At which stage of the service lifecycle should the processes necessary to operate a new service be defined?

Service Design is the lifecycle stage responsible for designing all aspects required to transition and operate a new service, including the processes, policies, architectures, and documentation. The 'Design the processes' activity within Service Design ensures that operational processes such as incident management, request fulfillment, and monitoring procedures are defined before the service is built or transitioned. Defining processes here prevents operational gaps when the service goes live.

Service Strategy focuses on defining the value proposition, service portfolio, and strategic objectives; it does not define the operational processes required to run a specific service.

Service Transition plans and prepares for deployment using processes already designed; it does not create the operational process definitions themselves.

Service Operation executes and manages services using processes that should already be defined; defining new processes at this stage indicates a failure in earlier lifecycle planning.