ITIL v3 Overview
Rob Goodwin-Davey
The ITIL Framework
Service Strategy
Establishes the overall strategy for IT Services and for IT Service Management.
 
the primary objective is to provide superior performance to competing alternatives.
IT Service organisations (BT) seek to know what customers need.
Strategy Processes
Strategy Generation -determines what service to offer to whom and determines how to differentiate the organisation from competing alternatives.
 
Demand Management -understands and anticipates patterns of business activity (PBA’ s) influences demand for IT Services. The best example of this is BT’ s own calling packages targeted at day use, or evenings and weekends use etc.
 
Strategy Processes
Service Portfolio Management -describes IT Services in terms of business value.
 
– A Service Portfolio describes a provider’ s services in terms of business value and then articulates business needs and the provider’ s response to those needs. It also represents the commitments and investments made by a service provider across all customers and market spaces.
 
Financial Management -is responsible for managing an IT Service Provider’ s Budgeting, Accounting & Charging requirements.
Service Design
The design of appropriate and innovative IT Services, including their architectures, processes, policies, and documentation to meet current and future agreed business requirements.
Design Processes
Service Catalogue Management -ensures that an accurate Service Catalogue is produced and maintained containing information on all operational services.
It contains a customer-facing view of the IT services in use, how they are intended to be used, the business process they enable, and the levels and quality of service the customer can expect for each service.
Design Processes
Service Level Management -ensures that an agreed level of IT Service is provided for all current IT Services and that future services are delivered to achievable targets.
This is very much an As Is process for BT.
Design Processes
Supplier Management -to manage suppliers and the services they supply, to provide seamless quality of IT service to the business, ensuring that value for money is obtained.
each service provider should have formal processes for the management of all suppliers and contracts, and the processes should adapt to cater for the importance of the supplier and/or contract and the potential business impact on the provision of services.
Design Processes
Availability Management -ensures that the level of service availability delivered in all services is matched to, or exceeds, the current and future agreed needs of the business, in a cost-effective manner.
this process depends heavily on the measurement of service and component achievements with regards to availability. What to measure and how to report it depends on which activity is being supported, who the recipients are and how the information is to be utilised.
Design Processes
Capacity Management -ensures that cost justifiable IT capacity in all areas of IT always exists and is matched to the current and future needs of the business, in a timely way.
 
Another As Is process for BT, it provides a point of focus and management for all capacity and performance-related issues, with regards to both services and resources.
Design Processes
Information Security Management -aligns IT security with business security and to ensure that information security is effectively managed in all service and Service Management scenarios.
the objective is to protect the interests of those relying on information, and the systems and communications that deliver the information from harm resulting from failures of availability, confidentiality and integrity.
Design Processes
IT Service Continuity Management – supports the overall Business Continuity Management process by ensuring that the required IT technical and service facilities can be resumed within required, and agreed, business timescales.
purpose is to maintain the necessary ongoing recovery capability within the IT services and their supporting components.
Service Transition
Service Transition builds, tests and deploys a release and establishes that the new or changed service will deliver the requirements specified by the customer and stakeholders.
Transition Processes
Change Management -responds to the customer’ s changing business requirements while maximising value and reducing Incidents, disruption and re-work.
Release & Deployment Management -deploys releases into production.
Service Validation & Testing -assures that a service will provide value to customers and their business.
Knowledge Management -enables organisations to improve the quality of management decision making by ensuring that reliable and secure information and data is available throughout the service lifecycle.
 
Service Operation
Focuses on the activities required to operate the services and maintain their functionality as defined in the SLAs.
 
To coordinate and carry out the activities and processes required to deliver and manage services to business users and customers at agreed levels.
Operation Processes
Event Management -detects Events, makes sense of them and determines the appropriate control action.
Incident Management -focuses primarily on returning the IT Service to Users as quickly as possible and to minimise the adverse impact on business operations.
Problem Management -focuses primarily on preventing Incidents from happening, and to minimise the impact of Incidents that cannot be prevented.
Request Fulfilment -is responsible for managing the lifecycle of all Service Requests (password resets etc)
Access Management -provides the right for users to be able to use a service or group of services.
 
Continual Service Improvement
Responsible for managing improvements to IT Service Management Process and IT Services across the whole Service Lifecycle.
To continually align and re-align IT services to the changing business needs by identifying and implementing improvements to IT services that support business processes.
 
CSI Processes
CSI is looking for ways to improve process effectiveness and efficiency as well as cost effectiveness.
 
The following statements should be considered:
 
You cannot manage what you cannot control
You cannot control what you cannot measure
You cannot measure what you cannot define.
CSI Processes
Deming Cycle
Plan, Do, Check, Act
Project Plan, Project, Audit, New Actions
Fundamental tenet of CSI
Critical at 2 points in CSI:
Implementation of CSIs
Application of CSI to services and service management processes
Cycle is underpinned by a process-led approach to management where defined processes are in place, the activities are measured for compliance to expected values and outputs are audited to validate and improve the process.
CSI Processes
7 Step Improvement Process
Fundamental to CSI is the concept of measurement
Obvious that all the activities of the improvement process will assist CSI in some way
Relatively simple to identify what takes place but difficulty lies in understanding exactly how this will happen.
CSI Processes
7 Step Improvement Process
Step 1 -Define what you should measure
Compile a list of what you should measure
Make it simple! The number of what you should measure can grow quite rapidly
Identify & link: Corporate & IT vision, mission, goals and objectives
CSFs
Service Level targets
Job description for IT staff.
CSI Processes
7 Step Improvement Process
Step 2 -Define what you can measure
Every organization may find they have a limit on what they can actually measure. If you cannot measure something then it should not be in an SLA.
Create a list of tools and what they measure against what information is being collected and reported on.
Perform gap analysis on the 2 lists & report back to the business, customers & IT.
CSI Processes
7 Step Improvement Process
Step 3 -Gathering the data
Need some form of monitoring in place.
Quality is the key objective of monitoring in CSI
Focuses on the effectiveness of a service, process, tool, organization or Configuration Item (CI).
Gather whatever data has been identified as both needed and measurable.
Gathering data is defined as the act of monitoring and data collection
CSI Processes
7 Step Improvement Process
Step 4 -Processing the data
Convert the data in the required format and for the required audience. Metric to KPI to CSF.
This step is often overlooked in CSI.
An example is taking the data from monitoring of the individual components such as the mainframe, applications, WAN, LAN, servers etc and process this into a structure of an end-to-end service from the customer’ s perspective.
CSI Processes
7 Step Improvement Process
Step 5 -Analysing the data
This transforms the information into knowledge of the events that are affecting the organization.
More skill and experience is required to perform data analysis than data gathering and processing.
Verification against goals and objectives is expected to validate that objectives are being supported and value is being added.
Looking for: clear positive or negative trends, if changes are required, are targets being met, are corrective actions required etc
CSI Processes
7 Step Improvement Process
Step 6 -Presenting and using the information
Take knowledge and present it, turning it into wisdom by utilizing reports, monitors, action plans, reviews, evaluations and opportunities.
3 distinct groups to present to:
Business -real need is to understand whether IT delivered the service they promised at the levels they promised and if not what they have done to correct it
Senior IT management -focussed on results around CSFs and KPIs such as customer satisfaction, actual v plan, costing and revenue targets
Internal IT -interested in KPIs and activity metrics that help them plan, coordinate, schedule and identify incremental improvement opportunities.
CSI Processes
7 Step Improvement Process
Step 7 -Implementing Corrective Action
Use the knowledge gained to optimize, improve and correct services
Need to identify issues and present solutions
Explain how the corrective actions to be taken will improve service.
Based on goals, objectives and types of service breaches, an organization needs to prioritise improvement activities.
These may be driven externally such as regulatory requirements, changes in competition or even political decisions.