With all the recent talk (and press) around SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) as well as how many billions of $ are going to be spent by IT organizations on SOA-based initiatives, I can’t help but wonder what impact this bow-wave of activity will have on ITIL-related initiatives. Or will there be any impact at all?
Is this coming “wave” good news for ITIL and ITIL-related projects? Does it mean a shift in focus for many IT Organizations? After some analysis, I think the answer is pretty clear.
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The emphasis today around Change Management is establishing a good workflow to speed up the request and approval process. All well and good, but let’s fast forward and declare that part of journey over and pretend we’re so efficient that we can submit and approve 50 change requests a day. While we’re at it, let’s also assume you are also proficient at detecting and resolving collisions among a batch of RFCs.
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Every well designed process or system relies on a feedback mechanism to ensure stability and to achieve a desired goal (that’s right, a process is a small system and not a Visio diagram). That?s simply a text book definition from school, but I?ve certainly come to respect the need for feedback in life as well as managing business processes.
So if you want your ITIL Change Management process to be more than pumping paperwork faster, then consider what feedback controls need to be designed into the workflow.
Here are some control points to design in:
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People don’t seem to take the ITIL PIR concept seriously. Reviewing changes and projects are like hated exam papers. When they are turned in, no one wants to look at them again, regardless of grade or outcome.
But the PIR is an opportunity to learn and to avoid repeat mistakes thereby freeing capacity. And isn?t the lack of capacity one of the chief complaints from your staff?
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Last time I shamelessly teased you by stating that speed, quality and cost can all be improved at the same time. Now I’ll tell you how I’ve seen it done in real-world IT shops.
Here’s the secret: they implemented strong, mature ITIL-based Configuration, Change and Release Management.
Here’s why it works: as I said, these three processes are tightly linked at almost every step.
For example, your planned changes (RfCs or Requests for Change) are assessed for impact and risk and which Configuration Items (CIs) are involved by using the relational data about your infrastructure that?s stored in your CMDB (Configuration Management Database).
Then, the Change Management process hands off the actual implementation of many (but not all) changes to the Release Management process, which is responsible for building, testing and implementing the actual changes to the infrastructure.
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When we’re working with clients to help them map out a long-term plan for ITSM (IT Service Management) using ITIL best practices as a guide and benchmark, one of the most important questions is “Which ITIL process should we work on first? Second?”
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When I’m working with clients on ITIL awareness training or conducting an ITIL maturity assessment, there’s always a tension between ‘what the official ITIL book says’ and ‘how can we implement ITIL in the real world?’
For example, the ITIL maturity model defines four levels of maturity - Repeatable, Defined, Managed and Optimized. So for a given ITIL Process, such as Configuration Management, we assess the client?s current state and assign a score. Looks really simple, on paper.
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