ITIL 2011:  Business Relationship Management Originally Published on August 16, 2011 With the recent publication of the ITIL 2011 edition, several items within the best practice set have undergone a transformation. One of the goals of the 2011 edition is to bring even more consistency and standardization to the best practices by formally recognizing and organizing several ideas and activities that the 2007 edition had not previously structured as full, formal processes.  While always referenced in the 2007 edition (and ISO/IEC 20000), Business Relationship Management is now an official ITIL process The newly structured Business Relationship Management process now formalizes the activities and links between the customer or user and the service provider through a central contact point embodied in the Business Relationship Manager role. The ITIL 2011 edition states that the purposes of Business Relationship Management are twofold: To establish and maintain a business relatio

Cycles Originally Published December 4, 2012 As we move into the waning of the year in the northern hemisphere and the waxing of the year in the southern hemisphere, it becomes time to reflect on the meaning and understanding of the idea of cycles. The yearly cycle of seasons was long ago recognized by early mankind as playing a significant role in culture and society. Planting, growth, maturity and harvesting each set the day to day activities of peoples around the globe throughout a given year. This is no less true when it comes to the lifecycle of services and the lifecycle of Service Management. Both play a significant part in the culture and functioning of an organization. A cycle is defined as “any complete round or series of occurrences that repeats or is repeated.” This definition holds true for service management and IT services. When it comes to providing value through IT services and governing, controlling and managing those services, we do not exist in a “once and

The Fundamentals of Portfolio Management Originally Published June 14, 2011 IT must begin to align with drivers of business value other than just managing infrastructure and applications. In order for IT to organize its activities around business objectives, the organization must link to business processes and services, not just observe them. IT leadership must engage in a meaningful dialogue with line-of-business owners and communicate in terms of desired outcomes. We have to become a Business & Service oriented organization. The transition from managing infrastructure to managing services is a fundamental cultural shift for many organizations. Managing infrastructure requires a focus on component operational availability, while managing services centers on customers and business needs. In order for us to link service assets to business services we must first begin to develop a portfolio of services using the following work methods. Define: Begin by collecting informatio

Service Strategy's Four P's Originally Published on July 10, 2012 Whenever I am introducing ITIL and ITSM to a new group of students I always make sure that the concept of Strategy as a process is always discussed.   The reaction that I usually get from most is: “Strategy isn’t something the business does?”   I begin our discussion with a simple definition.   Service Strategy comprises the processes of: strategy management for IT services, service portfolio management, financial management for IT services, demand management and business relationship management.   In the world of ITSM, Service Strategy is the stage of the lifecycle were we align our IT strategy the with business strategy and define our perspective, position, plans and patterns that we as a service provider will have to execute in order to meet an organizations business outcomes.     These four elements must be present and help guide us in defining and documenting our overall IT strategy.     

I've been hearing a lot lately about "going back to the basics" of ITIL and IT Service Management.  So for the first half of 2013, I'm going to package and republish the best of my blogs for each lifecycle stage.  As always, I welcome your comments and questions!   ~~ ITSM Professor Utility and Warranty Equals Value Originally published October, 2012 When a service provider is developing a service for a customer or group of customers the underlying goal is to ensure that the service has value for the customers by meeting a set of defined requirements.    The value is often defined by what the customer is willing to pay for this service rather than what it actually cost the service provider to produce the service or any other essential feature of the service itself. Services themselves do not actually have intrinsic value.   That value is created by the outcome enabled by employing the service and therefore the value of the service is not determined by the provid

I often get asked where change evaluation takes place.   Isn’t it part of change management?   It is a separate process however it is driven by change management and is triggered by the receipt of a request for evaluation from Change Management. Inputs come from several processes including the SDP and SAC from Design Coordination, change proposal from SPM, RFCs, change records and detailed change documentation from Change Management.   It holds discussions with stakeholders through SLM and BRM, testing results from service validation and testing to ensure that its members have a full understanding of the impact of any issues identified and that the proper risk assessments can be carried out against the overall changes and in particular the predicted performance, intended affects, unintended affects and actual performance once the service change has been implemented.    The purpose of change evaluation is to provide a uniform and structured means of determining the performance of a c

In an earlier blog I spoke to the conflicts that all operational organizations face.   This struggle can be broken down into four general imbalances so that an IT organization can identify that they are experiencing an imbalance by leaning more towards one extreme or the other.   At a high level it can provide the service provider with the opportunity to develop some guidelines on how to resolve these conflicts and move towards a best practice approach in resolving discrepancies.   We talked to the first and most common which was the Internal IT view vs. the External Business view.   Today I would like to speak to the dilemma of Stability vs. Responsiveness. IT operations must ensure that the IT infrastructure is stable, performs at an agreed and defined levels on a consistent basis and is available with the correct amount of capacity to meet the demands of ever changing patterns of business activity. These changes can be evolutionary.   Needed changes in functionality, performance