Cribsheet for processes and functions according to ITIL:(btw, it should be clearly obvious from this list that processes are a cluster of activities to achieve a goal. A process takes one or more defined inputs and turns them into defined outputs. Processes define actions, dependencies and sequence.
A distinctive feature of any process is measurability, which is performance-driven. Responsiveness to specfic triggers allows a process to routed to a specfic trigger. A function is a team of people (and the tools used by the same) supposed to carry out a process or activity.
Functions
Service Strategy
-Strategy management for IT Services - assess the service provider’s offerings, capabilities, competitors as well as current and potential market spaces in order to develop a strategy to serve customers and ensure the implementation of the strategy adopted.
-Service Portfolio management - manages service portfolio, ensuring that it has the right mix of services to meet business outcomes at reasonable levels of investment.
-Demand management - seeks to understand, anticipate and influence customer demands for services aligned with capacity management to ensure the demand can be met.
-Financial Management - budget and accounts.
-Business relationship management - it's about being friendly toward customer
Service Design
-Design coordination - coordination of everything in service design.
-Service level management - discuss Service Level AGreement with customer.
-Availability management - define, analyze, plan, measure and improve (sounds awfully similar to DMAIC) all aspects of the availability of IT services, ensuring that all IT infrastructure, processes, tools, roles etc are appropriate for the agreed availability targets. Basically a gear check to make
sure you're ready for battle.
-Capacity management - just make sure you can follow the SLA within time and financial limits.
-Supplier management - ensure that all contracts with suppliers support the needs of the business, and that all suppliers meet their contractual commitments. Trust but verify.
-Information security management - confidentiality, integrity and availability of iunformation, data and it services.
-Service catalog management - Service Catalogue should be produced and maintained, containing accurate information on all operational services and those being prepared to be run operationally.
-IT service continuity management - plan for disasters. You have to think of the worst possible scenario. Next, you ensure the business customer that IT services will ALWAYS be available at
minimum agreed levels. Meanwhile, you should plan for the recovery of IT services when disaster strikes.
Service Transition
-Change management - the hallmark of Service Transition. Ensure that changes have minimum disruption to running IT services.
-Release and deployment management - manage releases in both test and live environments. Fiddle with it all you want while in the sandboxed confines of the test environment. Just make sure you don't screw up the live environment, aka where IT services are already up and running.
-Knowledge management - spread of knowledge
-Transition planning and support - process with noticeable overlaps with Project Management as a discipline, aims to plan and cordinate the deployment of a major release. As with Capacity management, it should be conducted within agreed financial, time and quality standards.
-Change Evaluation - assess the plausibility of major changes.
-Service validation and testing - will the deployed release really meet customer needs? Can IT operations support the new service?
-Service asset and configuration management - another stepping stone in the history of IT service management. Enter Configuration Management System (CMS) and Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Configuration Items get logged in databases.
Service Operations
-Incident management - any disruption to IT services should be dealt with to restore IT operations as quickly as possible
-Problem management - the unknown source of one or more incidents.
-Event management - the ongoing monitoring of CIs and IT services and use of filters to decide where to ask for appropriate actions.
-Request fulfillment management - requests are low impact but much more frequent than incidents. Examples include adding new hardware or software programs to a host machine in order to facilitate the use of an application of a business-related activity. Just handle these requests accordingly and nothing can go wrong.
-Access management - manages the right level of access to the right user to make use of the right resource.
Continual Service Improvement
-7 Step Improvement Process - not quite a process, but a guideline to pinpointing shortcomings in services and processes and come up with solutions. It's made up of:
- What should you measure? - the 'vision' (strategic and/or operational) will feed into this step
- What can be measured? - what can IT and the business actively measure that will be of benefit to the organization
- Gather Data (measure) - gather the data based on the metrics defined in the previous step
- Process Data - figure out the collected data
- Analyze Data - trends, discrepancies and subsequent explanations thereof are prepared for discussion with customers.
- Present and use information - the business/stakeholders are informed as to whether the goals have been achieved or not.
- Implement Corrective Action - document improvements, add to the Service Improvement Program (SIP), create a new baseline and start the 7 steps again.
Functions
- Service Desk - the go-to resource for the end-user. The first point of contact with the customer of the IT services.
- Technical Management - provides detailed technical skills and resources needed to support the ongoing operation of the IT Infrastructure. Technical Management also plays an important role in the design, testing, release and improvement of IT services. In small organizations, it is possible to manage this expertise in a single department, but larger organizations aretypically split into a number of technically specialized departments (2011, ITIL p 194)Application Management - manages applications besides also being responsible for testing, designing and improving of applications part of the IT services.
- Operations Management - monitor and control IT services and IT infrastrcuture. A key difference between Operations Management and Event Management is that Operations Management is made up of people responsible for performing the organization’s day-to-day operational activities (2011, ITIL p 229) while Event Management often relies on automated routines to check whether CIs' performance does not drop below agreed quality standards.
- IT Operations control - responsible for executing routine checks on It services and the underlying infrastrcuture. I'm at loss to elicit the difference between operations management and IT operations control. Maybe they're one and the same?
- Facility management - Management of the infrastrcuture housing the It services. This function also extends to power and cooling, building access management and environment monitoring.
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