Would you buy a product or service that did not include some type of warranty?  If the manufacturer or reseller does not explicitly set the expectations, then you will form them for yourself.  It is the same with the customers of your IT services.  Either IT clearly sets the expectations, or end-users will develop them on their own. Best practice tells us that during the negotiation and acceptance of Service Level Agreements, IT commits that services not only meet business and customer outcomes but also that they will meet requirements for availability, capacity, continuity and security.  Ok… that is good.  Best practice tells us to include these so called “non-functional” requirements early in the lifecycle of a service.  In reality these warranty requirements are often considered somewhat in the Strategy/Design stage but more often than we would like to admit the majority of the work and effort for security and availability are performed reactively in the Service Operation lifec

User stories are one of the primary development artifacts for Scrum teams.  They are a short description of the feature as told from the perspective of the person (stakeholder) who desired some new capability from a current service, system or application.  Many Scrum teams have adopted the user story template developed by Mike Cohn, which identified who the end user is, what the end user wants and why in a single sentence.  This template is most often written like this:  "As a (type of user), I want (some goal) so that (some reason)."  Example: As an Incident Process Owner, I want to see a release of known errors in order to do appropriate service desk staff training. In this way team members are encouraged to think of their work from the perspective of who will use it, ensuring requirements get met and value is delivered.  User stories are narrative texts that describe an interaction of the user and the service.  It focuses on the value that a user gains from utilizin

What is the difference between a Business Service Catalog and a Request Fulfillment Catalog?  One clear way to distinguish the type of service catalog that is required is to ask yourself, who is your audience?  I have found that when a lot of IT organizations say that they have a Service Catalog many are talking about a service catalog for end users.  Another very important service catalog is one that is mapped to your business customer needs.  In this blog I will briefly discuss some characteristics of service catalogs for these very distinct audiences and for the purpose of clarity I will refer to them as Request Fulfillment and Business Service Catalog. Request Fulfillment Service Catalog Service providers today are striving to automate the first line support for user request fulfillment by providing self-help and also more importantly self-serve end user request fulfillment catalogs.  This self-serve catalog is the most common and allows users to fulfill requests directly fro

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 the current change sc

In today's dynamic business climate, service outages cause real bottom line impact to the business. There are documented best practice processes and known critical success factors and yet outages that throw support organizations into reactive firefighting turmoil are far too common. Mature processes with just enough control are needed to smoothly transition new and changed services into production, helping to ensure stability for IT and the business.  Most organizations will confirm that they do have Change and Release Management processes in place.  Service Providers will usually have some level of Service Asset and Configuration Management control.  There is generally a lot of buzz and focus on three core processes for Service Transition and the success and integration of these three are critical to business success.  Three Core Processes for Service Transition are: Change Management Service Asset and Configuration Management Release Management Most IT organizations

A systems engineer recently asked “With all of the buzz around Agile and DevOps, is ITIL Foundation training and certification still relevant?”   The short answer is yes and its relevance is directly tied to the success of strategic initiatives and the outcomes of the organization.  There is direct benefit to the learner/candidate also.  It has been a while since this has been discussed so let’s revisit this once again. For the Consultant or Third Party Vendor: Gets you on the short list! -  ITIL Foundation training gives those who are consulting in any area of “Service Management” a standard set of vocabulary critical to communication.  Also, knowing the terms and basic concepts is crucial to the credibility of the consultant.  The improper use of a single term that is known by your customer could give the impression that you as the consultant do not know the industry and omit you from the short list.  Some organizations will not even consider a vendor without the proper certi

Stuart Rance wrote in a blog  “Knowledge only has value when it is available to someone, either because they remember it or because they are guided towards it at the time they need it”.   One of the key elements in support of CSI is Knowledge Management. An organization must continually gather knowledge about its services and support processes in order to look for trends, find improvement opportunities and develop strategies that will move them into the future.  The philosopher and essayist George Santayana wrote,  “Those that cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”. In today’s reality of increased rates of change, increased employee turnover, increased access to information and greater market completion it is ever more critical to build meaningful knowledge bases that allow an organization can create and capture value by insuring that data, information, knowledge and wisdom are being brought forward to benefit how and what the ITSM organization does to support bus

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 service provider

What is hurting the capability of service providers to design and deliver service at the rate of speed and at a cost that is viable to the business?  I asked a group of IT managers and practitioners in a recent training class and all agreed on these common causes: Lack of upper management strategy and direction. Lack of   adequate or accurate information Resistance to change Cultural issues / Agenda’s Inadequate funding I am sure you can add to this list.   Many service providers are suffering from the same pain.   What is causing this?   One area that most will agree upon is the fact that a lot of challenges for a service provider to deliver come from silos.   A classic silo and division that some organizations are addressing are those that exist between development and operational teams. That will help, but it’s not only siloed teams that are hurting this industry.   It is the fact that ITSM processes are also siloed.   If your processes and data are siloed even the best

From an operational perspective, we are primarily interested in the overall management of applications as part of IT services.  These can be developed in-house or purchased off the self from third party developers. Because of our operational point of view, and the focus on ensuring these services/applications are delivered with both utility and warranty, we look at their support from a more holistic approach and use what is referred to as the “Application Management Lifecycle”. It sequences through six stages or steps which are: Requirements, Design, Build, Deploy, Operate and Optimize.  Requirements: Requirements for new applications are garnered, based on business/customer needs and takes place primarily during services design.  There are six types of requirements for any application Functional requirements Manageability requirements Usability requirements Architectural requirements Interface requirements Service Level requirements Design:   At this point the requ