ITIL adds value to the organization and is also known to be a guide for good practices in the IT area, right?
Within this sector, many people get confused by the presence of numerous acronyms that turn into an alphabet soup, which can make it difficult to understand the real value of various frameworks and good practice guides.
In fact, it is important that you know which frameworks are most used today. Basically, with ITIL, the company can adopt and adapt Service Management. And this application has a direct relationship with guiding principles.
Therefore, today’s text aims to help you have more knowledge about ITIL and Agile, as well as knowing how to relate the two subjects.
Guiding Principles
We know that guiding principles are not only useful in IT service environments that have adopted or intend to adopt ITIL best practices. They can be seen in other methodologies, models, and structures, such as Agile and DevOps.
For an organization to be successful, it needs to be able to adapt to new variables and circumstances, remaining functional and effective. This may include changes in products and services, as well as in its structure and practices.
IT management and IT itself are expected to be agile, after all, the Information Technology area is essential for all organizations.
Agility, for many IT professionals, refers to software development and is associated with the Agile Manifesto. In any case, we can say that Agile deals with a flexible, adaptable, and timed approach to IT work, which allows for a quick response to changes.
Agile Development
In summary, Agile development includes:
- Requirements in constant evolution, collected through feedback analysis and direct observation;
- Division of development work into small increments and iterations;
- Establishment of product-based multifunctional teams;
- Visual presentation (Kanban) and regular discussion about progress (daily quick meetings);
- Presentation of functioning software, at least what is called the “minimum viable” for stakeholders, at the end of each iteration.
When successfully applied, agile software development allows for quick responses to evolving service consumer needs. However, in many organizations, Agile development has not provided the expected benefits, as often there was a lack of agile methods in other service life cycle phases.
Thus, the idea is to adopt a holistic approach to the service value chain to ensure that the service provider is agile throughout the service life cycle.
Agile
Agility should become a quality of all service management dimensions and all service value chain activities. Applied in a fragmented way, agile methods can become costly and “complicated.” For agile ways of working to be effective and produce regular deliveries, certain basic organizational capabilities must be established.
The focus on Agile alone tends to offer more resources and corrections, however with less focus on service improvement. This, of course, due to its nature, can lead to the risk of instability in production services.
Therefore, executing Agile without the ITIL model can result in higher costs over time, less accurate time estimates, and lower quality of service delivery. In other words, Agile needs ITIL.
Moreover, with ITIL in place, agile teams can work more efficiently, allowing for faster and more stable deployment in production environments. The cost of continuous service provision tends to be reduced, as does better coordination between agile projects and other areas of service or business that still carry out traditional projects.
Common Success Factors for Agile Practices
Be that as it may, digital transformation has changed the way the service provider works and what it produces as a service.
Thus, in more recent times, various practices have been developed to adapt to the needs of each organization. Each existing organizational model serves the organization in a different way, so it is necessary to identify the gaps in the company to choose the best practice.
Before that, keep in mind that any management practice adopted by an organization is an organizational change. There are certain success factors, even though each practice operates in a different way. The success factors when adopting progressive practices (Lean, Agile, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Testing, among others) are:
- Maintaining new organizational changes without old ways of working getting in the way;
- Commitment, sponsorship, and reinforcement from higher hierarchical levels;
- Change in the organization’s culture;
- Change in the structural part, reorganization of teams and organization’s skills;
- Support tools and automation, always being aware that technology alone cannot change behavior;
- Work based on trust and collaboration from everyone, accepting that certain failures may occur along the way.
Keep in mind that change takes time and that practice will not correct all organizational problems immediately. Read other blog posts to stay up to date.
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