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ITIL – Back to Basics for Agile and DevOps

ITIL advocates that IT services are aligned to the needs of the business and support its core processes. It provides guidance to organizations and individuals on how to use IT Service Management (ITSM) ­­­as a tool to facilitate business change, transformation and growth.
Some are believing that ITIL has run its course.  In truth I believe the opposite is true.   In the past, and still today, many organizations believe that Best Practice and ITSM processes are focused on the Service Operation Lifecycle.   Implementation, process design, and ITSM tools have had a very heavy focus on processes like Incident, Problem, Change and Configuration Management. Few have yet to recognize or have not seen the value in the guidance for Service Strategy and Service Design processes and roles.   How did these get overlooked?
In the last three or so years I have seen a bit more buzz about “Business Relationship Management”.   Less so for “Demand” and “Strategy Management” for IT Services. Few are integrating these into real Service Level Management and other proactive processes in Service Design as indicated by Best Practice.   Even with Agile and DevOps in the lime light, today there is still a heavy focus on the functional requirements and less so on the “non-functional” or warranty requirements and processes as laid out in ITIL.
I suggest considering and embracing Best Practice in the Service Strategy and the Service Design Lifecycle Stages of ITIL Best Practice to make your Agile and DevOps initiative able to bring the level of optimization you want to achieve.  Without Best Practice these initiatives could and are falling way short of what is expected.  In many cases we are still not aligning to real BUSINESS and CUSTOMER OUTCOMES.   Shift Left using ITIL Best Practices.

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