Sooner or later a Continual Service Improvement Program is going to have to deal with ITSM tools. Many organizations forget the "Four P's" of people, processes, products, and partners and go straight for the product: the tool that will support your IT Service Management. "Let's buy ITIL!" :-)

Have you heard the "ITIL" buzz word and want to know more? Are you interested in ITIL and how it could benefit your organization? If you answered "yes" to any of the above questions ... then today is your lucky day! You are invited to participate in one of the upcoming ITIL v3 Foundations courses that Wake Forest University will offer:

• July 14-16, 2009
• October 27-29, 2009
• February 2-4, 2010

Please go to the class description page for more information and to register.

Our change management procedure was created out of audit concerns. We wanted to ensure that changes to productions were properly approved and documented. Many Universities adopt change management for the same reason--to satisfy audit requirements.

I've been looking into the ITIL intermediate certificates. If you look at the one of the "Professional Qualifications" PDFs from the ITIL official site's ITIL v3 Qualification Scheme page, and skip down to "Format of the Examination," you will see for the exam format:

Eight (8) multiple choice, scenario-based, gradient scored questions.

Demand management is the process for understanding what customers want, how much they want, when they want it, and how to influence that demand. For example, demand management is responsible for identifying that the University has a high volume of requests when the fall semester begins.

Some organizations have great IT Service Continuity plans--e-commerce companies like eBay, hospital IT shops, and the military, for example. Others don't have such great continuity plans, and only prepare plans as a response to recent events e.g. Hurricane Katrina.

I have been learning more about the Project Management Institute's Project Management Professional (PMP) certificate. It's interesting to see the overlap between ITIL certification and PMP certification.

In content, the PMP and ITIL foundations are very different. The two have different meanings for change control and configuration control. Perhaps the best tie-in is to think about ITIL's "services" as the products of a project.

As I mentioned last fall, we manage our continual service improvement program quarter by quarter: each quarter we select certain critical projects, and then as we have time we "pick up" other work and add it to our list.

Separate but related to this concept of quarterly improvement "releases," we have also created a "semi-annual governing document review." Twice a year we get several relevant staff members together to review our "governing documents"--our policies, standards, and procedures. We don't make major changes, but we make sure that everything makes sense together, uses the latest template, etc.

People talking about "Lean" principles can mislead their audience, because often "Lean" to the speaker means something very different (e.g. that "Lean" means holding kaizen improvement sessions, and that's it). So, take what I'm going to say with a bit of salt, because I have no Lean credentials.

In reading about Lean manufacturing (through "Lean Thinking," "Getting the Right Things Done," and now "Learning to See"), I have been working through how Lean concepts might apply to an Information Technology environment. One of Lean manufacturing's focuses is to create pull-based processes that minimize inventory on-hand, for example. By minimizing inventory you free up cash for new things and can respond more quickly to changing demand.

So--how does this relate to IT? Inventory, in a value-stream mapping, is the stuff waiting between groups. The two ITIL processes that seem to relate the best to the inventory concept are incident management and request fulfillment. Here's my thoughts: