Adopting the ITIL seven “Guiding Principles” for service providers could be the best way to establish a healthy organizational culture. All “Guiding Principles” are powerful but today are some thoughts on just one and that is “FOCUS ON VALUE”.    ITIL 4 best practice guidance says to focus on value.  Getting level set on what VALUE is for your business partners, customers and consumers is critical to every strategic, tactical, and operational action! To understand this better let’s start with the official definition of a service. “A service is a means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating OUTCOMES that customers want to achieve without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks". If this is so, then there is a direct correlation between VALUE and OUTCOMES. When it comes to defining “VALUE” we must get OUT of “IT”.  An “OUTCOME” is what we deliver. It is not the activities within the value delivery stream but rather the RESULTS of all people,

One of the leading questions following the release of ITIL 4 is “How do I Transition from ITIL V3 to ITIL 4?   Which translates to, how do you proceed to adapt existing processes to the new way of working?  The answer is… ITIL 4 for ITIL 4. What? That’s right! ITIL 4 has the best practice for “adapting” and might I include “accelerating” the ITSM processes that you have in play today. Below is an outline of principles, concepts and precepts from ITIL 4 guidance that will help. Ongoing Continual Improvement has always been a best practice. Therefore: How do you proceed to adapt existing processes to the new way of working? Each is discussed here at a very high level. First and foremost, START WHERE YOU ARE!  Continual Improvement - ITIL 4 is the next logical progression of your improvement cycle. Business Requirements are dynamic and therefore we must be dynamic in order to provision for evolving business and customer needs. We must be responsive (Agile) and ensure “Stab

START WHERE YOU ARE! This guiding principle is just common sense. We are either not moving and dying or we are moving forward and living. The guiding principles from ITIL4 best practices are universally applicable to practically any initiative, any size of organization, or any type of service provider. There are seven “Guiding Principles” that can be adopted and adapted to suit any service management improvement. The one Guiding Principle that we will focus on here is simple yet powerful! That is “Start Where You Are”. Every organization that is in business has existing systems comprised of people, practices, and technology! Don’t forget to “Honor the Past”. There are a lot of people who have put a lot of effort (blood, sweat, and tears) into helping to improve the capabilities within your organization. Don’t start from scratch and build something new without considering what you already have. It’s almost always better to improve what you currently have than to throw it all awa

What is changing in your organization? The easier question might be what is not changing. We live in an accelerated world. To say that business and customer requirements are evolving is an understatement. It is a volatile time and the Co-Creation of services between service providers and customers as defined in ITIL 4 is the type of guidance  that could help. Studies have shown that there is a direct relationship between customer engagement in value co-creation and customer satisfaction.  There is no room for an “Us and Them” environment. Engagement means that we vet the requirements with the customer to ensure needs but also that the customer will engage and play a role in the design, development and delivery of the product or service. They won't necessarily get down in the weeds with the developers and techies, but they absolutely should have a strategic and a bit of a tactical role to play throughout.  Beyond the consumer/customer and the service provider, there

In the early days of DevOps, there was a lot of debate about the ongoing relevancy of ITIL and IT service management (ITSM) in a faster-paced agile and DevOps world. Thankfully, that debate is coming to an end. ITSM processes are still essential, but, like all aspects of IT, they too must transform. Recent updates to ITIL  (ITIL 4), as well as increased interest in site reliability engineering (SRE), are providing new insights into how to manage services in a digital world. Here's a look at ITIL 4 and SRE and how each underpins the "Three Ways of DevOps," as defined in The Phoenix Project, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford.‎ What is ITIL 4?  ITIL 4 is the next evolution of the well-known service management framework from Axelos. It introduces a new Service Value System (SVS) that's supported by the guiding principles from the ITIL Practitioner Guidance publication. The framework eases into its alignment with DevOps and agile through a bi-mo

There are some misconceptions about ITIL ® 4 and its use of the term ‘practice’ vs. ‘process’ as a component of its recently introduced service value system. One misconception is that processes aren’t important anymore. Another is that organizations think they must completely redesign their tools in order to accommodate this change. Neither is true. Let’s begin by taking a look at how ITIL 4 defines these terms. Process: a set of interrelated or interacting activities that transform inputs into outputs [to accomplish an objective]. Processes define the sequence of actions and their dependencies. Practice: a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective. Practices include resources based on the four dimensions of service management which include: organizations and people, information and technology, partners and suppliers, and value streams and – wait for it – processes.   Both processes and practices focus on achievin

Testing starts with the first line of code!   It is NOT a downstream activity. DevOps testing has a critical role to play in a Continuous Delivery Pipeline. Without integrated testing DevOps simply will not work!   With the advent of DevOps and the movement to breakdown silos between developers, QA, security, and operations, it becomes critically important that all members of an IT team - regardless of what tools they use, or role they play - understand the essentials of testing. Every member of your development team should also integrate to ensure Compliance and Audit outcomes!   It is a new world.   In this new world, we can leverage from existing but must be open to walking through new doors of opportunity. Understanding traditional test strategies is helpful but when and where, and most importantly how we proceed with our test strategy must shift.   Knowing how to code is not enough, Quality Assurance in and of itself is not enough.   We cannot afford to have our products