Today technology has been integrated into
almost every aspect of business and continues to grow in importance with every
new innovation. It is impacting organizational structures, business processes, how
and what products and services we offer to our customers. This tidal wave of change is increasing in
complexity and velocity. These dynamics
are shaping the strategies we must employ to manage our IT environments.
Given the changes that are happening in the
digital world today, support organizations have had to look at how to enhance
and speed up the traditional waterfall approach to management of our IT
infrastructures. ITIL and Agile are not contradictory
of each other. Agile development provides
opportunities to assess the direction of a project throughout its development
lifecycle. It is a methodology on how to deliver projects, that is
iterative, adaptive and an incremental approach to project management which can
be used for almost any type of project.
ITIL is about
best practice in IT Service Management. It’s a
holistic collection of processes and functions on how to define, design,
transition, run and continuously improve services and the processes that
support their delivery. ITIL’s perspective is from the
operational point of view, recognizing that value to the customer is delivered
during service operation and therefore operational requirements must be engaged
as early as Service Strategy. ITIL is neutral about what types
of tools or management methodologies are used, which means that
ITIL and Agile are complementary and not competitive.
From a design perspective, both usually have a
starting point of an approved business case and gather business
requirements. One in the form of a Service Level Requirements document, the other in user stories.
Both then prioritize these requirements or improvement opportunities
ensuring they align to customer needs and the overall business strategy.
During
the transition phase time boxed sprints are
employed. Normally the sprint will start
with a sprint planning meeting and daily standup meetings, which help to track
progress and to eliminate impediments. The sprint ends with the sprint review
meeting, where the new or changed service is formally accepted. There can also
be a Sprint Retrospect Meeting, which results in lessons learned for the next
sprint.
In ITIL the change transition
planning and support process gets employed to oversee coordination and
prioritization of resources. Moving into
change, SACM and release and deployment controls are utilized to insure that
intended outcomes are being realized and risk assessment are being properly
review, along with accurate recording of data, information and knowledge. This
will normally finish with a post implementation review where the change is accepted
into operations and lessons learned can be recorded for future changes. In speaking with a
number of my students, it’s in the actual deployment and the operational phases
where they are still working on the integration of methodologies. They
incorporate Agile in the Strategy, Design and large parts of the Transitions
stage, but in the Operation stage, the rigor of the ITIL concepts is still a
requirement when integrating older applications and systems with new that are
still prevalent in real world situations (off the island). This helps to safeguard service availability,
security and continuity while Agile ensures the quickened pace to deliver new
capabilities to the business. This ties in with creating a culture of
ITIL’s continuous improvement, while looking to move forward with greater
speed, without compromising quality.
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