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.

Predecessors/Before You Begin

"Request fulfillment" is an ITIL v3 concept. In ITIL v2, it was considered part of Incident Management. However now the two are separate: incidents are for things that are breaking or about to break, and service requests are for new things.

Request fulfillment is tightly coupled to service catalog management--request fulfillment is when services are actually ordered from the service catalog.

Request Fulfillment

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:

Predecessors/Before You Begin

Demand management and capacity management are closely related. Demand management is about understanding (and shaping) user demands--looking at the market and knowing what people want. Capacity management is about knowing what IT can provide. Demand management is a service strategy process, because it's about understanding the market. Capacity is a service design process, because it's about designing a solution (ideally, one that matches the identified demand).

Demand management

Service Strategy is about identifying markets and how IT can meet those market needs within certain cost and risk parameters. Demand management supports the Service Strategy phase by understanding what the market (or markets) want, and potentially shaping that market.

Like many organizations, we have been trying to understand how project management and (service) change management interact. There are a few confusing components:

• Project management texts sometimes use the term "change management" when referring to "project scope change management" aka controlling the scope of a project.
• Projects need governance. Change management also facilitates governance decisions.
• Very early on, it can be hard to determine if something is a project or not.
• Projects have products or deliverables, and these deliverables often follow a change management process.

Predecessors/Before You Begin

"Service Portfolio Management" is not dissimilar from Project Portfolio Management or Program Management, project management terms. However, Service Portfolio Management manages the "new stuff" and existing services.

Service Portfolio Management

Service Portfolio Management is the ITIL Service Strategy process concerned with managing new, current, and retired services. The Service Portfolio Manager balances the three components of the service catalog: