USM - A Simpler Approach to Service Management

Today all businesses are service businesses. Even if you are just selling potatoes, you will legally need to provide a support for returning the bad ones, which makes it a service.

For many companies it is not enough to just provide services. They see the need to become customer-driven in order to survive in a competitive market. To become customer-driven, you need to focus on the long-term relationship with the customer, instead of only looking at individual transactions. This means that how you manage your services needs some new thinking as well.

The USM method provides a standardized management method for a service organization to manage its people, its processes, its technology, and its services.

USM is different from frameworks and standards, such as ISO 20000-1, COBIT or ITIL, which are collections of best practices. USM is built on principles inspired by those practices. Thus USM is complementary to them.

In fact, if you need any such certifications for your business, USM is probably the fastest, least expensive, least risky, and probably even the most useful way to do it. After you deploy USM, the auditors can cross-reference certification requirements to the activities in workflows, profiles and other specifications of the USM, to demonstrate compliancy.

The USM Method was authored by USM Chief Architect Jan van Bon. Jan has extensive exprience in Service Management, including being a member of the ITIL v3 guidance team between 2006-2007. Jan became increasingly frustrated with the complexity of common standards and frameworks, including ITIL and various ISO standards, and started developing a more simplified method for service management, based on principles. USM is the result of that work.

The USM Method was developed and is owned and managed by the SURVUZ Foundation in Netherlands.

The following features make the USM different from the existing frameworks:

It is universal, so you can use it to manage any service.
It unified, and allows workflows to co-operate more harmoniously even in complex networks of service providers.
It is learnable, because it is based on principles instead of practices
It is free, so you don’t need to pay royalties for using it
It is simple, so you can learn it and become self-sufficient
It is non-redundant, so you can avoid duplication of work
It is open, so it fosters a culture of sharing ideas and practices

To learn more, download the free booklet Simple USM by Mikko Ahonen using this form here. We only ask your industry, you are not required to provide even your email address.