with the standard, you'll have to meet all these requirements. So, in ISO 20000 you will find lots of clauses with stipulations, but then ISO 20000 will not tell you precisely how you should go about fulfilling those requirements.
And here the YaSM model comes into the picture: It supports service providers that want to get certified to ISO 20000 or use it as a benchmark.
The YaSM service management processes and documents are aligned with the requirements of ISO 20000, so what YaSM provides are in fact guidelines and practical examples, explaining how organizations can meet the requirements.
To ensure this advice is easily accessible, we've created the YaSM - ISO 20000 Bridge - a set of diagrams that relate every single requirement to the YaSM processes and documents. With the Bridge, you can work your way through ISO 20000 and figure out, one by one, how your organization can meet the requirements.
It's currently available for Visio® and ARIS™, and here's what the Bridge looks like in Visio:
The first diagram presents an overview of the ISO 20000 standard where you will find exactly the same structure as in the original ISO 20000 document - for example, "section 8.3.3: Service level management", as part of Relationship and agreement.
Clicking on the link will take you to a diagram for this specific section with, first of all, requirements at the left. So here in this column at the left we have the complete list of requirements from the ISO 20000 standard that must be fulfilled.
Now the most important part: Next to every requirement we show one or several YaSM service management processes which should be in place to fulfill that requirement.
As you might guess already, clicking the link on the process shape will open a diagram from the YaSM® reference model, where we can see exactly what the process should be like. So in fact you get rather precise recommendations for fulfilling every single ISO 20000 requirement by implementing one or several YaSM processes.
We also need to take into account that your auditor will look for evidence that your processes do not only exist on paper, and if you are able to present a couple of documents - such as customer service agreements in this case - then you are usually in a good position.
To help you in this respect, the YaSM - ISO 20000 Bridge tells you what evidence should be in place, and again gives you detailed advice: For example, the checklist 'customer service agreement' describes the typical contents of such agreements. And of course you can use this as a template, if you need to create this kind of agreement in your organization.
Now, let's close the checklist - and then let's take a look at the last column.
Here we explain precisely how the ISO 20000 requirements are related to specific YaSM processes, and of course you can add your own notes - for example to indicate what still needs to be done to fulfill a requirement.
And if we move back to the left again, you can see that next to every requirement there is a tiny circle. These circles can be used for color coding: For example, green could mean that a requirement is fulfilled. In this way you can use these diagrams as kind of a dashboard as you prepare yourself for the ISO 20000 certification audit.
So much about the YaSM® - ISO 20000 Bridge.
I hope you will agree that it can accelerate your ISO 20000 initiative quite a bit because it provides detailed suggestions for every requirement,
If you'd like to learn more about the YaSM process model and the YaSM® - ISO 20000 Bridge please get in touch with us!