IT Service Management for Project Managers
Reuse Elements of ITIL Service Management for Successful Project
Jan 9, 2009
ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) became increasingly popular with ITIL v2 and in 2007 ITIL v3 was released. The key change from ITIL v2 to ITIL v3 is the repositioning from process lifecycle management to the lifecycle of the services provided by IT with a focus on ROI (Return on Investment). The process components are still present but revised and reorganised into the new five core modules: Strategy, Design, Transition, Operation and Continual Service Improvement.
Simple Summary of ITIL
A very simple summary ITIL v3 is:
- Service Strategy - identify new market opportunities for new services
- Service Design - focus on developing the design for new services identified by strategy
- Service Transition - implementation of the service design, including ITIL v2 such as Change Management and Release Management
- Service Operation - day to day service provision according to service level agreements, including ITIL v2 such as Incident Management and Problem Management
- Continual Service Improvement - focus on continual improvement of quality of services offered, including ITIL v2 Service Level Management
IT Service Management (ITSM) for Project Managers
ITIL includes a number of other guidance documents such as management of: Capacity, Availability, Continuity, Security and Financial. However, for the project manager the question is what can be reused for a project and indeed what must be used to transition the project to the service managers. Reuse must be balanced between project need and differences with service need. If those differences are too great then it may make no sense to try to reuse procedures, processes or systems. However, possible candidates for reuse are:
- Incident Management - whilst this may not be useful during the development phase where there is a lot change going on it may become useful after change control has been applied to the solution. This would typically be at the start of system testing
- Change Management - change management must be applied at the project level in terms of scope and items such as requirements as well as at the solution level, and similarly this process and procedure may be useful once formal testing begins
- Configuration Management - the project solution will transition to service management so it makes sense to use configuration management and its database (CMDB) immediately. However, if the CMDB is intended for "production" items only then the configuration may need to be managed outside of the CMDB until the solution is delivered and a production baseline of configuration items is taken
- Release Management - closely aligned to change and should be applied once formal testing has started to control future updates after each test iteration and final deployment
Reuse to Save Project Time
As a project manager it makes sense to reuse existing processes, procedures and systems as appropriate because it means the project does not have to recreate them and expend unnecessary time and effort doing so. Talk to the IT Service Management people and others to see what help they can provide. Working smarter may help lead to a successful project.
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