University ITSM

No formal guidance exists, to my knowledge, describing how to marry project management, software development, and ITIL together. Yet these three areas almost always exist, and overlap, in an IT organization.

Previously I've written about project management and change management, but here I'm talking about more generally how you could fit the PMBOK, CMMI and/or Agile development, and ITIL together.

Here is my advice:

• Acknowledge you must interpret the guidance
• Use project management to handle large units of work. This could be a Financial Management process implementation, for example, or the deployment of a big new service.
• Use ITIL to assist in gathering requirements and to define activities to take place. For example, code being developed should be developed according to the availability requirements in the appropriate service level agreement. If the service is always supposed to respond within 1 second, then you must code differently than if the service can hang for 30 seconds.
• Use software development lifecycle (SDLC) tools like Agile development (e.g. Extreme Programming, Scrum), and CMMI, to carry out the development once project management and ITIL have helped define the requirements.
• Use project milestones for development iterations and to ensure that ITIL processes are notified of the status of development.

Here's an example. Let me know, if you disagree, what your recommendation would be!

Example of PMBOK+Agile+ITIL

1. User submits a change request through (ITIL) change management for a new "vending machine survey" service, to survey users about what items they would like in campus vending machines
2. (ITIL) change management identifies this would be a lot of work and according to department procedure sends this request to the Project Management Office
3. PMO uses (ITIL) Financial Management, Service Portfolio, Demand Management to assist in (PMBOK) Project Selection Methods and decides to go forward with the project
4. PMO developes a (PMBOK) project charter, gets the charter approved
5. Project management team works with Service Design folks e.g. (ITIL) Capacity Management, (ITIL) Availability Management, (ITIL) Service Level Management to assist in developing project scope statement. Arguably these service level requirements are "progressively elaborated" along with each iteration of the software development lifecycle.
6. Project management team works with application development and (ITIL) application management to develop project management plan. Project management plan confirms the development methodology/ies to be used
7. Developers code "vending machine survey" service according to SDLC. Project management plan has taken into account that there will be five iterations. (ITIL) Release management used to ensure that baselines are taken and tested as iterations progress.
8. Developers complete "vending machine survey" service. (ITIL) change management used to put the new service into production.
9. (PMBOK) project ensures final sign-offs and closes project.