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Agile Service Management – Roles and Responsibilities

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Agile Development is an umbrella term for several iterative and incremental development methodologies.  In order to achieve Agile Development, organizations will adopt frameworks and methodologies such as SCRUM and LEAN.

Being Agile and using SCRUM, LEAN and other methodologies in development is good!  What happens when development starts adopting this culture and becomes more agile and begins to move faster and leaner than ever before, only to come up against laborious and bureaucratic change management and Service Operation processes?  One example that I heard lately is that it is like pushing more and more paper into a printer and expecting it to print faster!   It doesn’t work!

The Agile Principles and the Agile Manifesto are applicable beyond software development. Therefore, service providers not only need Agile Development we also need to adopt Agile principles throughout the entire Design, Transition, and Operation lifecycles.  Agile Service Management (Agile SM) ensures that ITSM processes reflect Agile values and are designed with “just enough” control and structure to effectively and efficiently facilitate customer and business outcomes when and how they are needed.

There are several Roles identified in the SCRUM Framework for Agile Software Development and when adopting Agile Service Management for ITSM processes the roles are quite similar.

Agile Service Management Roles:

Agile Process Owner:
Instills Agile thinking into the process
Communicates the process’ vision and goals
Creates, maintains and prioritizes a Process Backlog
Ensures that Agile values are embedded into the process
Inspects the process’ progress after each Sprint
Audits and reviews the process
Prioritizes improvements in the CSI Register
Is accountable for overall process quality

Agile Process Team – A Cross‐functional Agile Process Team should include:
Process Owner
Process Manager(s)
Process Practitioners
Change Manager(s)
Tool Administrators
Technical Writers or Documenters
Customer and/or User Representative
Other Process Managers or skills as required

Agile Service Manager - Operational counterpart to Developments ScrumMaster
Manages the Agile and Scrum aspects of the ITSM program
Ensures Agile and Scrum principles are understood and applied to ITSM
Removes impediments whenever possible
Works closely with the Process Owner and Team to get the work done
Facilitates Scrum events as needed
Helps the Agile Process Team bridge relationship with Development Teams!

To learn more, or register for ITSM Academy's Certified Agile Service Manager (CASM) or Certified Agile Process Owner (CAPO) - Click Here

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