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Showing posts with the label Lifecycle

What is RCV?

RCV stands for Release, Control and Validate.  These are critical activities that are required for every deployment.  Proper Release, Control and Validation (RCV) is achieved as a result of integrated process activities.  In today's dynamic business climate, service outages cause real bottom line impact to the business. Mature processes are critical in enabling IT organizations to smoothly transition new and changed services into production, helping to ensure stability for IT and the business. The ITIL Capability course, Release, Control and Validation (RCV), provides the best practice process knowledge required to build, test and deploy successful IT services.  RCV is also the name of an ITIL intermediate training and certification. This course provides in-depth knowledge of the ITSM RCV processes that include: Change Management Release and Deployment Management Service Validation and Testing Service Asset and Configuration Management Request Fulfillment Change Evalu

How Does ITIL Help in the Management of the SDLC?

I was recently asked how ITIL helps in the management of the SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle).  Simply put... SDLC is a Lifecycle approach to produce the software or the "product".  ITIL is a Lifecycle approach that focuses on the "service". I’ll start by reviewing both SDLC and ITIL Lifecycles and then summarize: SDLC  -  The intent of an SDLC process is to help produce a product that is cost-efficient, effective and of high quality. Once an application is created, the SDLC maps the proper deployment of the software into the live environment. The SDLC methodology usually contains the following stages: Analysis (requirements and design), construction, testing, release and maintenance.  The focus here is on the Software.  Most organizations will use an Agile or Waterfall approach to implement the software through the Software Development Lifecycle. ITIL  -  is a best practice for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the

Creating and Supporting Services – Plan, Protect and Optimize!

Would you buy a product or service that did not include some type of warranty?  If the manufacturer or reseller does not explicitly set the expectations, then you will form them for yourself.  It is the same with the customers of your IT services.  Either IT clearly sets the expectations, or end-users will develop them on their own. Best practice tells us that during the negotiation and acceptance of Service Level Agreements, IT commits that services not only meet business and customer outcomes but also that they will meet requirements for availability, capacity, continuity and security.  Ok… that is good.  Best practice tells us to include these so called “non-functional” requirements early in the lifecycle of a service.  In reality these warranty requirements are often considered somewhat in the Strategy/Design stage but more often than we would like to admit the majority of the work and effort for security and availability are performed reactively in the Service Operation lifec