AGILE ITSM: THE ESSENTIALS – ITIL 4 AND AGILE RELATIONSHIP

This is the third post in the series on Agile ITSM. You can find the first two posts at the links below:

• AGILE ITSM: THE ESSENTIALS - INTRODUCTION
• AGILE ITSM: THE ESSENTIALS –AGILE FUNDAMENTALS

Now let's get started with today's discussion on the relationship between Agile and ITSM which may cause some controversy with some Agile and ITIL purists.

Is Agile Anarchy or Angelic?

If you are familiar with ITIL, but not Agile it is possible you wonder how it can fit within what seems like what ITIL presents as such a rigid framework. Well, this is mostly due to a very misunderstood way of viewing ITIL in the first place in my opinion, but secondly from the way it was presented to many as well. However, since the new version of ITIL was released, this hopefully will change.

Although on the surface, anyone adhering to an ITILv3 framework may have viewed Agile methods as pure anarchy, this was not true, it was just a lack of imagination and true focus on the part of the service organization.

I mean really. How can a service organization not believe it shouldn’t have ever been focusing on delivering value?

But, ITILv4 has made this much more apparent and the conducive relationship between the two frameworks much more apparent as well and shows that the two can work together well.

The ITILv4 and Agile Way of Incident and Change Management (Enablement)

With ITILv4 they made this relationship much more apparent between the Agile guiding principles and ITIL change management process by renaming Change Management to Change Enablement and redefining it better.

This redefinition just ensures that the focus remains on preventing delays and opening up more ways to work as a team such as in scrum teams and swarming.

Additionally, Incident Management also opens to the concept of using workarounds and swarming as Agile methods building directly into the new ITILv4 processes. Not that these agile methods shouldn’t have already been practiced in v3, but I digress.

I’ll get into Incident Management with Agile ITSM more in a later post.

Conclusion

That’s it for now, my next post will be on Making ITSM Agile Tips. Let me know what you think?

Feel free to share some thoughts on the topic and what you might expect to see as we move forward in future posts in the comments section. I love to hear from and engage with you.

Joe "Rhino" Brochin is launching ITSM RHINO in the coming months, it is the pull-no-punches, casual-but-effective resource for renegade IT Pros who want to manage risk and add value through ITSM processes & IT Policy.
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