The Best of the Professor for DevOps #1 – Resources to “Educate and Inspire”

If you are a strategist, manager or practitioner working in service management today you will probably be working on ways to improve lead time, cycle time and overall flow of work through the lifecycle of delivery. Business demand requires speed and dynamic business requirements force us to look at ways to bust out of silos for cross functional integration. Time to market, customer satisfaction and the need for secure robust systems are being optimized by many service providers as a result of successful DevOps initiatives.

When considering where and how to optimize the flow of work from ideal to end of life for a service , managers and IT staff frequently have a subjective view of what DevOps is all about and will often get into war room discussions around what certain terms mean. Over the last year there have been many papers written by the ITSM Professor that clarify terms, concepts and methods current in the industry for service providers. For clarification, and to ensure a baseline of common understanding for your teams, feel free to use the following “Best of the ITSM Professor” resources relating to DevOps. Doing so could expedite and improve efforts throughout the enterprise. These are great resources to help you get started on your journey or to help you to educate and inspire others.

Historically there has been a divide between the Systems Administration (Operation folks) and Software Development (Application folks).

You Don't Need a Weatherman to Tell Which Way the Wind is Blowing ‎ Bob Dylan once wrote “The times they are a changing”.

DevOps for Newbies

DevOps – IT and Business Performance

DevOps and Infrastructure as Code

‎Velocity Velocity, it’s just such a cool word!

Watch for additional DevOps, Agile and ITSM links to valuable information in future publications from “The Best of the ITSM Professor”!

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Four Service Characteristics

Recently I came across several articles by researchers and experts that laid out definitions and characteristics of services. ITIL provides us with a definition that can help drive the creation of value-laden services: A means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks. An area that ITIL is not so clear is in terms of service characteristics. Several researchers and experts put forth that services have four basic characteristics (IHIP): Intangibility—Services are the results of actions not things. They have no physical presence and represent a logical set of elements. One way to think of service is “work done for others.” Heterogeneity—Also known as “variability”; services are unique items because of the mechanisms used to deliver services, which is people. Because the people element adds variability, the service is variable. This holds true, especially for the value proposition—not eve...

What Is A Service Offering?

The ITIL 4 Best Practice Guidance defines a “Service Offering” as a description of one or more services designed to address the needs of a target customer or group. As a service provider, we can’t stop there! We must know what the contracts of our service offering are and be able to put them into context as required by the customer. Let’s explore the three elements that comprise a Service Offering. A “Service Offering” may include: Goods, Access to Resources, and Service Actions 1. Goods – When we think of “Goods” within a service offering these are the items where ownership is transferred to the consumer and the consumer takes responsibility for the future use of these goods. Example of goods that are being provided in the offering – If this is a hotel service then toiletries or chocolates are yours to take with you. You the consumer own these and they are yours to take with you. ...

The New Four Ps of Service Management

By Donna Knapp For years, people , process , and technology (PPT) was a widely recognized framework for balancing and integrating the components needed to achieve optimal performance and outcomes. In the ITIL v3 Service Design publication, this framework was expanded to the four Ps: people , processes , products , and partners . ITIL 4 has further expanded and evolved this framework to the four dimensions of service management. These four dimensions are collectively critical to the effective and efficient facilitation of value for customers and other stakeholders in the form of products and services. The four dimensions of service management are: Organizations and people Information and technology Partners and suppliers Value streams and processes. These four dimensions represent perspectives which are relevant to the whole service value system (SVS), including the entirety of the service value chain and all ITIL practices. Each ITIL practice is a set of organizational resources base...

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