Agile Service Manager

What is an Agile Service Manager? The following is a definition from the University of California Santa Cruz for an IT Service Manager. “The Service Manager has overall accountability for defining the service, ensuring services meet the business need and are delivered in accordance with agreed business requirements and managing the service lifecycle – often in conjunction with a Service Team”. I also looked up some jobs offerings from around the globe that were described as Agile Service Management and took some pieces from them. Here are a couple of examples:

Has responsibility for defining and creating the global service, developing the reliability and performance of the services in line with the business requirements, and managing the overall service lifecycle within an agile environment. This includes stability, performance, capability, risk acceptance and analysis of the services.

Developing a deep understanding of what is important to the service, you will be prioritizing and driving improvements, key business initiatives and resolution of service related issues through established strong relationships with your key stakeholders and all the technical teams.

You see the similarities? The differences? Let’s start at the beginning and ask why all this talk about being Agile. In today’s IoT (Internet of Things) every business has become a technology business and every business decision triggers some type of IT event. Demand for innovation, reliability, automation and the capability to deliver these services and the underpinning technology quickly and on budget has become a critical success factor for all IT organizations today.

“Rapidly changing IT requirements require rapidly changing IT capabilities” (1)

Being Agile is not the incorporation of just one thing such as a framework like scrum into the way we manage the delivery of our services, but is the approach and perspective with which we can apply multiple frameworks, practices and principles always with the goal of increasing value to the business. “Agile Service Management ensures that ITSM processes reflect Agile values and are designed with “just enough” control and structure in order to effectively and efficiently deliver services that facilitate customer outcomes when and how they are needed.” (2)

An Agile Service Manager must ensure that:

Agile values and principles are embedded into the entire ITIL lifecycle
We improve ITSM’s entire ability to meet customer requirements faster
We are being Lean; not overly complex, both effective and efficient
We ensure scalability. Processes with “just enough” control and structure, ensuring the removal of constraints where capable and allowable.
We are communicative, always keeping an open eye and ear to the changing customer needs and requirements

How many of you already incorporate these items in what you do today? See, you're already on the journey to becoming Agile. Good Luck!

For a list of certification courses: www.itsmacademy.com/agile

For related webinars http://www.itsmacademy.com/webinar-archives/

(1,2) The Agile Service Management Guide (Jayne Groll)

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