Donna Knapp is the curriculum development manager for ITSM Academy, where she is responsible for  the development of ITIL course content. By her own admission, it’s a role that indulges her love of learning and passion for sharing her knowledge with others. Gaining the ITIL 4 Master designation is an unexpected outcome to the career path Donna Knapp first set out on. However, she now realizes it’s the culmination of her ITIL journey.  “Early in my career, I was the IT liaison for my organization’s Lean initiatives. At the time, I wasn’t aware of ITIL . Instead, we used IBM’s IT service management framework.” Donna said. “The IBM philosophy was well respected in the IT industry at that time, and dovetailed much of what I was doing in terms of designing and improving our IT service delivery and support processes.” “IBM went on to contribute to the birth of ITIL and by 2005 I was using ITIL as a consultant and educator,” Donna explained. “As I look back, I appreciate that this w...

Value streams are getting a lot of attention these days for a couple of reasons. One is that value streams allow us to identify opportunities to minimize waste or bottlenecks across organizations, processes and functional silos, and to improve the flow of value. Organizations adopting DevOps , for example, are using value stream mapping as a way to improve the flow of activities during the software development lifecycle, and to improve cross-functional collaboration. Another reason is that value streams direct our attention to what customers value. For example, organizations can use value stream mapping to streamline new product development activities, improve time-based measures such as lead time and time to market, and identify ways to improve product quality. They can also use it to streamline the activities involved in integrating a new employee into the company and its culture. What these both have in common is that the focus is on optimizing the value-adding activities; with the ...

One of the things we frequently hear from individuals who attend the advanced ITIL ®  4 classes such as High Velocity IT and Drive Stakeholder Value is how very different ITIL 4 is, and more specifically, how relevant it is to challenges currently facing organizations. So how can organizations leverage this guidance? They need a strategy. More specifically, they need a set of aligned strategies that are linked to the  organization’s overall objectives. According to  ITIL  4 ®  Digital and IT Strategy , this set of strategies includes: A  business strategy  – how an organization defines and achieves its purpose A  digital strategy  – a business strategy that is based all or in part on using digital technology An  IT strategy  – a technology strategy and corresponding architecture that supports the digital strategy; along with the back-office strategy and administrative elements of information technology (e.g., the data center and inf...

One of the leading questions following the release of ITIL 4 is “How do I Transition from ITIL V3 to ITIL 4?   Which translates to, how do you proceed to adapt existing processes to the new way of working?  The answer is… ITIL 4 for ITIL 4. What? That’s right! ITIL 4 has the best practice for “adapting” and might I include “accelerating” the ITSM processes that you have in play today. Below is an outline of principles, concepts and precepts from ITIL 4 guidance that will help. Ongoing Continual Improvement has always been a best practice. Therefore: How do you proceed to adapt existing processes to the new way of working? Each is discussed here at a very high level. First and foremost, START WHERE YOU ARE!  Continual Improvement - ITIL 4 is the next logical progression of your improvement cycle. Business Requirements are dynamic and therefore we must be dynamic in order to provision for evolving business and customer needs. We must be responsive (Agile) an...