Introduction

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With the USM assessment tool, you can assess all aspects of the Service Management system of an organization, e.g. your internship company. You can set the scope of the assessment yourself.

The tool is designed for IT service organizations (IT management organizations), and allows you to assess six organizational components against the USM management system reference:

  1. Control
  2. Organization
  3. Processes
  4. Routines
  5. Tools
  6. Service delivery

The result of the assessment contributes to stakeholders in several ways:

  1. You gain structured insight into a practical situation compared to a fixed reference at the architecture level.
  2. The analysis automatically provides improvement suggestions, which you can use to create an improvement plan for the (internship) company.
  3. When multiple (internship) companies are compared plenarily, you gain insight into the variations that occur in the field.
  4. The (internship) company receives a free analysis and improvement plan based on a well-thought-out reference architecture.

Each of the six components contains a number of themes, which can be assessed using a set of questions. The scores per question consist of two dimensions:

  1. How important is this aspect in the eyes of the surveyed organization?
  2. How capable does the surveyed organization think it handles this aspect?

For each question, you can give an explanation of the scores, and make a suggestion for improvement.

Each question and score is weighted equally in the assessment of a theme. The questions can be filtered so that each assessment can have its own scope for a custom assessment.

The weighted scores are automatically calculated and plotted in a graph. The graph thus shows the combination of importance/score. The graph can be divided into four quadrants:

  • top right: high importance and high capability - these metrics get the recommendation "maintain"
  • bottom right: high importance and low capability - these measuring points get the recommendation "improve"
  • bottom left: low importance and low capability - these measuring points get the recommendation "no attention"
  • top left: low importance and high capability - these measuring points get the recommendation "less attention"

With this quadrant approach, the explanations, and the improvement suggestions, you can make a structured improvement proposal for the organization under study.

Task

The task is dependent on local assignments and specific of the program. E.g., the tool may be used to assess an internship company, but also any other organization.

Downloads

The assessment tool is made available by the USM teacher. The tool is based on an online questionnaire.