Friday 13 March 2015


ITIL 2011 Processes & Functions - Summary


Service Strategy 

Strategy Management for IT Services
Goal
The purpose of Strategy Management For IT Services is to establish and maintain standard services in concert with strategic needs & plans.
Objective
  • Analyzing capabilities and needs for services that span multiple customers and agreements
  • Establishing and maintaining standard services, service levels, and descriptions that reflect these capabilities and need
Service Portfolio Management – SPM
Goal
To assist the IT organization in managing investments in Service Management across the enterprise and maximizing them for value
Objective
Maximize the value with limited resources and capabilities by seeking an efficient portfolio with optimal levels of ROI and risks.
Demand Management
Goal
Assist the IT service provider in understanding and influencing customer demand for services, and the provision of capacity to meet these demands
Objective
  • Minimize uncertainty in demand
  • Provide reliable planning data for Capacity Management
  • Avoid unused excess capacity and insufficient capacity
Financial Management for IT Services
Goal
  • To provide cost effective stewardship of the IT assets and the financial resources used in providing IT services
  • Enables an organization to account fully for the resources spent on IT services and to attribute these costs to the services delivered to the organization’s customers
Objective
  • Operational visibility
  • Insight
  • Superior decision-making
  • Quantify in financial terms - Value of IT services, Value of service provisioning assets
Business Relationship Management – BRM
Goal
The aim of business relationship management is to understand the customer and the business process drivers and based on this to establish and maintain a good relationship between the service provider and the customer.
Objective
Three key aspects must be anchored within the organization in order to meet the requirements demanded of business relationship management:
  • Regular service reviews
  • Service complaints procedure
  • Measurement of customer satisfaction
    Service Design
Design Coordination
Goal
  • To coordinate all service design activities, processes and resources.
  • Design coordination ensures the consistent and effective design of new or changed IT services, service management information systems, architectures, technology, processes, information and metrics.
Objective
  • Design Coordination Support
  • Service Design Planning
  • Service Design Coordination and Monitoring
  • Technical and Organizational Service Design
  • Service Design Review and RFC Submission
Service Catalog Management
Goal
To ensure that a Service Catalog is produced, maintained and contains accurate information on all operational services and those ready for deployment
Objective
  • Manage information contained within Service Catalog
  • Ensure accuracy
  • Reflect details, status, interfaces and dependencies of all current services
Service Level Management – SLM
Goal
To ensure an agreed upon level of all current IT services and that future services are delivered to agreed upon achievable targets
Objective
Implement improvement measures for the level of service delivered
To focus on the relationship and communication between the business and customers
 
Capacity Management
Goal
To ensure the current and future capacity and performance demands of the customer regarding IT service provision are delivered against justifiable costs
Objective
  • Improvement measures
  • Capacity Plan
  • Agreed upon Service Level Agreement (SLA)
  • Advice and guidance
Availability Management – AM
Goal
  • To optimize the capability of the IT infrastructure and to support the organization by delivering a cost effective and sustained level of availability that enables the business to satisfy its objectives.
  • To ensure 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.
Objective
  • Improvement measures
  • Reduction in the frequency and duration of availability related -
                    Incidents
                    Availability Plan
                    Agreed upon SLA
 
Information Security Management – ISM
Goal
To align IT security with business security and ensure that information security is effectively managed in all service and IT Service Management activities.
Objective

  • Protect information from harm due to failures of confidentiality, integrity and availability
  • Confidentiality
  • Information is observed by or disclosed to only those who have a right to know
  • Integrity
  • Information is complete, accurate and protected against unauthorized modification
  • Availability
  • Information is available and usable when required, and the systems that provide it can appropriate resist attacks and recover from or prevent failures
IT Service Continuity Management – ITSCM
Goal
To support the overall Business Continuity Management by ensuring that the required IT  infrastructure and the IT service provision can be recovered within required and agreed upon business time frames.
Objective
  • To maintain a set of IT Service Continuity Plans
  • To complete regular Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
  • To conduct regular risk assessment
  • To ensure that appropriate continuity and recovery mechanisms are put in place
Supplier Management
Goal
  • Value for money
  • Manage suppliers and the services they supply
  • Negotiate, agree upon and manage contracts
  • Underpinning contracts aligned to SLAs
  • Maintain a supplier policy
Objective
  • The Supplier Management process ensures that suppliers and the services they provide are managed to support IT service targets and business expectations.
  • The aim of this section is to raise awareness of the business context of working with partners and suppliers, and how this work can best be directed toward realizing business benefit for the organization.
Service Transition

Transition Planning and Support
Goal
Transition Planning & Support aims to plan and coordinate the resources to deploy a major Release within the predicted cost, time and quality estimates.
Objective
The objective of Transition Planning and Support is to:
  • Plan and coordinate the resources to establish successfully a new or changed service into production within the predicted cost, quality and time estimates
  • Ensure that all parties adopt the common framework of standard re-usable processes and supporting systems in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the integrated planning and coordination activities
  • Provide clear and comprehensive plans that enable the customer and business change projects to align their activities with the Service Transition plans.
Change Management
Goal
The goals of Change Management are to:
  • Respond to the customer’s changing business requirements while maximizing value and reducing incidents, disruption and re-work
  • Respond to the business and IT requests for change that will align the services with the business needs.
Objective
The objective of the Change Management process is to ensure that changes are recorded and then evaluated, authorized, prioritized, planned, tested, implemented, documented and reviewed in a controlled manner. The purpose of the Change Management process is to ensure that:
  • Standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes
  • All changes to service assets and configuration items are recorded in the Configuration Management System
  • Overall business risk is optimized.
Service Asset and Configuration Management
Goal
  • Support the business and customer’s control objectives and requirements
  • Support efficient and effective Service Management processes by providing accurate configuration information to enable people to make decisions at the right time, e.g. to authorize change and releases, resolve incidents and problems faster.
  • Minimize the number of quality and compliance issues caused by improper configuration of services and assets
  • Optimize the service assets, IT configurations, capabilities and resources.
Objective
The objective is to define and control the components of services and infrastructure and maintain accurate configuration information on the historical, planned and current state of the services and infrastructure. The purpose of SACM is to:
  • Identify, control, record, report, audit and verify service assets and configuration items, including versions, baselines, constituent components, their attributes, and relationships
  • Account for, manage and protect the integrity of service assets and configuration items (and, where appropriate, those of its customers) through the service lifecycle by ensuring that only authorized components are used and only authorized changes are made
  • Protect the integrity of service assets and configuration items (and, where appropriate, those of its customers) through the service lifecycle
  • Ensure the integrity of the assets and configurations required to control the services and IT infrastructure by establishing and maintaining an accurate and complete Configuration Management System.
Release and Deployment Management
Goal
The goal of Release and Deployment Management is  deploy releases into production and establish effective use of the service in order to deliver value to the customer and be able to handover to service operations. The purpose of Release and Deployment Management is to:
  • Define and agree release and deployment plans with customers and stakeholders
  • Ensure that each release package consists of a set of related assets and service components that are compatible with each other
  • Ensure that integrity of a release package and its constituent components is maintained throughout the transition activities and recorded accurately in the CMS
  • Ensure that all release and deployment packages can be tracked, installed, tested, verified, and/or uninstalled or backed out if appropriate
  • Ensure that organization and stakeholder change is managed during the release and deployment activities
  • Record and manage deviations, risks, issues related to the new or changed service and take necessary corrective action
  • Ensure that there is knowledge transfer to enable the customers and users to optimize their use of the service to support their business activities
  • Ensure that skills and knowledge are transferred to operations and support staff to enable them to effectively and efficiently deliver, support and maintain the service according to required warranties and service levels.
Objective
The objective of Release and Deployment Management is to ensure that:
  • There are clear and comprehensive release and deployment plans that enable the customer and business change projects to align their activities with these plans
  • A release package can be built, installed, tested and deployed efficiently to a deployment group or target environment successfully and on schedule
  • A new or changed service and its enabling systems, technology and organization are capable of delivering the agreed service requirements, i.e. utilities, warranties and service levels
  • There is minimal unpredicted impact on the production services, operations and support organization
  • Customers, users and Service Management staff are satisfied with the Service Transition practices and outputs, e.g. user documentation and training.
Service Validation and Testing
Goal
The goal of Service Validation and Testing is to assure that a service will provide value to customers and their business. The purpose of the Service Validation and Testing process is to:
  • Plan and implement a structured validation and test process that provides objective evidence that the new or changed service will support the customer’s business and stakeholder requirements, including the agreed service levels
  • Quality assure a release, its constituent service components, the resultant service and service capability delivered by a release
  • Identify, assess and address issues, errors and risks throughout Service Transition.
Objective
The objectives of Service Validation and Testing are to:
  • Provide confidence that a release will create a new or changed service or service offerings that deliver the expected outcomes and value for the customers within the projected costs, capacity and constraints
  • Validate that a service is ‘fit for purpose’ – it will deliver the required performance with desired constraints removed
  • Assure a service is ‘fit for use’ – it meets certain specifications under the specified terms and conditions of use
  • Confirm that the customer and stakeholder requirements for the new or changed service are correctly defined and remedy any errors or variances early in the service lifecycle as this is considerably cheaper than fixing errors in production.
Evaluation
Goal
The goal of evaluation is to set stakeholder expectations correctly and provide effective and accurate information to Change Management to make sure changes that adversely affect service capability and introduce risk are not transitioned unchecked. The purpose of evaluation is to provide a consistent and standardized means of determining the performance of a service change in the context of existing and proposed services and IT infrastructure. The actual performance of a change is assessed against its predicted performance and any deviations between the two are understood and managed.
Objective
  • Evaluate the intended effects of a service change and as much of the unintended effects as is reasonably practical given capacity, resource and organizational constraints
  • Provide good quality outputs from the evaluation process so that Change Management can expedite an effective decision about whether a service change is to be approved or not.
Knowledge Management
Goal
The goal of Knowledge Management is to enable organizations to improve the quality of management decision making by ensuring that reliable and secure information and data is available throughout the service lifecycle. The purpose of Knowledge Management is to ensure that the right information is delivered to the appropriate place or competent person at the right time to enable informed decision.
Objective
The objectives of Knowledge Management include:
  • Enabling the service provider to be more efficient and improve quality of service, increase satisfaction and reduce the cost of service
  • Ensuring staff have a clear and common understanding of the value that their services provide to customers and the ways in which benefits are realized from the use of those services
  • Ensuring that, at a given time and location, service provider staff have adequate information on:
        Who is currently using their services
        The current states of consumption
        Service delivery constraints
        Difficulties faced by the customer in fully realizing the benefits expected from the service.

Service Operation
Processes
Event Management
Goal
The ability to detect events, make sense of them and determine the appropriate control action is provided by Event Management.
Event Management is therefore the basis for Operational Monitoring and Control.
Objective
  • The ability to detect events, make sense of them and determine the appropriate control action is provided by Event Management.
  • Event Management is therefore the basis for Operational Monitoring and Control.
  • If these events are programmed to communicate operational information as well as warnings and exceptions, they can be used as a basis for automating many routine Operations Management activities, for example executing scripts on remote devices, or submitting jobs for processing, or even dynamically balancing the demand for a service across multiple devices to enhance performance.
  • Event Management therefore provides the entry point for the execution of many Service Operation processes and activities.
  • In addition, it provides a way of comparing actual performance and behaviour against design standards and SLAs.
  • As such, Event Management also provides a basis for Service Assurance and Reporting; and Service Improvement.
Incident Management
Goal
  • The primary goal of the Incident Management process is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and minimize the adverse impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained.
  • ‘Normal service operation’ is defined here as service operation within SLA limits.
Objective
  • The ability to align IT activity to real-time business priorities. This is because Incident Management includes the capability to identify business priorities and dynamically allocate resources as necessary.
  • The ability to identify potential improvements to services. This happens as a result of understanding what constitutes an incident and also from being in contact with the activities of business operational staff.
  • The Service Desk can, during its handling of incidents, identify additional service or training requirements found in IT or the business.
Request Fulfillment
Goal
  • Request Fulfilment effectively reduces the bureaucracy involved in requesting and receiving access to existing or new services, thus also reducing the cost of providing these services.
  • Centralizing fulfilment also increases the level of control over these services.
  • This in turn can help  reduce costs through centralized negotiation with suppliers, and can also help to reduce the cost of support.
Objective
The objectives of the Request Fulfilment process include:
  • To provide a channel for users to request and receive standard services for which a pre-defined approval and qualification process exists
  • To provide information to users and customers about the availability of services and the procedure for obtaining them
  • To source and deliver the components of requested standard services (e.g. licences and software media)
  • To assist with general information, complaints or comments.
Access Management
Goal
Access Management provides the right for users to be able to use a service or group of services.
It is therefore the execution of policies and actions defined in Security and Availability Management.
Objective
Access Management provides the following value:
  • Controlled access to services ensures that the organization is able to maintain more effectively the confidentiality of its information
  • Employees have the right level of access to execute their jobs effectively
  • There is less likelihood of errors being made in data entry or in the use of a critical service by an unskilled user (e.g. production control systems)
  • The ability to audit use of services and to trace the abuse of services
  • The ability more easily to revoke access rights when needed – an important security consideration
  • May be needed for regulatory compliance (e.g. SOX, HIPAA, COBIT).

Problem Management
Goal
Problem Management is the process responsible for managing the lifecycle of all problems.
The primary objectives of Problem Management are to prevent problems and resulting incidents from happening, to eliminate recurring incidents and to minimize the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented.
Objective
  • Higher availability of IT services
  • Higher productivity of business and IT staff
  • Reduced expenditure on workarounds or fixes that do not work
  • Reduction in cost of effort in fire-fighting or resolving repeat incidents.
Service Operation
Functions
Application Management
Goal
  • It is the custodian of technical knowledge and expertise related to managing applications.
  • In this role Application Management, working together with Technical Management, ensures that the knowledge required to design, test, manage and improve IT services is identified, developed and refined.
  • It provides the actual resources to support the ITSM Lifecycle.
  • In this role, Application Management ensures that resources are effectively trained and deployed to design, build, transition, operate and improve the technology required to deliver and support IT services.
Objective
The objectives of Application Management are to support the organization’s business processes by helping to identify functional and manageability requirements for application software, and then to assist in the design and deployment of those applications and the ongoing support and improvement of those applications. These objectives are achieved through:
  • Applications that are well designed, resilient and cost-effective
  • Ensuring that the required functionality is available to achieve the required business outcome
  • The organization of adequate technical skills to maintain operational applications in optimum condition
  • Swift use of technical skills to speedily diagnose and resolve any technical failures that do occur.
IT Operations Management
Goal
  • There is work to ensure that a device, system or process is actually running or working (as opposed to strategy or planning). 
  • This is where plans are turned into actions. 
  • The focus is on daily or shorter-term activities, although it should be noted that these activities will generally be performed and repeated over a relatively long period (as opposed to one-off project type activities). These activities are executed by specialized technical staff, who often have to undergo technical training to learn how to perform each activity
  • There is a focus on building repeatable, consistent actions that – if repeated frequently enough at the right level of quality – will ensure the success of the operation
  • This is where the actual value of the organization is delivered and measured
  • There is a dependency on investment in equipment or human resources or both
  • The value generated, must exceed the cost of the investment and all other organizational overheads (such as management and marketing costs) if the business is to succeed.
Objective
  • Maintenance of the status quo to achieve stability of the organization’s day-to-day processes and activities
  • Regular scrutiny and improvements to achieve improved service at reduced costs, while maintaining stability
  • Swift application of operational skills to diagnose and resolve any IT operations failures that occur.
Service Desk
Goal
  • Improved customer service, perception and satisfaction
  • Increased accessibility through a single point of contact, communication and information
  • Better-quality and faster turnaround of customer or user requests
  • Improved teamwork and communication
  • Enhanced focus and a proactive approach to service provision
  • A reduced negative business impact
  • Better-managed infrastructure and control
  • Improved usage of IT Support resources and increased productivity of business personnel
  • More meaningful management information for decision support
Objective
  • Logging all relevant incident/service request details, allocating categorization and prioritization codes
  • Providing first-line investigation and diagnosis
  • Resolving those incidents/service requests they are able
  • Escalating incidents/service requests that they cannot resolve within agreed timescales
  • Keeping users informed of progress
  • Closing all resolved incidents, requests and other calls
  • Conducting customer/user satisfaction callbacks/ surveys as agreed
  • Communication with users – keeping them informed of incident progress, notifying them of impending changes or agreed outages, etc.
  • Updating the CMS under the direction and approval of Configuration Management if so agreed.
Technical Management
Goal
  • It is the custodian of technical knowledge and expertise related to managing the IT Infrastructure.
  • In this role, Technical Management ensures that the knowledge required to design, test, manage and improve IT services is identified, developed and refined.
  • It provides the actual resources to support the ITSM Lifecycle.
  • In this role Technical Management ensures that resources are effectively trained and deployed to design, build, transition, operate and improve the technology required to deliver and support IT services.
Objective
The objectives of Technical Management are to help plan, implement and maintain a stable technical infrastructure to support the organization’s business processes through:
  • Well designed and highly resilient, cost-effective technical topology
  • The use of adequate technical skills to maintain the technical infrastructure in optimum condition
  • Swift use of technical skills to speedily diagnose and resolve any technical failures that do occur.
Continual Service Improvement

CSI brief Overview
Continual Service Improvement (CSI) is not a new concept. Organizations have talked about it for many years but for most the concept has not moved beyond the discussion stage. For many organizations, CSI becomes a project when something has failed and severely impacted the business. When the issue is resolved the concept is promptly forgotten until the next major failure occurs. Once an organization has gone through the process of identifying what its services are, as well as developing and implementing the IT service management (ITSM) processes to enable those services, many believe that the hard work is done. That is wrong, the real work is only just beginning. How do organizations gain adoption of using the new processes? How do organizations measure, report and use the data to improve not only the new processes but to continually improve the services being provided?
 
This requires a conscious decision that CSI will be adopted with clearly defined goals, documented procedures, inputs, outputs and identified roles and responsibilities. To be successful CSI must be embedded within each organization’s culture.
 
The 7 Step Improvement Process
  1. Define what you should measure
  2. Define what you can measure
  3. Gathering the data
  4. Processing the data
  5. Analysing the data
  6. Presenting and using the information
  7. Implementing corrective action
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Author - Vijayakumar Reddy, CTO & Lead Trainer, A2A IMTCS Pvt. LTD.

© Copyright 2015 A2A - IMTCS. All rights reserved. www.iimtcs.in
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Copyright © AXELOS Limited 2011. Reproduced under license from AXELOS
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