Sample Pages


Evidence Product Checklist for

ISO/IEC 20000-1:2005 - Part 1: Specification  

Information technology –Service management   

1.     by businesses that are going out to tender for their services;

2.     to provide a consistent approach by all service providers in a supply chain;

3.     to benchmark IT service management;

4.     as the basis for an independent assessment;

5.     to demonstrate the ability to meet customer requirements;

6.     to improve services.

ISO/IEC 20000-1:2005 promotes the adoption of an integrated process approach to effectively deliver managed services to meet business and customer requirements. For an organization to function effectively it has to identify and manage numerous linked activities. Co-ordinated integration and implementation of the service management processes provides the ongoing control, greater efficiency and opportunities for continual improvement. 

Organizations require increasingly advanced facilities (at minimum cost) to meet their business needs. With the increasing dependencies in support services and the diverse range of technologies available, service providers can struggle to maintain high levels of customer service. Working reactively, they spend too little time planning, training, reviewing, investigating, and working with customers. The result is a failure to adopt structured, proactive working practices. Those same service providers are being asked for improved quality, lower costs, greater flexibility, and faster response to customers. 

In contrast, effective service management delivers high levels of customer service and customer satisfaction. It also recognizes that services and service management are essential to helping organizations generate revenue and be cost-effective. The ISO/IEC 20000 series enables service providers to understand how to enhance the quality of service delivered to their customers, both internal and external.

The ISO/IEC 20000 series draws a distinction between the best practices of processes, which are independent of organizational form or size and organizational names and structures. The ISO/IEC 20000 series applies to both large and small service providers, and the requirements for best practice service management processes are independent of the service provider's organizational form. These service management processes deliver the best possible service to meet a customer's business needs within agreed resource levels, i.e. service that is professional, cost-effective and with risks which are understood and managed.

Overview of the Checklist

The process of defining what is necessary for compliance with a service management process standard such as “ISO/IEC Standard 20000-1:2005” is often confusing and laborious because the directions contained in the standards are unclear or ambiguous.  To aid in determining what is actually “required” by the document in the way of physical evidence of compliance, the experts at SEPT have produced this checklist.  This checklist is constructed around a classification scheme of physical evidence comprised of policies, procedures, plans, records, documents, audits, and reviews.  There must be an accompanying record of some type when an audit or review has been accomplished.  This record would define the findings of the review or audit and any corrective action to be taken.  For the sake of brevity this checklist does not call out a separate record for each review or audit.  All procedures should be reviewed but the checklist does not call out a review for each procedure, unless the standard calls out the procedure review.  In this checklist, “manuals, reports, scripts and specifications” are included in the document category.  When the subject standard references another standard for physical evidence, the checklist does not call out the full requirements of the referenced standard, only the expected physical evidence that should be available.       

The author has carefully reviewed the document “ISO/IEC Standard 20000-1:2005 Service management - Part 1: Specification and defined the physical evidence required based upon this classification scheme.  SEPT has conducted a second review of the complete list to ensure that the documents’ producers did not leave out a physical piece of evidence that a “reasonable person” would expect to find.  It could certainly be argued that if the document did not call it out then it is not required; however if the standard was used by an organization to improve its process, then it would make sense to recognize missing documents.  Therefore, there are documents specified in this checklist that are implied by the standard or in common use in software engineering, though not specifically called out in the document, and they are designated by an asterisk (*) throughout this checklist.  If a document is called out more than one time, only the first reference is stipulated.  There are occasional situations in which a procedure or document is not necessarily separate and could be contained within another document.  For example, the “Service Management Audit Plan could be a separate plan or part of the Service Management Process Specific Plan.  It would all depend of the size of the company and project.  The author has called out these individual items separately to ensure that the organization does not overlook any facet of physical evidence.  If the organization does not require a separate document, and an item can be a subset of another document or record, then this fact should be denoted in the detail section of the checklist for that item.  This should be done in the form of a statement reflecting that the information for this document may be found in section XX of Document XYZ.  If the organizational requirements do not call for this physical evidence for a particular project, this should also be denoted with a statement reflecting that this physical evidence is not required and why.  The reasons for the evidence not being required should be clearly presented in this statement.  Further details on this step are provided in the Detail Steps section of the introduction.  The size of these documents could vary from paragraphs to volumes depending upon the size and complexity of the project or business requirements.

Checklist Preparation Steps

This checklist was prepared by analyzing each clause of this document for the key words that signify a:

This checklist specifies evidence that is unique.  After reviewing the completed document, the second review was conducted from a common sense “reasonable man” approach: If a document or other piece of evidence appeared to be required, but was not called out in the document, then it is added with an asterisk (*Suggested Item) after its notation in the checklist.  This notation is listed in the footnotes for each section. The information was then transferred into checklist tables, based on the type of product or evidence. 

Using the Checklist

When a company is planning to use "ISO/IEC 20000-1:2005" (and sometimes also ISO 9001:2000) standard, the company should review the evidence checklist.  If the company’s present process does not address an ISO/IEC 20000-1:2005 (or ISO 9001:2000) standard product, then this question should be asked:  Is the evidence product required for the type of business of the company?  If in the view of the company the evidence is not required, the rationale should be documented and inserted in the checklist and quality manual.  This rationale should pass “the reasonable person rule.”  If the evidence is required, plans should be prepared to address the missing item(s).

Detail Steps

An organization should compare the proposed output of their organization against the checklist.  In doing this, they will find one of five conditions that exist for each item listed in the checklist.  The following five conditions and the actions required by these conditions are listed in the table below.

This checklist is composed of 8 sections:

·       Section 1.  Introduction

·       Section 2.  Checklist of all required and suggested “ISO/IEC 20000-1:2005” evidence products.

·       Sections 3-7.  Individual checklists for each evidence type.

·       Section 8.  “About the Author”  

Product Support

All reasonable questions concerning this checklist or its use will be addressed free of charge for 60 days from time of purchase, up to a maximum of 4 hours consultation time.