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!" :-)

Lately I have been thinking about topic of how best practice frameworks fit together. Whether you follow the PMBOK, ITIL CMMI, COBIT, and the list goes on, a good chance exists that you will find times when the schools of thought overlap as well as contradict one another. It is fair to say that all models inevitably have both evangelists and critics, but it is my belief that all the proclaimed “best practice” models have at least some good takeaways. So, to dismiss any one model altogether is a bit close-minded.

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.

Information technology service management is the practice of managing an IT infrastructure by employing a service-oriented perspective. A best practice framework known as ITIL offers guidelines on how to manage an IT portfolio by viewing it as a collection of services that provide value to customers. ITIL orients its guidance around the lifecycle of a service beginning with conceiving a strategy, followed by designing the service, and subsequently transitioning the service into an operational mode.

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.