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 not just the service itself but also the supporting processes, measurement systems, and tools needed to operate and manage it. One of the four Ps of Service Design is Processes, meaning operational and management processes are explicitly scoped and defined here. Defining these processes at design time prevents gaps and operational failures that would arise if process design were deferred until service transition or operation.

Service Strategy focuses on determining what services to offer and how to position them in the market; it defines direction and policies, not the detailed operational processes for a specific service.

Service Transition plans and manages the build, test, and deployment of services into production, but relies on processes already defined in Service Design rather than creating them.

Service Operation executes the processes defined in earlier stages; by this point the processes must already exist, so it is too late to define them here.