The Best of the Professor for DevOps #1 – Resources to “Educate and Inspire”

If you are a strategist, manager or practitioner working in service management today you will probably be working on ways to improve lead time, cycle time and overall flow of work through the lifecycle of delivery. Business demand requires speed and dynamic business requirements force us to look at ways to bust out of silos for cross functional integration. Time to market, customer satisfaction and the need for secure robust systems are being optimized by many service providers as a result of successful DevOps initiatives.

When considering where and how to optimize the flow of work from ideal to end of life for a service , managers and IT staff frequently have a subjective view of what DevOps is all about and will often get into war room discussions around what certain terms mean. Over the last year there have been many papers written by the ITSM Professor that clarify terms, concepts and methods current in the industry for service providers. For clarification, and to ensure a baseline of common understanding for your teams, feel free to use the following “Best of the ITSM Professor” resources relating to DevOps. Doing so could expedite and improve efforts throughout the enterprise. These are great resources to help you get started on your journey or to help you to educate and inspire others.

Historically there has been a divide between the Systems Administration (Operation folks) and Software Development (Application folks).

You Don't Need a Weatherman to Tell Which Way the Wind is Blowing ‎ Bob Dylan once wrote “The times they are a changing”.

DevOps for Newbies

DevOps – IT and Business Performance

DevOps and Infrastructure as Code

‎Velocity Velocity, it’s just such a cool word!

Watch for additional DevOps, Agile and ITSM links to valuable information in future publications from “The Best of the ITSM Professor”!

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The Four Ps of Service Design - It’s not all about Technology

People ask me why I think that many designs and projects often fail. The most common answer is from a lack of preparation and management. Many IT organizations just think about the technology (product) implementation and fail to understand the risks of not planning for the effective and efficient use of the four Ps: People, Process, Products (services, technology and tools) and Partners (suppliers, manufacturers and vendors). A holistic approach should be adopted for all Service Design aspects and areas to ensure consistency and integration within all activities and processes across the entire IT environment, providing end to end business-related functionality and quality. (SD 2.4.2) People: Have to have proper skills and possess the necessary competencies in order to get involved in the provision of IT services. The right skills, the right knowledge, the right level of experience must be kept current and aligned to the business needs. Products: These are the technology managem

What Is A Service Offering?

The ITIL4 Best Practice Guidance defines a “Service Offering” as a description of one or more services designed to address the needs of a target customer or group . As a service provider, we can’t stop there! We must know what the contracts of our service offering are and be able to put them into context as required by the customer. Let’s explore the three elements that comprise a Service Offering. A “Service Offering” may include: Goods, Access to Resources, and Service Actions Goods – When we think of “Goods” within a service offering these are the items where ownership is transferred to the consumer and the consumer takes responsibility for the future use of these goods. Example of goods that are being provided in the offering – If this is a hotel service then toiletries or chocolates are yours to take with you. You the consumer own these and they are yours to take with you. Note: Goods may not always be provided for every Service Offe

What is the difference between Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner?

I was recently asked to clarify the roles of the Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner and wanted to share this with you. Roles and Responsibilities: Process Owner – this individual is “Accountable” for the process. They are the goto person and represent this process across the entire organization. They will ensure that the process is clearly defined, designed and documented. They will ensure that the process has a set of Policies for governance. Example: The process owner for Incident management will ensure that all of the activities to Identify, Record, Categorize, Investigate, … all the way to closing the incident are defined and documented with clearly defined roles, responsibilities, handoffs, and deliverables. An example of a policy in could be… “All Incidents must be logged”. Policies are rules that govern the process. Process Owner ensures that all Process activities, (what to do), Procedures (details on how to perform the activity) and the

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