The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Confused change management in ITIL V3"

Service Management

skeptic — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 18:02:17 +0000

Funny you should say that: see USMBOK or my new book due out for Christmas. Neither work is IT-oriented but both are about Service Management.

ITIL V3 Framework

Visitor — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 13:43:28 +0000

The V3 Framework is excellent. Unfortunately, the people who created it don't appreciate the potential. They created a great framework and then took all of the V2 Operational stuff and used it as supporting detail. V3 concepts can be applied across the enterprise but the authors of V3 continue to focus on operations.

In its defense

skeptic — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:48:15 +0000

In its defense, ST does say in 4.2.2

...outside the scope of their service change process. Typcially these might include:
Changes with significantly wider impacts than service changes, eg.g departmental organisation, policies and business operations - these changes would produce RFCs to generate consequential service changes

breaks down with Change

skeptic — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:03:42 +0000

I think that - for once - this isn't about "alignment". The separation between strategic/aligned/business actiivty and backroom/operational/IT activity breaks down with Change. Change is the connection between them. They are not aligned, i.e. pointing in the same direction. they are linked, integrated. Organisational change is what drives a lot of IT change (although IT also generates a lot itself). Which is fine so long as ITIL sticks to running the backend operational IT change. But as soon as it talks about user RFCs and service portfolio and demand, suddenly it is poking its nose into organisational change. You can't separate out IT service change from business change. They are one and the same. So Service Strategy swaggered into the boardroom, but Service Transition stayed firmly rooted in the IT Change Manager's office, and confusion reigned.

The constant refrain that IT

EnterpriseWizard — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:32:35 +0000

The constant refrain that IT and business MUST be aligned seems to be responsible for much of this; "alignment" doesn't mean that every move IT makes must be justified from a strategic standpoint. If the business side asks "What are we doing to ensure our IT department is strategically aligned?" and IT can say, "Well, we can use ITIL v3 to make strategic change decisions..." then everyone is ostensibly satisfied, even if that's not really what ITIL is for. "Operational" shouldn't be a codeword for "unimportant and easily ignorable," but it's not as sexy as strategy, unfortunately, which even the ITIL writers have picked up on. A tight focus on ensuring that operational change procedures are managed efficiently is no bad thing.

Organizational change drivers... and types

ianclayton — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:34:09 +0000

Although my wording may have been slanted to non-organizational change - and towards products and services, the types of maintenance do indeed include any organizational, process, documentation or similar change required.

The driver for the change can be anything. Lets go back to the service for a moment and consider the need of a service (product) manager who must react to new/customer market needs in a market they currently exist. The resulting strategy (service plan) might require a change in the support structure, new service branding, and a complete rewrite of how costs are recovered (new billing and invoicing procedures), oh lets add in new governance. perhaps it was all driven by a new government regulation - who knows.

The 4 types are designed to handle this type of change. I'll be writing on this in more detail in an upcoming book ' Service Change Management'.

more than production change but less than organisational change

skeptic — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 01:25:00 +0000

are we discovering that ITIL offers useful but incomplete guidance? indeed.

What your discussion doesn't address is where change kicks in. the four categories you describe sound to me like they apply to IT production cnahges. they don't sound like a good model for business organisational change.

I don't believe ITIL's description of change is adequate to manage organisational change requests: new product, new IT application, office move, merger, change of branding... and yet it tries to be more than just IT production change. And it explicitly does not manage projects or project portfolio, but it does attempt to manage service portfolio. And so on and so on. ITIL V3 is caught partway between IT and the business, more than production change but less than organisational change.

There are four types of change

ianclayton — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:37:00 +0000

In support of your discussion...

There are four types of maintenance (change) applicable to products and services as defined within the USMBOK (@Page 184):

- perfective (new functionality)
- adaptive (forced compatibility)
- preventative (proactively avoid and issue)
- corrective (post issue or failure)

Each are subject to prior justification, which naturally includes cost. A MAJOR initiator of maintenance is Problem Management, where almost everything required to review and approve the change is prepared, including the action plan and expected results. Another MAJOR instigator is the product or Service Manager, or whatever name is assigned to the individual responsible for the Service Plan, which dictates the functionality of the service.

The type of change (reason) is one element of the overall classification scheme. This is often missing from guidance in many of the popular frameworks. Other elements more commonly found include area of change (hardware, software, organizational), and of course the degree of risk. ITIL is correct in reminding us that the governance associated with a reviewing and approving a change should be proportional to the level of risk. It should also reflect the required knowledge and affected or involved communities.

The change practice should be used for all changes. The procedure used should be 'proportional' and include the degree of risk and the resource commitment to effect.

A key metric to successfully managing change is being able to compare estimated with actual cost.

Again - are we discovering that ITIL offers useful but incomplete guidance?