Many people make a huge mistake thinking that ITIL, being a process framework, cannot work with agile practices. What a huge mistake! They are not exclusive, but on the contrary, they make a perfect match! Therefore, I invite everyone to learn how uniting Agile and ITIL 4 can be an advantage.
We know that services encompass processes and people, as well as the technology that enables the delivery of such services.
For those who know ITIL 4, it is known that these services need management. It is important to recognize that designing services is different from designing products. The processes are different!
To offer a consistent and continuous improvement experience to the customer, it is important to consider all aspects of the service, not just the delivery of a product, but also how it is implemented and supported.
And this applies to any client, whether they are public, private, large, medium, small, etc.
Our mission as members of IT is to help them change their own service delivery and provide a more consistent user experience.
Not to mention that today, additionally, we need to move their business systems to the cloud. The benefits are enormous, and I can list the main ones: facilitate people’s interactions, reduce costs, improve the efficiency of these interactions, and much more!
Agile Practices
Remember! Our initial focus is on product delivery and creating a user experience based on their requirements. And to understand this in detail, my proposal is to create a service project plan.
This plan should show, for example, how someone will enter a request for any system; and how it is treated by the service, from submission to approval. Next, we will use this service design to ensure that our technology supports service delivery and facilitates continuous improvement.
And now agile practices come in!
Imagine that your company already has an agile approach, running four-week sprints and grouping mini-projects that end up passing to the Scrum Master.
Let’s assume we’re talking about Scrum, which is already widely recognized and proven to be a very effective way of working and tracking success and resource usage.
In addition, of course, to identify any issues and problems in processes through retrospective meetings to ensure continuous improvement.
This is an iterative approach to product development. That is, do something, validate, and regularly check if the right thing is being developed.
This means that any problems – should they arise – can be easily reversed. We validate what we are doing by the “show and tells” method with the customer and user, testing and continuously improving the user experience.
Agile and IT Service Management (ITSM)
So where does IT service management fit alongside our agile product development?
There is always a lot going on, and we are getting to the point where products are being more widely adopted due to the increased number of customers.
That’s where service management helps. For example, using some ITIL approaches, such as product portfolio management and service catalog.
Many companies unfortunately still do not have such processes in place. So there is a great opportunity! By the way, it is still very common to find companies with few processes in place, except for the standard ones, such as Incident, Problem, and Change Management.
But I can guarantee that the union of Agile with ITIL will stimulate the creation of new processes such as portfolio management, capacity management, release management, risk management, among others.
And you know why? Because these same companies still think that ITIL only serves Infrastructure and IT Operations. Not to mention that project management practices (agile or not) are only conducted in the Systems Development areas.
Our businesses are always changing and there is always room for improvements, innovations, and simplification! With ITIL-supported IT service management, there is more structure around development processes and – especially with the adoption of “Agile” and “DevOps” – it allows for space and autonomy of people to function with a consistent basis.
The ITIL 4 Update
ITIL 4 is proof of this union. We are talking about Cloud, DevOps, Scrum, Lean, etc. The new version of ITIL is a great opportunity to understand how ITIL can be useful and how it can be applied to our way of work.
An important detail: we want to use best practices and not reinvent the wheel! We need to ensure that we have the necessary structure to deliver a better service to our customers. And ITIL has a long history of success at all levels of the company.
The new version of ITIL is evolving and changing according to the new and different ways that software services are being delivered. It is taking into account this whole range of approaches, from DevOps to Agile. And if you still don’t know “how” to make this union, ITIL 4 will help!
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