From the course: Putting ITIL® Into Practice: Applying ITIL® 4 Foundation Concepts

Seven ways to apply service management - ITIL Tutorial

From the course: Putting ITIL® Into Practice: Applying ITIL® 4 Foundation Concepts

Start my 1-month free trial

Seven ways to apply service management

“

- [Instructor] Adopting and adapting ITIL need not be a heavyweight, top-down affair, layered on top of existing work as extra work to do like rolling a giant boulder up a hill. A lighter weight approach is possible and I argue better suited to today's lean, agile and DevOps-oriented individuals, teams and organizations. Service management began being light weight. Based on Jan Carlzon's conception of "Moments of Truth." The idea that processes are what people do. And that working on interactions among people, what he called moments of truth, was the right approach. Sounds like the agile manifesto's people over process, doesn't it? In fact, in early ITIL books, the word process was used interchangeably with discipline. I like discipline a whole lot more because a discipline is something individuals and teams must apply themselves to learn. It's something that you do and that you reflect and act on that you must practice to master. It's not something someone else does that you have to comply with. The process-heavy concept of service management is a holdover from the process re-engineering era where the focus was making end-to-end processes predictable and consistent. While this is still a good approach for certain situations, it's a problem if it's the only approach you use. I call this the engineering a force approach where people try to install processes like software. The problem with this approach is that there's no ask of individuals and teams to learn and think and act and drive towards shared outcomes and change their behavior with your help. Making these asks are what I call the enact and enable approach where you do more than simply ask people to comply with processes. Many publications give guidance on organizational-level end-to-end process engineering so we'll skip this discussion entirely. ITIL 4 replaces the heavy process and function process of ITIL v3 with a focus on practices which aim for the same outcomes but which may or may not include processes and functions. Practices in ITIL 4 are more like disciplines. Something you and your team need to learn, practice and do to become good at. Now, let's look at the approaches I've come to reply on. I hope you'll find them refreshingly helpful and better suited to today's work environment and agile, lean practices.

Contents