ITIL

IT world today is bombarded with various acronyms and certifications. There are so many options available in the market yet, organizations are still struggling with more problems than never before. IT Companies still face the same issues of cutting costs and increasing efficiencies, and at the same time struggling to keep up with the technology.
My suggestion: Let’s get back to the drawing board and see what we really want:
Most of IT Companies are looking for 2 things:
Excellent customer service, leading to happy customers
and
Great productivity
Now, this does not mean that we don’t have $ on our mind. But these are the basics that drive us: Productivity and Customer Service

ITIL: If I have to define ITIL, I will say that ITIL is the way to achieve our basic goals inline with our $ value. And in ITIL terms it is a set of concepts and practices for managing IT Services and Operations. It is built on a service life-cycle model and encompasses “Good Practice”Actually in today’s competitive world we need to follow ITIL if we want to succeed. Most successful service providers, today, are using ITIL or their own versions of ITIL.
Now that we know a little bit about ITIL, I can go to next important topic: Why Adopt ITILTo achieve success as a service provider we need to adapt to this model as it helps us achieve our goals by improving alignment between IT and other business processes, improve the quality of service provided and reduce costs.
Service Lifecycle Approach: The ITIL approach is very basic and is very easy to understand, for example: when we start a business we will first develop a strategy then we will design our product/service, then we will transition to operations and lastly we will continuously improve our service/ product depending on feedback or market. ITIL uses the same approach and gives it 5 stages:Stage 1: Service Strategy
Stage 2: Service Design
Stage 3: Service Transition
Stage 4: Service Operation
Stage 5: Continual Service Improvement

For most of it you can easily get reading material on Google, so I will jump straight to Service Transition.

Transition includes first key process:
Change Management:
Change Management is an approved/useful/standardized/fool proof set of processes to handle change in a way that the desired outcome is achieved with no unwanted impact to other related services or operations.
There are many performance indicators related to Change Management such as:
• Number or % of failed changes
• Number or % of changes causing incident
• Number or % of unapproved changes
• Number or % of emergency Changes
Management needs to set these targets depending on the business needs as different environments can lead to very different targets. It is also important to note that Change Management needs to identify a person or a group which will be responsible for the approval of emergency changes. Also to have a standardized request for change it is suggested, that one template be used by the whole organization.
Service Operations: This is where the fun begins. All starts with a channel through which client contacts IT; mostly it is the Service Desk. I won’t go into details of the Service Desk but would like to say that the Service Desk is a gateway to your organization and your customer service skills are required the most at this point. So make sure you have excellent reps with good CS Skills. What comes next, any guesses? For sure Incident Management. Clients call when they have an issue. So Service Desk Logs an Incident.
1) Incident Management: Goal of this guy is to restore service with minimum disruption to business. Depending on SLA and priority of the incident the Incident Manager should make sure that the issue is resolved within the set time frame. It is also suggested that the Incident Manager develops a Critical Incident Management Process for Critical Incidents and an Incident Management Process for incidents with low impact and urgency. Mostly Incident Manager also has a clear escalation process to be followed in times of critical incidents.
Few Key Performance Indicators are:
% of Incidents Resolved in set RTO timeframe( Return Time Objective )
Achieve SLA
Response time for incidents( time taken for Incident to go from open to working status)
2) Problem Management: Goal of Problem Management is to ensure that the incident that got resolved by the Incident Manager never happens again. PM is responsible for conducting root cause analysis and coming up with action plans. This is where the issue is fixed permanently
Key Performance Indicators are:
% of reoccurring Incidents
% of Problems resolved
3) Event Management: An Event is any occurrence detected (mostly by monitoring teams using software’s such as Tivoli) that can impact Infrastructure or services. Event Management is responsible for detecting events, understanding them and determining appropriate action.

Now we are on last section of the cycle and that is Continual Service Improvement: Here the goal is to improve efficiency and effectiveness of the operations by continues enhancements to the processes.
Once the operations is up and running, we needs to go back and review our achievements, outputs, customer service, our methods and the come up with result oriented action plans on continues improvement. ITIL says this in 7 steps:
Step 1: Define what you should measure
Step 2: Define what you can measure
Step 3: Gather the data
Step 4: Process the data
Step 5: Analyze the data
Step 6: Present and use the information
Step 7: Implement corrective Action

What we read above is very basic and simple, but that is what ITIL is. It is a back to basics approach, follow the same steps daily and make sure you keep going back keep improving what you do daily