Welcome back to another edition of Real World ITIL.

We haven’t blogged in a while because we’ve been devoting the limited time we have for blog writing in order to adapt the ITIL white paper we wrote last year for publication in a national IT magazine. We expect that it will appear in print soon and will let you know if it does. The white paper itself will be available for download through Evergreen’s website sometime after the magazine issue is released. Thanks to each of our readers who submitted helpful suggestions, comments, feedback and edits on the paper - it’s a better work because of your help!

Thanks also to our readers who offered feedback our 3-part series on Availability Management. We’re glad you found it helpful and hope the other ITIL practitioners among us did, too. We’ll be very interested to see what ITIL version 3 says on the topic. There certainly is much more to the real world implementation of that process than the version 2 documents might lead one to understand.

It’s been another one of those weeks in which so much great ITIL-related stuff happened that it’s hard to know where to begin writing. So maybe we’ll muse on a few topics & see where we end up.

Buyer Beware Alert! For anyone who is considering downloading the new ISO 20000 standards documentation, make sure you pay a fair price. We know of one consultant who recently paid over US$400 for his copy, when the documents are actually available for less than US$200. Make sure you?re buying it through a reputable source, such as the United Nations? ISO website or the ANSI website in the US, as other sources may gouge unsuspecting buyers!

Have you looked at ISO 20000 yet? We’d love to hear what you think - click on the Comment link, below, to share your thoughts.

On the subject of ITIL version 3, we’ll be interested to see how much more detail gets added to the specification of Release Management. One of our colleagues recently completed advanced ITIL certification classes and the unanimous opinion of the class was that the ITIL description of RM is nearly useless in the real world. Talk to any 20-year veteran of IT and their worst ‘war stories’ will probably somehow be related to the poor management of production releases. Considering how much risk releases can involve and how much IT practitioners could benefit from applying better processes to this topic, I hope the authors of the new ITIL version have actually lived through some of these war stories so that the new standard reflects some reality.

Are you an IT veteran with an RM horror story to tell? Why not help us understand the topic better by clicking on the Comment link? Maybe one of ITIL’s new authors will take heed.

ITIL, like any worthy subject, is one of those things that seems like we’re learning anew no matter how many times we’ve implemented a particular process. On our current project, we’ve been working deep into the process of Capacity Management, which (like Availability) is another topic that gets infrequent attention in the ITIL press.

When considering this topic, many practitioners tend to focus on its technical aspect - like how not to run out of disk space? On our project, however, the team is increasingly realizing that Capacity Management is only partly about the engineering aspects. It’s really more about improving the financial performance of our infrastructure.

How so?

While many IT departments have a Finance function and many more also have ‘capacity planning’ functions, only the creative combination of the two functions through ITIL’s Capacity Management process can answer complex management questions like, “Is our spending on infrastructure capacity too high, too low or just right compared to our business need?” Or, as ITIL puts it, Capacity Management is about ‘balancing cost vs. capacity and supply vs. demand’. We’ll look more closely into that balance in a future entry.

For now, thanks for reading Real World ITIL. We’ll see you back here next time!

Regards,

Scott (your moderator)

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