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Showing posts with the label Service Transition

Service Asset & Configuration Management (SACM)

Service Asset & Configuration Management (SACM) is the one process that touches all of the other ITIL processes. SACM’s purpose is to deliver accurate and up-to-date data and information to every other process across the lifecycle.  The fascinating fact about SACM is that in many cases it depends on those other processes through their defined, documented and agreed to activities, to insure that the data and information about those assets is up to date, accurate and properly recorded through the Configuration Management System (CMS),  No organization can be truly efficient and effective without having a configuration management process to insure we understand how and where that infrastructure, application, tools, documentation and sometimes even people are being utilized in delivering business outcomes and creating value. SACM ensures that CIs (configuration items) are properly identified; baselined and that changes made to them are properly controlled a...

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 througho...

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 ...

The Whitehouse - Transitioning of Power to the New Administration

So the election is over and we move into the transitioning of power to the new administration. This doesn’t officially happen until January 20 th 2017. President elect Trump met with President Obama and so begins the transfer of Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom. So with such a short time the transfer between the transition teams and the operational teams has to happen quickly, efficiently and effectively.  This transfer of power has happened 43 times in our nation’s history with 11 happening so far in the postmodern era and the Obama to Trump administration being the twelfth. Can you say change model? The ability to have this smooth transition rests to a significant extent on the ability of those involved to be able to respond to existing circumstances, their ability to understand the situation as it currently exists along with any options that may be available, along with the known consequences and benefits.  The quality, relevance and accessibility of this ...

Failing Forward

In the introduction of her book The ITSM Process Design Guide, Donna Knapp writes “In today’s competitive business climate it’s not enough to do things right; Information Technology (IT) organizations have to do the right things right.”  Well what happens when we don’t? Remember New Coke?  Not every decision we make, every new design or redesign we engage in goes according to plan.  What happens when we fail?  One of the most important and most deeply entrenched reasons why established companies struggle to grow is fear of failure. In fact in a 2015 Boston Consulting Group survey, 31% of the respondents identified a risk adverse culture as a key obstacle to innovation. (1)  ITSM processes for strategy, design, transition, operation and CSI are all based on efficiency and effectiveness.  It’s about being in control of our IT environments and that we must do everything we can to prevent failures.  Now this may go against many of our strongly held be...

Assessing and Evaluating the Change

All changes need to be assessed and evaluated.  Changes that are considered significant should be subject to a normal change evaluation in which we have well defined criteria for making this determination.  In this blog we will focus on the assessment side of the equation. A logical place to begin assessing the impact of changes on services and configuration assets would be the use of the "Seven Rs of Change Management".  Without these questions being answered a proper impact assessment could not be completed.  When leading an impact and resource assessment several items should be considered.  At the top of the chart we need to determine if there will be an impact to the customer's business operations.  Next we might want to know what the effect will be on infrastructure, individual customer services and their performance, reliability, security, continuity and ability to handle various levels of demand.  Additionally we will need to understand what t...

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 ser...

Service Transition: Release Unit vs Release Package

A “Release Unit” describes the portion of a service or IT infrastructure that is normally released as a single entity according to the organizations release policy. The Release Unit can be thought of as a collection of infrastructure items that when packaged together could perform a useful function. The unit may vary depending on the type or item of service asset or service component.  The actual components to be released on a specific occasion may include one or more release units, or may include only part of a release unit.  Release Units should contain information about the service, its utilities and warranties and release documentation.  These components can be grouped together into a Release Package for a specific release.  In general the aim is to decide the most appropriate release unit level for each service asset or component. A “Release Package” is a set of configuration items that will be built, tested and deployed together as a single release.  E...

The Value of Release Models

To understand the concept of “Release Models” one must first understand the clear distinction between the Change Management process and the process of Release and Deployment Management.   At a high level you could say that the Change Management process activities assess, authorizes and control the change and that Release and Deployment Process will actually execute or implement the change. This helps to understand the difference between change and release but also to understand that there will be different skillsets and activities involved for each area.    Although Change and Release management processes in and of themselves do have clearly defined objectives, roles and responsibilities these processes do not stand alone and must consistently work together for seamless integration with all of the Service Transition processes including Service Asset and Configuration Management and Validate and Testing processes.   This is especially true when you set out to defi...

The Best of Service Transition, Part 3

Early Life Support Originally Published on May 3, 2010 I have found, after doing a number of releases throughout my career, that a solid Early Life Support program (ELS) can really enhance the acceptance and support of any new or changed service. The ITIL Service Transition definition of ELS is the “Support provided for a new or changed IT service for a period of time after it is released." During ELS the IT Service Provider may review the KPIs, Service Levels and Monitoring Thresholds, and provide additional resources for Incident and Problem Management.   Although stakeholders have agreed to the entry and exit criteria in the Service Design stage, it may become necessary to finalize the performance targets and exit criteria after the build and testing of the service has been completed. This will help to clarify the deployment process and set the proper expectation of the operational resources that will perform the support after ELS has been completed. ELS ensures that ap...

The Best of Service Transition, Part 2

Transition Planning and Support Originally Published on February 28, 2012 I am often asked on how to manage transition.   Most organizations find that there are a lot of moving parts.   What happens here effects all stake holders and if expectations aren’t set correctly the reputation of the IT organization can often be at risk and that it can be difficult to meet the changing needs of the business in a cost effective and timely manner.   In order for us to be able to effectively meet these challenges we should start with the big picture process of Transition Planning and Support: The purpose and objective of the transition planning and support process is to provide overall planning for service transitions and to coordinate the resources that are required.   It does that with the following activities: Plan and coordinate resources to deliver the requirements of service strategy that have been translated in service design and insure they are effectively delive...

Change Categorization

Rusty asked: I was looking for terms used for categorizing the impact of a change, I remember in Version 2 of ITIL that changes where categorized as Major, Significant, Minor and Standard is that no longer done? Or is the Imapct also defines as the priority High, Medium, and Low Rusty, I’m going to give you my answer in three parts. This information can also be found in Section 4.2 of your Service Transition Book.   In ITIL V3 changes are now categorized into three distinct types:   • Standard Change: Change to a service or infrastructure for which the approach has been pre-authorized by Change management that has an accepted and established procedure to provide a specific change requirement. It has a defined trigger, documented tasks and budgetary approval. The risk is low and well understood. • Normal Change: Change to a service or infrastructure for which the risk must be assessed and must go through the Change Advisory Board (CAB). These are Changes that happen ...