By definition, ITIL is a set of best practices (refer to glossary and section 1.2.3 of any of the books)  It is also considered a "source" of good practice.   While this may be confusing, it is important to understand the distinction. There are many sources of good practice but not all of those sources are  validated as "best" practice.   While the term is loosely used, best practices should be repeatedly proven to demonstrate tangible value in actual organizations.  In fact, today's documented best practice could be tomorrow's good or common practice.  That's how service management evolves, improves and becomes institutionalized. Building a service management program can also involve other sources of good practice (i.e., other frameworks, standards, and proprietary knowledge). ITIL makes it clear that it's best-practice guidelines  are not intended to be prescriptive.  Each organization is unique and must 'adapt and adopt' the gui

Several key individuals played a significant part in the creation of the movement to develop the ideas and usage of quality in the production of goods and services. Joseph Juran was one of these main contributors. His main efforts came in the form of the Quality Trilogy and the Quality Roadmap. Each of these approaches helped to set the foundational concepts and practices of achieving quality for customers. Juran began with a basic definition of quality: “Quality is conformance or fulfillment of customer requirements” The Quality Trilogy states that there exist three basic stages or aspects of achieving quality: Quality Planning: quality does not happen by accident Quality Control: checks and balances, structure and governance ensure quality Quality Improvement: we must always seek a better way to do things Once we have our basic aspects laid out we can then create a “roadmap” or plan for attaining quality. For the delivery of goods and services we could try to create this r

The Professor has kindly lent me his blog to share the latest ITIL Library update - Jayne It was recently announced that the 2011 Edition of the ITIL Core Library will publish on July 29, 2011. Notice that I did not refer to the new release with a new version number - and with good reason. All future revisions to the ITIL publications will be referenced by the year that it was published. ITIL will finally just be ITIL. If you regard the 2011 ITIL update as the equivalent to the revision of a college textbook, you'll understand why this is not a big deal. Academic textbooks are revised on a regular schedule without much fanfare or impact on prior or future students. Past attendees do not retake their final exams or replace their textbook. Just a normal course of continual improvement. Do you base your decision on whether to take a college course on the edition of the textbook being used?  Not really.  What's important is the relevancy of the topic.    The 2011 ITIL Edit

I was recently asked about how to measure service management maturity when the maturity of individual processes is not equal. Frankly, it’s a bit of chicken and egg. It can be difficult to define where your organization is as a whole compared to each individual process when the processes are at different levels. When we look at a specific process we have to judge it against a specific set of criteria. Each organization will develop this criteria based on the organizational goals and objectives. Each process may have a different set of criteria, different levels of benefit or impact so therefore a different level of need-based maturity. For example, for organizations that are highly dependent on suppliers and outsourcing, the need for a mature Supplier Management process is critical. Other organizations may not focus on Supplier Management but invest their focus and resources on other processes such as Configuration Management. The maturity of individual Service Management process

What is the difference between a service and a good? When answering questions like these, I attempt to look at things from a simplified view. I try to stay away from complexity and decompose or deconstruct the parts of an answer to its most basic form. As a result, for me the difference between a service and good is very simple. A service is intangible (an abstraction or an idea) while a good is tangible (having physical characteristics). In terms of the creation or production of each, they are both “manufactured” or “created” using the exact same approach. Raw materials are “processed” into a finished output. So both services and goods could be considered “products” of a manufacturing “process.” In this way services and goods are the same thing. The difficulty arises for many people when it comes to the idea of “manufacturing” services. Because they can see, taste, smell or feel a service as it makes its way through the “manufacturing” process, they end up thinking or believing that

The workplace can be a stressful environment. Personality differences, team dynamics, budget constraints, technology issues, achieving business alignment and customer satisfaction are all contributing factors to this stress. Conflict inevitably arises. I recently attended an ITSM Leadership workshop and realized that conflict is not negative nor something that we should avoid. As IT Service Management leaders we must understand that our stakeholders often have a different set of concerns and issues. There will be varied opinions on the right way to implement service management. In our goal of effective leadership it is important to solicit and listen to differing opinions. We have to embrace our differences, work through the issues and implement strategies to limit the negative aspects of conflict. Conflict can actually be valuable to an organization. It is in the effective management of this conflict that our teams can be made stronger, our relationships with our customers improved an

I was recently asked where an entity such as Enterprise Monitoring resides in an organization. Should it be equivalent to the Operations, Engineering and Security areas rather than reporting to one those areas? Yes in some ways it does make sense to have Enterprise Monitoring at the same level. However, we must remember that there is a clear distinction and separation between the functions as proposed in ITIL and the activities that they perform. “Monitoring” is an activity related to a process (including but not limited to Event Management, Availability, Capacity, Service Level, etc.) So this work gets performed across an enterprise and not by a single, particular group. Anyone who needs to “monitor” something should use the associated processes to do so. Someone doing “monitoring” does not need to be located in any specific part of an organization. Functions are organization, location and structure agnostic. A function is not a place or management structure rather an abstract groupin