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01-3 Define and explain the concept of a service (SS 2.1.1)
ITILFND01 Service Management as a Practice 01-3 Define and explain the concept of a service (SS 2.1.1) There are a multitude of definitions for the term service. ITIL provides an excellent definition that covers much ground but truly understanding the concept of service management and running IT like a business requires more than just this […]
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01-2 Describe and explain why ITIL is successful
ITILFND01 Service Management as a Practice 01-2 Describe and explain why ITIL is successful (SS 1.4) Many believe that ITIL is successful because it provides a practical approach to apply what has worked for other organizations and codifies that “best practice” into a framework that others can apply in their organizations—hopefully to achieve similar or […]
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01-1 Service Management as a Practice
ITILFND01 Service Management as a Practice 01-1 Describe the concept of best practices in the public domain (SS 2.1.7, Fig 2.3) Best practices are a way of doing things that has been shown by others to produce good results. Generally, best practices will be developed and proven by leading organizations independently. These best practices are […]
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The Four Aspects of IT Services, Aspect Two
If you have been struggling with building a services business, then ITIL has provided some help in the form of a new definition for services targeted to the business owner or leader of a services organization. It builds upon the conceptual economic definition of service and provides an excellent foundation for creating a service business. […]
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The Four Aspects of IT Services, Aspect One
IT service management is about delivering sustainable value to the business from the use of technology. It is not about defining the best process. It’s not about assigning process owners or service level managers. It is not about implementing a tool or resolving incidents or problems. It’s not even about managing change. It is about […]
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How to present value in business terms in the real world
A few years ago, I found myself in a two day meeting with a sales person, a technical presales person, and a client’s IT executive team. The company I worked for sold IT Service Management software and the client was a rather important client. The client as it turns out had attempted to purchase four […]
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IT support sucks but we made our metrics
SLAs should only include those items that can be effectively monitored and measured at a commonly agreed point. Inclusion of items that can’t be effectively monitored almost always results in disputes and eventual loss of faith in the SLM process. It is essential that monitoring matches the customer’s true perception of the service. A service […]
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The End-user’s Perception is Your Reality
In order for processes and services to be managed and optimized, there must be a feedback loop that provides management information regarding the functioning of the processor service. This requires monitoring the process or service in appropriate ways to ensure that it is meeting the stated goal in the most effective and efficient manner. From […]
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IT as Strategic Partner
The quantity and levels of service that IT is able to provide are always bounded by the associated costs. IT Service Level Management (SLM) is tasked with helping the customer understand the tradeoffs between cost and benefit. This should be accomplished in a way that allows the business to make decisions about which services it […]
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Configuration Management Database Introduction
The configuration management database is a virtual concept and is made up of many physical databases and physical stores of information. It becomes a CMDB, when the information is brought together with a common interface that makes the information accessible and relevant for decision makers; most importantly, the CIs are related (linked) to one another. […]
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Operations and Development Tear Down That Wall
Many IT organizations suffer from less than optimal communication between development and operations groups. This happens so often that a special term has been created to describe what happens during the transition process. IT people say that developed software is “thrown over the wall” from development to operations. The result is that in house development […]
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Definitive Stores Reduce Costs
What happens in a typical organization when there is catastrophic damage to a hardware component that requires rebuilding form scratch? In many organizations the existing production configuration would not be definitively known and the exact version of software that was installed is often unknown and not locatable. This results in a rebuilt component that differs […]
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Great Release Management Requires Project Management
Release management impacts every process area in the production environment. In addition its effectiveness and professionalism contributes significantly to the general perception of the development group. The most finely developed product ever is considered useless by the business if it can not be effectively deployed. As such it is critical that release management
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Define Your Roles for Best Communication Flows
Effective communication flows are important for any organization. They become increasingly important as organizations grow in size or are required to operate in a more rapid fashion. Communication flows are also one of the most difficult aspects of an organization to manage. Much of the difficulty involves the lack of a good model with which […]
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Create a Loop to Measure Change Management
How do you know if an individual change or the change process as a whole was successful? This question can be answered by creating a feedback loop. The components of this loop are incident records, problem records, and RFCs (change records). By linking these three components together, we can begin to
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One Change Management for all of IT
Many IT organizations have change processes that are specific to different parts of the organization. For instance, development may have its own change process, and each operational technical silo may have a change process of its own. While this may have worked in the past, the current state of technology interdependence makes this type of […]
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The CAB is NOT the Change Authority
The change advisory board is an important concept in change management. It is a group of key stakeholders of changes and they serve to advise and assist the change manager in assessing and prioritizing changes. It is an advisory body that does not have responsibility for final approval of changes. That responsibility lies with the […]
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Urgent Change Doesn’t Mean Bypassing Change Management
Urgent changes represent an unrecognized and unmanaged cost to the typical organization. The costs are easily measured in terms of unplanned downtime, utilization of IT resources, and lost business opportunity. Part of the reason is that many individuals use urgent changes as a means of working outside the established change management process. This leads to
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Problem Managers are Fire Fighters
There are two primary roles inherent in the duties of Problem Management, that of fire fighting and fire prevention. All organizations are faced with emergencies (fires) that occur without warning and that require rapid response by problem resolution teams. However, many of these emergencies that occur in typical organizations are not truly emergencies in that […]
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The Clash of Incident and Problem Management
The critical distinction between Incident Management and Problem Management can be defined by their contradictory goals. Incident Management is concerned with restoring service as quickly as possible and maintaining SLA targets, while Problem Management is concerned with finding root causes and eliminating errors from the infrastructure. Root cause investigation often requires extended periods of unplanned […]
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Incident Problem and Known-Error Relationships
An error in the infrastructure causes a disruption in service. This disruption causes an end-user to call the Service Desk and create an incident record. If the incident can not be resolved, or if it indicates an underlying problem that needs to be addressed, then a problem record is opened and associated with the incident. […]
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What is a Service
Service is an integrated composite that consists of a number of components, such as management processes, hardware, software, facilities and people that provides a capability to satisfy a stated management need or objective. IT services can be divided into customer/end-user facing IT services as well as services or sub-services that support customer facing IT services. […]
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Key Considerations for Service Desk
These are some of the key considerations to keep in mind, when implementing the Service Desk function. Information collected here is used in many of the other process areas, so it is important to record as much information as may be required to support the activities of those processes. Service Desk will normally be the […]
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Goals for Service Desk
For every need that an end-user has of IT, there should be an acceptable response from the service desk. For every IT activity that affects an end-user’s ability to work, there should be proactive communication from the Service Desk, explaining what to expect. Service Desk should act as the single point of contact for end-user […]
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Introduction to Service Desk
Extending the Range of IT Services – In ITIL the Service Desk is considered to be a function, not a process, and it does more than simply log and resolve incidents. Service Desk and incident management are intimately connected but Service Desk has a larger role such that it handles more than just incidents. The […]
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Managers are responsible for the system
ITIL is based on quality initiatives in businesses, which find their roots in the work of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Business students will recognize Dr. Deming as the person who revolutionized the Japanese auto industry in the 1970’s. Dr. Deming was a professor of statistics and was intimately involved in quality efforts for United States […]
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Why focus on Process?
In the effort to produce competitive advantage there are three primary resources that IT managers have at their disposal to meet business requirements. They are People, Process, and Technology. Companies already do everything in their power to hire the best people and deploy the best technologies. They compete in an open market for existing talent […]
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Who Cares what a Process is?
Process is a series of related activities aimed at achieving a set of objectives in a measurable, usually repeatable manner. It has defined information inputs and outputs, consumes resources and is subjected to management controls over time, cost and quality. Processes are the basic building blocks of business. Companies make millions of dollars from creating […]
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Service Focus Trumps Technology Focus
Every IT organization is familiar with the natural boundaries for communication and cooperation that arise from organizing IT around technology specialties, which are often referred to as technology silos. In the past, there was good reason to organize IT in this fashion, with few drawbacks, since technologies were rarely interdependent and not often business critical. […]
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Services Have Types?
Service is an integrated composite that consists of a number of components, such as management processes, hardware, software, facilities and people that provides a capability to satisfy a stated management need or objective. IT services can be divided into customer/end-user facing IT services as well as services or sub-services that support customer facing IT services. […]
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Customers Want Business Services from IT
Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) embodies the idea that the IT department is a service organization, delivering IT services to the business. As such, IT should be focused on creating and delivering IT services that are defined in business terms. For too long, IT has expected the business to learn technical language. This has led […]
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IT is Dead, Long Live IT
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. – Alfred North Whitehead IT is a mere infant in the business world, having existed no more than a few decades. By contrast, professions such as accounting, production, economics, and marketing have been practiced for thousands of years, with at least three hundred years […]