Welcome back to Real World ITIL!

It’s been a few weeks since our last entry, during which interval we completed the white paper mentioned in our last entry. The writing part is done now and we hope that it will be published soon. We’ll let you know, so keep watching this space!

Also in the interval, our time has been consumed with two ITIL projects: a strategic roadmap for the implementation of several ITIL processes for the government of a certain island; and leading implementations of Service Level, Availability, Capacity, Change, Configuration and Incident for an IT component of a major European bank.

So, here at Real World ITIL, our effort will always go first to actually doing ITIL in the real world as opposed to only blogging about it.

Nevertheless, we think it’s important to share some of our stories through this blog. We hope to hear some of yours, too!

On that note, we’ll focus this week on responding to all of the great responses we’ve gotten on our last few topics. THANK YOU again to everyone who has taken the time to write in - we really appreciate the chance to have substantial discussions with you about ITIL.

Before we jump into our responses, though, I’d like to share an interesting observation I heard recently from Jim Freeman. In a chat one day about the nature of Our Favorite Subject, Jim likened ITIL to a practice called ‘Extreme Programming’. That was a new term for me.

Apparently, Extreme Programming is a type of Rapid Application Development methodology, which, naturally enough, is meant to speed the creation of software.

According to Jim, Extreme Programming makes the assumption that ‘extremely good’ programmers have developed better ways of working than most other programmers have. We assume this means that their coding and communications habits are better than most. Of specific interest to us, though, is its presumption that good programmers also use better workflows to accomplish better programs in less time.

The principle is to gather together small groups of extremely good programmers and then observe how they interact over time as they develop applications. If you then carefully document the workflows and practices within the small groups, you are by default documenting ‘best practices’ processes for programming. If all programmers on the project are then taught these practices, the overall quality and productivity of the larger team will naturally improve.

Sound familiar?

Jim’s analogy, therefore, is that ITIL is like documenting the practices of an extremely good IT department - one that all IT departments should aspire to be. I think this is an intriguing and powerful thought.

Would you agree? Share your thoughts on Jim’s analogy by clicking on the Comment link below.

Thanks, Jim, for sharing your thoughts - we hope to hear from you again!

Now, to John, Bernardo, Ric, Brian, and Dr. ITIL (that is, if you’re still out there after our long hiatus we’ve responded to each of your comments as follows. We hope you’ll stay in touch!

For Ric P: click

For John W: click

For Bernardo: click

For Dr. ITIL: click

Just before we go, we’d like to call our readers’ attention to the recent results from an ITIL Maturity Survey recently conducted by Evergreen Systems - it contains some interesting findings.

Thanks for reading Real World ITIL. Until next time, have a great week!

Regards,
Scott (your moderator)

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