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IT Service Management - Tools

In today’s world where demand for up to date services has grown and the lead times for delivery has continued to be shortened I am often asked, what is the best tool? The answer is, of course, “it depends!” Every organization has different needs, budgets and resources, however the requirements for automated building, testing and delivering new functionality has never been greater. Every organization must be able to look at the list of requirements for tools from both the operational and development sides of the IT organization as the functions become more and more integrated. The starting point is a list of generic requirements. An integrated suite is preferable and should include options such as: Service Portfolio Service Catalog Service Design Tools Discovery/Deployment/Licensing Technology Workflow or process engines CMDB’S Configuration Management Systems (CMS) Self Help for Users Remote Control Diagnostic Utilities Reporting Tools/Dashboards Service K

Service Acceptance Criteria

I have often been asked what value does the Service Acceptance Criteria (SAC) provide?  Along with other criteria and elements, the Service Acceptance Criteria forms what is described in ITIL and the Service Design Package.  With so much importance on Design, Development and Deployment, the significance of the SAC increases as we look to optimize service value.  Do you want to increase value to your business and customers? First let’s understand what the SAC is.  Service Acceptance Criteria:   A set of criteria used to ensure that an IT Service meets its functionality and quality requirements and that the IT Service Provider is ready to operate the new IT Service when it has been deployed. This set of criteria is in the form of a formal agreement that an IT Service, Process, Plan or other deliverable is complete, accurate, reliable and meets the specified requirements.  In the past, this has sometimes been thought of and enacted on at the end of the value stream. High performi

Incident vs. Problem

You may have seen a similar blog from the Professor a few years back that talked about the distinction between the idea of an incident vs problem.  Everything from that article is still relevant.  As process and methods for development and deployment have matured so has the usage of Incident and Problem Management. This is one of the most often confused points in for Agile, LEAN and ITIL adaptations. The ITIL definition is the same. Incident: Any unplanned event that causes, or may cause, a disruption or interruption to service delivery or quality Problem: The cause of one or more incidents, events, alerts or situation­­­­­­­ Where and how we apply Incident and Problem Management is evolving. A decade ago, and still in some organizations, Incident and Problem Management are processes exclusive to Service Operation.   ITIL is so very relevant and today we find, with the onset of DevOps and cultural shifts, many organizations are adopting little or zero tolerance

The Purpose and Value of a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

I am often asked the purpose and value of a Business Impact Analysis (BIA).  The purpose of a BIA is to quantify the impact to the business (in dollars and cents) that the loss of a service would have.  It is a valuable source of input when trying to ascertain the business needs, impacts and risks that the organization may face in the delivery of services.  The BIA is an essential element of the overall business continuity process.  It identifies the most important services to the organization and therefore will help to define the overall strategy for risk reduction and disaster recovery.  At a more granular level this analysis enables the mapping of critical service applications and technology components to critical business processes.  It is an invaluable input for Continuity, Strategy, Availability, Design, and Capacity Management and can have a significant impact on the cost of designing, delivering and maintaining these services based on their criticality as defined by the busin

Service through Knowledge Management

I believe that a service provider can improve by choosing to follow best practices from ITIL, Lean, Agile and more.  That said I also believe that Knowledge Management will be the glue that ties in all together. Knowledge is required to deliver maximum results.  Knowledge Management ensures the right knowledge to the right people at the right time.  Think about yours or your customers service provisioning model.  How much time, money and resources is spent because of the lack of knowledge at the right time?  How frequently do we need information or access to the information and it is NOT available?  Not only is information not available when we need it, but sometimes it is replicated in many ways in many different places so that there is no real way to determine the definitive source.  It is difficult to get management control over the outcomes of an organization when the knowledge is out of control.  Knowledge Management is required throughout the Service Lifecycle.  A few exampl

Service Test Models

Quality: The ability of a service or product to meet customer requirements and create value for that customer.  Perceived quality affects customer support more than any other element.  Products and services must attain a certain minimum level of quality.  No other components can make up for a significant shortfall on this one and the perceived loss of value this can create. In business today, “Time to Value” has increasingly become one of the most significant measures an organization reviews and reports on.  Today’s ever more progressively shorter time scales for this cannot be met without being able to incorporate such practices as continuous delivery (CD), continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD), which all are dependent on our ability to do continuous testing. As many of you have certainly experienced, this need for speed continues to be a clear and present danger in our ability to create a high trust culture where testing and learning from failure is allowed

The Technical Catalog

As most of us are already aware, the business of IT has become even more critical in ensuring the overall success of an organization.  In today’s fast pace and fluid environments the statement that “every business decision triggers and IT event” is becoming increasingly true for those of us who operate in the world of ITSM. One of the most valuable tools that we can employ is our service catalog.  In a mature ITIL organization we can have two views of this catalog. The first being the Business/Customer catalog where we connect our customers/users to the standard IT services that we offer, deliver and support.  The second view is the Technical/Supporting service catalog, which when appropriately maintained is a very powerful tool that allows us to relate IT services to our supporting services and the underlying supporting infrastructure.  It is this second view that we will review here. Our service catalog provides us with a central source of information on all of the IT servi

Managing Across the Lifecycle

As the current IT organization has grown from a provider of technology to the Service Provider of choice we have had to incorporate the principles of service management to ensure that we deliver the outcomes required by our customers.  Given that, we have to ask ourselves a couple of strategic questions: What outcomes are we trying to provide? How do we as a service provider facilitate that? Delivering an outcome based definition of services will allow the IT organization to move beyond just business / IT alignment to towards business / IT integration, which really should have been the goal from the beginning.  Supporting customer / business outcomes should be the ultimate focus of the IT organization thus creating value through the delivery of services. A focus on business outcomes is both a critical and in most cases a cultural shift for IT service providers.  As customer’s preferences and perceptions change over time so does the value statement that a service provider

The Service Design Package (SDP)

I was recently asked by one of my followers if I might have an example of a Service Design Package (SDP).  When seeking to implement ITSM and ITIL, we often seek to find examples and models we can use to give us more guidance. This is no less true of the SDP.  Unfortunately when we try to seek out specific examples of a SDP it can often be difficult, if not near impossible. So why is it hard to find actual examples of a SDP? It goes to the very nature of the guidance of what we call best practices. ITIL is not prescriptive as to what should go into a SDP or what one might look like. It provides best practice guidance on the types of items contained, but not the exact look and feel of the content. Therefore each SDP will be unique to the organization that creates it. The organization, type of content, what the content says, and how it is managed are all decisions made by each organization to meet the needs of their customers and users. Just like a Service Catalog or a set of Service L