Primp my IT in a Lean way

ITIL4 is out. As it hasn’t seen an update since 2011, a lot had to be accomplished to document the Best Practices that have developed further outside of ITIL, in the meantime. That includes agility, Cloud Computing, but in particular the DevOps side of things. This is now all in the new version. With sweat on the face and that tough feeling that the race to catch up has finished.

Ben Smith has headed up the IT department for many years. Over the last decade he has seen many changes in his Service Management operations and feels that his departmental structure is slowly phasing away. The developers are addicted to Scrum and keep on adding challenges to his operational part of the business, with faster development cycles as well as adding risk to his go-live planning. Ben knows that his business loves faster product updates, as they are already spoilt by periodic updates of Office 365 that have been completely outsourced to Microsoft. 

In addition, Ben’s accountability also covers the stability and integrity of the internal systems which makes him quite risk aware. He knows that good and reliable processes have to be in place for him to do his duty. But even the mention of a “process” makes people look at him as if he was a dinosaur.

This is kind of funny, isn’t it? Don’t people realize that the whole “Scrum thing” is nothing more than a well-structured and tough restricted process? Daily standups every single day? Delivery on clearly defined agreements? The fact that changes can be implemented very fast can’t overrule the basic principle of a process within Scrum.

Businesses need processes. Ben has an engineering background, so he is aware that manufacturing doesn’t work without processes. Cloud Computing is based on tough process definition. Nothing is left to coincidence. Taking this away is neglecting the fact that we are seeing a higher number of tougher processes defined than ever before, regardless of what we call them.

And now, processes seem to become even less important in the only framework that IT has been able to rely on so far. The new ITIL version might be following the trends, but does it reflect best practice? Is it still good guidance?

It probably is for high level service and business managers who don’t deal with the basics. However, Ben is concerned that he has to invest far more in training his staff in order to receive the essential skills of designing and monitoring processes, that are crucial to his operations. Ben simply doesn’t believe that everything can be agile. He used to send his staff to ITIL Foundation training for them to learn how to design processes, but with the new version this won’t be delivered any longer. He will be forced to send his people on additional training courses to achieve what he wants.  Therefore, he is keen to look for alternatives, which are close to the principles of ITIL and legal compliance, but that also helps his team keep their feet on the ground.

Ben looked at FitSM, a public framework, developed and backed by the EU that is available under a creative commons license. He downloaded the publicly available guidance and realized that this offers him exactly what he is looking for. He came up with the following training concept:

• All staff to receive FitSM Foundation training
• Additional practice workshops of the Maturity Model of FitSM to monitor processes
• Additional ITIL training where needed 

In the end, time will tell if Ben has made the right decision. But he believes in quality and the necessity to do things right to achieve his goals. He also knows that the times of “one-size-fits-all” are definitely over. Ben is now looking forward to bringing all the good things of agile, FitSM and ITIL together and to refresh his IT operations accordingly in a lean way.