The professor was recently asked:  "I am having difficulty communicating the business risk of having processes like Change Management and Incident Management sit at Initial (Level 1) maturity. Can you address some of the common business risks and costs companies see by having immature processes?" Great question!  Many organizations do not recognize the inherent risks inhaving immature critical processes such as Incident Management and Change Management. Both processes strive to increase service availability either by identifying and mitigating risk before a change is made or minimizing the impact of a failure after a service is deployed.  To refresh our memories, I have included a description of each aspect of Level 1 in the Process Maturity Framework, with its associated risks:   Vision and Steering: Minimal funds and resources with little activity. Results temporary, not retained. Sporadic reports and reviews. No formal objectiv...

Organizations looking for help defining standard changes will find it in the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). A white paper Using Standard Changes to Improve Provisioning describes what standard changes are in relation to other changes as well as in relation to service requests; along with guidelines for establishing standard changes. The MOF Action Plan: Standard Changes offers a more succinct step-by-step look at how to create standard changes. There are a also a number of “MOF Reliability Workbooks” in the MOF Technical Library (e.g., Reliability Workbook for Active Directory® Certificate Services) that describe proposed standard changes for the given system or service presented in a checklist-like fashion that allows the proposed change to be verified as a standard change. The MOF Reliability Workbooks are Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that also look at things such as Monitoring Activities, Maintenance activities, and Health Risks. This and other tools such as an in...

In one of my previous blogs I wrote about the ‘Process Maturity Framework”. (Appendix H pg 263 from the V3 ITIL Service Design Book). I mentioned that you can utilize this framework to measure your Service Management processes individually or your Service Management program as a whole.  With this discussion I would like to speak to the five areas that the assessment should be completed against at each level. The five areas are: Vision and Steering Process People Technology Culture  Initial (Level 1) Vision and Steering:   Minimal funds and resources with little activity. Results temporary, not retained. Sporadic reports and reviews. Process : Loosely defined processes and procedures, used reactively when problems occur. Totally reactive processes. Irregular, unplanned activities. People: Loosely defined roles or responsibilities. Technology: Manual processes or a few specific, discrete tools (pockets/islands). Culture: Tools and technology based and driven...

I am often asked about the best way to measure process maturity.  While there are several process maturity models available, I prefer the “Process Maturity Framework” (Appendix H pg 263) from the V3 ITIL Service Design Book. You can utilize this framework to measure your Service Management processes individually or Service Management as a whole. The five areas that the assessment should focus on are: Vision and Steering Process People Technology Culture The major characteristics of the Process Maturity Framework (PMF) are the following:    Initial (Level 1) The process has been recognized but there is little or no process management activity and it is allocated no importance, resources or focus within the organization. This level can also be described as ‘ad hoc’ or occasionally even ‘chaotic’. Repeatable (Level 2) The process has been recognized and is allocated little importance, resource or focus within the operation. Generally activiti...

What does it mean to “adopt and adapt” an ITSM framework like ITIL? This question has come up recently in several of my classes. It is not an easy question to answer but one that needs to be addressed early on in any ITSM implementation effort.   The first consideration is the adoption of a framework or perhaps even more than one. Yes, with an ITSM implementation we are not limited to taking on the advice and best practices of only one approach. When we “adopt” a framework, we make a commitment to use the methods, means and approaches laid out within a given framework. This commitment includes being willing to go as far as redesigning how and why we undertake activities and efforts within our organizations. If we want to “adopt” and ITSM framework, but we do not change the fundamental way we approach things, then we have not really adopted an ITSM framework. Adoption requires a fundamental willingness to see things from a new perspective. If you want to redesign your living space ...

Component Failure Impact Analysis (CFIA) is a proactive availability management technique which was developed by IBM in the 1970’s. This technique allows us to predict the impact on our services if any of the individual components fail. It points out our vulnerabilities to single points of failure. Doing a CFIA is a pretty simple exercise. Here are the steps: Take certain key Configuration Items (CI)s in the infrastructure and identify the services that they support by researching the Configuration Management System (CMS).  If you do not have a CMS, look for paper diagrams, network configurations, any available documentation and general knowledge. Create a paper or electronic table or spreadsheet.  List the CIs in the first column, and the Services in the top row.  For every CI, place an “X” in the column below the service if that CI's failure would cause an outage.   Mark an “A” when the CI has an immediate backup (hot start) o...

Throughout the ITIL classes that I teach many students have asked about other frame works and how they differ from and work in conjunction with   the ITIL framework.   The framework that I will be comparing with ITIL today is eTOM (Enhanced Telecom Operations Map)   The Enhanced Telecom Operations Map is a business process model framework intended to define a common language and a complete activity mapping and classification for use by service providers within the telecommunications industry.   eTOM provides the enterprise processes required to properly run the business of a telecom service provider and break them down to different levels of detail. eTOM is intended to be more formal when compared to IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) since it specifies a process framework composed by processes typically necessary for service providers to plan, deploy and operate their services. The eTOM Business Process Framework has been widely accepted by the telecommunication ...