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Service Management

CDS operates a managed service practice built on ITIL best practice and certified to ISO 20000:2018. This page describes how the practice works — the operating model, the principles behind it, and what that means for consultants working on Run engagements.

The operating model

CDS's managed service practice is 2nd and 3rd line. We are not a volume call-handling contact centre. We are a skilled application support function: engineers who understand the platform, the integrations, and the failure modes. When a ticket comes in, the team triages it against impact and urgency, applies the correct priority, investigates with genuine technical depth, and resolves or escalates appropriately.

Clients who need first-line volume call-handling should have that in place separately. What CDS provides is the expert layer: skilled triage, application-layer support, technical resolution, and management of third-party vendor relationships where those vendors are part of the support chain.

ITIL as the operating standard

The service delivery practice runs on ITIL best practice — not as a badge, but as the actual mechanics of daily work:

Incident management — every incident gets a unique reference, a priority based on impact and urgency, and active management to resolution. Priority levels and response/resolution targets are defined in the client's service agreement.

Problem management — root cause investigation of repeat incidents to eliminate underlying causes, not just resolve symptoms. Problem records are maintained separately from incident records.

Change management — all changes to production environments go through a formal Change Advisory Board (CAB). Changes are classified by risk and impact; emergency change procedures exist for critical fixes.

Release management — planned releases coordinated with change management. Release windows agreed with clients; rollback procedures defined before deployment.

Service delivery management — Service Delivery Managers own the client relationship, service level compliance, and continual service improvement. Service reviews are held on a cadence determined by the service tier.

Proactive, not just reactive

Good managed service reduces incident frequency; it doesn't just respond to incidents. CDS's approach is proactive by design:

  • Event monitoring to detect deviations from baseline before they become incidents
  • Vulnerability scanning on a defined cadence
  • Dependency management — keeping platform components current to reduce security exposure
  • Continual service improvement reviews to drive ongoing optimisation, not just maintenance

For Cloudflare engagements specifically, this includes ongoing WAF rule updates, configuration tuning, and performance optimisation as part of the managed service — not billable extras.

Service transition

Every Run engagement begins with a structured service transition. Whether CDS built the service or is taking it on from another provider, transition establishes the operating baseline: documentation, configuration records, known issues, monitoring thresholds, runbooks, escalation paths, and stakeholder contacts.

Service transition done well means the first incident on live service is handled with the same rigour as the hundredth. The transition plan is agreed at the start of the engagement, not assembled at the end.

The institutional knowledge advantage

The best Run engagements are the ones where CDS built the service. The team that built it understands what it does under load, how the integrations behave, where the failure modes are. That knowledge is genuinely hard to replicate with a new support team and it's a meaningful differentiator when CDS is both delivery partner and run partner.

This isn't always the case — CDS also takes on managed service for platforms built by others — but it shapes how we think about the Build-to-Run transition and why we invest in knowledge transfer during delivery.

Certifications

Certification Relevance
ISO 20000:2018 IT service management — the primary operating standard for all Run engagements
ITIL Service delivery team is ITIL-certified; underpins all service management processes
ISO 27001 Information security management — relevant to all Run engagements handling client data
ISO 22301 Business continuity — directly relevant to the uptime commitments Run engagements carry
ISO 9001 Quality management