As CMMI Consultants, if you come across the situation wherein you have to differentiate between Service System Transition Process Area and Strategic Service Management Process Area, how will you do this? Essentially, as CMMI Consultants, do we essentially know the fundamental difference between CMMI Service System Transition Process Area and CMMI Strategic Service Management Process Area?

CMMI FAQ 0

3rd April, 2015

Service System Transition and Strategic Service Management Process Areas belong to the CMMI Maturity Level 3. Both of these have their focus on the services but from different point of view. In this post we will figure out the difference between them.

Service System Transition (SST)

Service System Transition (SST) is the transitioning of service systems in new situations. These could be situations are which are de novo absolutely new or changed situations or this could be about dealing with obsolescence.

Service System Transition (SST) Process Area is used for the implementation of the new or updated service systems and service system components and management of the effects on existing service deliveries.

SST involves all phase of the transition including planning, communicating, managing, deploying and managing the service system components effective transition to the production environment. SST covers both new as well as significant changes to service components.

SST helps in preparing a plan for the transition so that relevant stakeholders are informed of the changes in advance. Impact analysis is also performed for evaluating the impact of the new changes on existing system including interfaces with internal or external systems.

Service System Transition helps in the transitioning of the service system for new installation, replacement or retirement of the system or system components, and helps in managing the impact of transition, communicating with stakeholders and completing the transition successfully.

Strategic Service Management (STSM)

Strategic Service Management (STSM) is a long term approach for establishing a standard service and replicating it on a larger scale for diverse objectives. It is replication of a unitary service model to transcend geographies or customer lines or product lines.

On the other hand Strategic Service Management (STSM) Process Area is used to develop and maintain standard services in the organization as per strategic needs.

It involves – analyzing existing capabilities and needs of services (required by multiple clients) and then developing those standard services and maintaining them.

STSM helps in aligning the services offered by the organization and strategic need to develop new or improve services. Before establishing new services organization require analysis of data collected from customers, competitors, market research, bids and other sources and the analysis data is aligned with organizational capabilities. Using STSM, set of standard services are maintained instead of individual services.

STSM is also used to improve existing standard services, quality of services, reducing costs, avoiding errors, efficient delivery.

Generally Service Catalogs are used to convey the organizational standard services to the world. For individual customers they can be customized as per needs.

STSM helps in the development of standard services in the organization and maintaining their descriptions.

Conclusion

So we can see clearly that there is a basic difference of the focus between these two process areas – SST and STSM. SST focuses on the deployment of services which are new, improved or removed. Whereas STSM focuses on the development of standard services in the organization.

Source: CMMI-SVC Model, CMMI Institute. Interpretation by the author

Other Reference:

What is Service System Transition (SST) in context of CMMI for Services?

What is Strategic Service Management (STSM) in context of CMMI for Services?