The Role of Process Practitioner

The role of the Process Practitioner is by far one of the most critical, and is sometimes overlooked in lieu of others such as Process Managers and Process Owners. Don’t misunderstand, Managers and Owners are important and are key success factors, but the Process Practitioner role is where the rubber meets the road. This is the role assigned to individuals who will be performing the work on a day to day basis. ITIL has always emphasized the need for clearly defined roles for Process Owners and Process Managers. ITIL also speaks to the role of Service Owner, an individual who is accountable for and represents the end-to-end service. Within each process, there may also be roles that are designed to carry out certain process activities … these are the “Practitioners”. Without this role and skill set everything else becomes a moot point.

Successful service management dictates that specific individuals are assigned to specific roles with specific responsibilities for one or more processes. But what about the rest of us? Where do we fit into the service management program? What role do we play?

ITIL defines a key role for anyone that executes any activity within any process – the Process Practitioner.

The Process Practitioner:

Carries out one or more process activities
Understands how his or her role adds to value creation
Works with other stakeholders to ensure contributions are effective
Ensures inputs, outputs and interfaces for activities are correct
Creates or updates activity-based records

Process Practitioners can be internal or external staff, suppliers, consultants - even potentially users and customers. They are the "doers" of the process and their activities may cross into multiple groups and multiple processes.

However you choose to define your Process Practitioners, this role must be considered when designing, implementing and managing your processes. The inclusion of a Process Practitioner role should also help organizations build and manage a RACI matrices. If you recall, a RACI model maps roles and responsibilities to tasks or activities. Leveraging the Process Practitioner role at the highest RACI level can determine workloads and potentially identify process bottlenecks. The feedback that is provided by the Process Practitioner is crucial for any organization that wants to continue to evolve and emerge with the ever changing business requirements and customer needs.

Practitioners must be able to apply their knowledge. The ITIL Foundation course enables IT professionals to learn the basics of IT Service Management (the what) and the business value of well-designed and delivered services (the why). Leveraging candidates’ existing ITIL knowledge, and based on a new publication – ITIL® Practitioner Guidance – the ITIL Practitioner course goes beyond the what and the why and provides practitioners a methodical way (the how) to use the ITIL guidance to improve whether by introducing new or by changing existing services or processes. Throughout this sixteen (16) hour case study-based course participants learn about and then apply nine guiding principles to the planning and implementation of service improvements. Participants also gain a practical understanding of how three critical competencies contribute to improvement.

For more information on ITIL Foundation please click here and for ITIL Practitioner please click here.

The Four Ps of Service Design - It’s not all about Technology

People ask me why I think that many designs and projects often fail. The most common answer is from a lack of preparation and management. Many IT organizations just think about the technology (product) implementation and fail to understand the risks of not planning for the effective and efficient use of the four Ps: People, Process, Products (services, technology and tools) and Partners (suppliers, manufacturers and vendors). A holistic approach should be adopted for all Service Design aspects and areas to ensure consistency and integration within all activities and processes across the entire IT environment, providing end to end business-related functionality and quality. (SD 2.4.2) People: Have to have proper skills and possess the necessary competencies in order to get involved in the provision of IT services. The right skills, the right knowledge, the right level of experience must be kept current and aligned to the business needs. Products: These are the technology managem

What Is A Service Offering?

The ITIL4 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 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. Note: Goods may not always be provided for every Service Offe

What is the difference between Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner?

I was recently asked to clarify the roles of the Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner and wanted to share this with you. Roles and Responsibilities: Process Owner – this individual is “Accountable” for the process. They are the goto person and represent this process across the entire organization. They will ensure that the process is clearly defined, designed and documented. They will ensure that the process has a set of Policies for governance. Example: The process owner for Incident management will ensure that all of the activities to Identify, Record, Categorize, Investigate, … all the way to closing the incident are defined and documented with clearly defined roles, responsibilities, handoffs, and deliverables. An example of a policy in could be… “All Incidents must be logged”. Policies are rules that govern the process. Process Owner ensures that all Process activities, (what to do), Procedures (details on how to perform the activity) and the

Search