ITIL For Dummies (UK Edition)

From ITIL For Dummies, 2011 Edition by Peter Farenden

Want to know how ITIL can help you with your IT service management? You’re in the right place. Check out these
concise pointers, which are designed to help you understand and implement the ITIL methodology in your
day-to-day IT service work.

Defining Some Basic ITIL Terms

As you use ITIL for your day-to-day IT service management, you regularly
come across key terms which you need to understand. This list covers the
basic and most frequently used ones.

Service: Something that provides value and is available to a customer from

a provider. For example, take travel agents. They sell you a holiday
package and make sure all the individual bits work together. They book the
flights, the transfers, the hotels and any excursions. What do you do? Pay
the money and turn up. Travel agents save you the effort, cost and risk of
doing the individual bits for yourself. They provide a service that is of value
to you.

IT service: A collection of IT bits and bobs along with the people and
documents required to provide an IT system which delivers a service that
provides value to a customer. Basically, a bunch of techie stuff that allows
you to do something useful with your computer.

For example, when you shop using the Internet, you’re using an IT service.
Your PC, your Internet provider and the company providing the website are
all providing IT services for you to use. When you shop online, the service
you use consists of many component parts – some of them you own, some
of them other people own.

You own your PC. Your Internet provider owns your Internet connection
and some network stuff. The online store that you’re buying from owns the
website. But you want it all to work as one seamless system. Wouldn’t it be
great if regardless of which bit breaks, one person deals with it for you?

Service management: Brace yourself, this is a tricky term to define. Only

joking – service management means managing a service. In a nutshell, the
provider is encouraged to identify and agree what the customer needs and
then provide it in an ongoing way. The following section elaborates further
on service management.

IT service provider: An organisation that provides IT systems to a user

(customer). The organisation may be an internal IT department of the
company you work for – the people who put the computers on your desks
and fix them when they go wrong. Equally it may be a commercial
organisation that provides IT services in exchange for money, in other
words an Internet provider or IT outsourcer. In all cases these
organisations are providing a service to their customers.

Looking at Some Important Roles in ITIL

Knowing who does what is essential to the success of ITIL. You benefit from
knowing a few really important roles from the outset of your interaction with
ITIL.

The service owner

The service owner owns a service. The service owner is usually someone in
the IT provider organisation, and the role provides a point of contact for a
given service. The service owner doesn’t necessarily know everything about
the service, but he does know a man (or woman) who does.

Here are some responsibilities of the service owner role:

Participates in internal service review meetings

 Represents the service across the organisation

Represents the service in change advisory board meetings

Is responsible for continual improvement of the service and management

of change in the service

Understands the service and its components

The process owner

A process owner owns a process. This role is accountable for the process.
For example, if the incident management process doesn’t achieve its aim of
restoring the service to the user, the process owner gets shouted at
(hopefully not literally). The process owner is accountable for the process
and is responsible for identifying improvements to ensure that the process
continues to be effective and efficient. Here are a few responsibilities of the
role:

Ensuring that the process is performed in accordance with the agreed and
documented process

Documenting and publicising the process

Defining and reviewing the measurement of the process using metrics such
as key performance indicators (KPIs)
You must ensure that every service management process you adopt has a
defined process owner.

The process manager

A process owner (see the previous section) is accountable for the process,
but may not get involved in the day-to-day management of the process. This
is a separate role often allocated to a different person: the process manager.

A process manager is responsible for operational management of a process.

The process manager’s responsibilities include planning and coordination of
all activities required to carry out, monitor and report on the process.

One process may have several process managers, for example it may have
regional change managers or IT service continuity managers for each data
centre.

You must ensure that every service management process that you adopt has
a defined process manager – though this may, of course, be the same person
as the process owner.

The process practitioner

The process practitioner is the role that carries out one or many of the
process activities. Basically, these people are the ones who do the work.
However, it’s important that they have a clear list of responsibilities related
to the process that they get involved in.

Implementing Basic Service Level Management in ITIL

If you don’t know what your customers need, you can never know whether
you’re meeting their needs. It’s like fighting in the dark. You can never be
right. (On the other hand, you can never be wrong – some people find this
prospect attractive, but your customers won’t be impressed.)

Service level management is, pretty obviously, the process that manages
service levels. The process tries to set up a proper relationship with your
customers and understand their business needs. Of course first you need to
know who your customers are.
If you’re the internal IT department that provides IT stuff to other people
and departments within the same company, your customers are the business
unit managers or department managers. If you’re a commercial IT services
company providing IT services to other companies in exchange for money,
your customers are those other companies; usually there is an assigned
representative who talks to you.

To implement service level management:

Set up a dialogue with your customers

Find out what they want

Agree with them what you can provide

Monitor and report on what you’ve achieved

If you haven’t done this before, you’ll be surprised at the difference simply
starting a dialogue with the business makes. In some cases the business will
be amazed that you bothered to talk to it. If you’re open and honest and
state your intentions up front, your customers will be happy to talk to you.

ITIL also defines the process of business relationship management and the
 role of business relationship manager. The service level manager defines,
agrees and reports on the service level for specific services – the business
relationship manager maintains an overall relationship with the customer,
keeps in contact, and looks for new opportunities to support the customer’s
needs. Many organisations combine these roles into one job description.
When setting up some basic service level management, you consider which
roles you need.

Applying the ITIL Service Lifecycle to IT Projects

Understanding how ITIL works with real-world IT projects is crucial. Here’s a
brief description of each activity of a typical project and its relation to the
ITIL service lifecycle:

Business case and project initiation: You use a business case to justify the
cost and effort involved in providing the new service or changing an
existing service. The business case triggers the project initiation. These
activities happen at the service strategy stage.

Requirements gathering and analysis: You identify and analyse the

detailed requirements of the service or change. These activities happen in
the service design stage.

Design: You produce a design of the service that meets the requirements.
This is usually a paper-based design at this point. These activities take
place in the service design stage.
Build: The physical bit where you acquire the solution, such as building the
hardware, the servers and networks, or programming the software
application. These activities happen in the service transition stage.
Test: Testing the service is essential to ensure it meets the needs of the
business, works in the way you expected, and can be supported. These
activities also take place during the service transition stage.

Implement or deploy: Launching the new or changed service into the live
operational environment. This takes place during the service transition
stage.

Deliver and support: The service is now in the live or production

environment and is being used by the users. The IT organisation must
make sure the service is working and fix it quickly when it goes wrong.
These activities take place during the service operation stage.

Improve: After a service has been operated for some time, it’s often
possible to optimise or improve the way it’s delivered. These activities are
part of the CSI stage.

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