ITIL® 4 Service Value System and DevOps

The Service Value System (SVS) and Service Value Chain as indicated in ITIL 4 Best Practices give you the big picture macro view that should be the start of every DevOps Pipeline. Without it, you could get swept into the undercurrent and potentially focus too much effort or misdirect resources towards the technical and automation aspects of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

Components of the SVS include: The ITIL4 Guiding Principles, Governance, The Service Value Chain, Practices, and Continual Improvement.

A Service Value Chain and Value Stream Mapping (VSM) exercise provides all stakeholders with a high-level view of the end-to-end steps required for your DevOps Pipeline. Applying the concept of “Systems Thinking” to the overall CI/CD Pipeline is critical but without including the information/data and flow of work we truly miss the mark. This is where Lean principles and VSM are helpful.

Notice in the above image from our Value Stream Mapping Facilitation course there are 3 main areas included in this sample value stream: information, materials and time diagnostics. Take a look at the time diagnostics. Did you notice it includes the dreaded wait time between each step in the pipeline? In this example, we can clearly see that it is taking over five weeks to complete approximately two weeks of value-added work.

Topics like this were discussed in recent ITIL 4 Foundation and DevOps Leader certification courses and it occurred to me that the real value comes from the data and information flow. In my mind, understanding that flow along with the analytics and actions taken with real-time data is the glue that ties all of this together. Applying these ITIL, DevOps, and Lean principles and practices is just a snippet of some concrete ways that allow us to think and work holistically as we work through the conversion of customer demand into value.

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