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Post Planning April 17, 2007

Yeah…  I disappeared again for a while.  But at least I know a few folks are still watching.

I started looking at ITIL again, so I think I’m going to look at the “rest of” ITIL, beyond the stuff that I already posted before.  Working on the notes and mindmaps for that now.

That, and working out “life as an independent consultant” just seems to have gotten the better of me lately.  Sorry.


ITIL: Service Support & Service Delivery - the whole thing June 1, 2006


ITIL Overview

I’ve been posting sections of my notes as I’ve worked my way through various ITIL materials over the last few months, and those can be found here. I got caught up with various bits and pieces, as the distinct lack of posting around here may have indicated, but I did keep that work up. Rather than posting a series of hard to read JPG’s, and a series of posts, I thought I’d just go ahead and post the whole thing here, and let you have at it if you’re interested. The overview image on the right links directly to the MindManager MindMap - there’s too much detail in the map itself to make an image of it here viable. If you don’t have MindManager itself, there’s a viewer available for download.

If you want to talk more “ITIL Stuff”, feel free to contact me, either directly or in the comments here. The map I’m making available here isn’t the “final version” that I use myself - that has substantially more low-level information in the notes field of the various map entries, as well as commentary and such from my own experiences, as well as links out to appropriate parts of other methodologies. For the time being, partly for commercial advantage reasons, and partly to make sure that I don’t violate anyone else’s copyright, I won’t be making that version of the map directly available, but if I end up working with you on an ITIL matter, well, we’ll see.

As always, comments and questions on ITIL are welcomed, and if you take a copy of the map, and are so inclined, let me know what you think and how it works for you.


Still Relaxing March 30, 2006

Vacation is a good thing, and I’m still relaxing in the UK.  No substantive posts to come until next week, I’ve decided, but here’s what’s coming up when I get back to the States next week:

Good chance you’ll get to see some family photos in the next day or two as well - sorry about that ;)   One of the reasons I’m here in the UK is that Saturday is a party for my stepfather’s 60th birthday, and his and my mother’s 25th Wedding Anniversary.  Warning: Gary + Alcohol + Digital Camera + Internet Connection Ahead!

Gentle reader, I thank you for your time and attention, and I’ll see you next week!


ITIL: Incident Management March 9, 2006

So, the Service Desk has been setup. Now it’s time to give them some work to do :) First and primary aspect, is Incident Management (and it’s important to distinguish Incident Management from Problem Management - that comes next).

Essential Activities of the Incident Management Process & Function:

Incident Management provides the following Benefits to the Organization:

and has the following (potential) challenges:

Some Key Performance Indicators that could be used to monitor and manage the Incident Management function are:

Incident Management is one of those areas where “the rubber meets the road” - if you don’t have these processes nailed down, failures, both actual and perceived, can spiral outwards. Personnel assigned to Incident Management, within the Service Desk function, are very much the face of your support organization.

(the above is part of an ongoing series of notes I’m making as I review the ITIL processes I currently work to in my “day job”. Other notes can be found by browsing the ITIL category here).


ITIL: The Service Desk February 23, 2006

Having established a configuration management database, the next key tenet of ITIL is the Service Desk. The goal of which is to provide a single point of contact for customers and end-users, and an operational single point of contact for managing incidents to resolution.

Essential Activities of The Service Desk

A Service Desk provides the following benefits to an Organization:

But you must be aware of the following (potential) challenges:

Some possible Key Performance Indicators for measuring the Service Desk could be:

The Service Desk

(the above is part of an ongoing series of notes I’m making as I review the ITIL processes I currently work to in my “day job”.  Other notes can be found by browsing the ITIL category here).


ITIL: Configuration Management February 16, 2006

It’s been a while since I posted an ITIL map here, and I had a number of responses to it, both in the comments and via email. I am, as I mentioned, reviewing a variety of ITIL notes that I’ve accumulated and worked to and from, for a variety of reasons. I’ll post recaps here as I work through them (I’m not in “dedicated study mode”, this is something I’m doing as a part of my regular workday, and fitting around “real” work, and there’s no set schedule for this. If you’re interested in a particular piece of ITIL, let me know in the comments - no reason I have to work on these in any particular order!). Similarly, these are posted as high-level, refresher-type notes; I’m not going into a huge amount of detail - if you’re reading this and you’d like more information on specific items or elements, go right ahead and let me know in the comments, and we’ll go from there.

Configuration Management

Configuration Management is the starting point of the ITIL processes in that everything ultimately reports back into a CMDB - a Configuration Management Database. When you’re dealing with Asset Management, you’re tying the assets to the CMDB. When you’re doing Incident Management, that Incident is in relation to something that is recorded in the CMDB - in theory, anyway!

The goal of Configuration Management is to identify, record and report on all IT components that are under the control and scope of Configuration Management. In turn, Configuration Management provides the basis for Change Management, and Release Management.

Essential Activities for Configuration Management:


What is ITIL? December 12, 2005

Well, literally, it’s the “Information Technology Infrastructure Library”, but that’s not very helpful in and of itself, is it?

ITIL is a comprehensive collection of consistent and coherent best practices focused on the management of IT service processes. It’s intended to promote a quality approach to achieving business effectiveness and efficiency in the use of business systems. It has a subsection known as IT Service Management, which is concerned with delivering and supporting IT services that are appropriate to the business requirements of the organization.

It’s popular, it’s used worldwide, and it isn’t aimed specifically at large organizations - it works equally well for large, mid-size or smaller IT groups. It doesn’t tell you exactly what to do - it’s a set of best-practice guidelines that you customize as you implement them within your own organization, taking advantage of your local knowledge. You can use ITIL in part, or in whole, it’s up to you, and your individual requirements. ITIL originated in the United Kingdom, and the home page of the Office of Government Commerce, who “own” process definitions, can be found here.

There are a number of high-level sections to ITIL, and I spent a lot of time working within the IT Service Support and IT Service Delivery areas - the diagram below (created in MindManager) shows the top-level working areas addressed within these two sections. I’m expanding that MindMap currently, including definitions, goals, benefits, risks and KPI’s, as well as descriptive notes for each area, and I’ll publish specific sections of each of those over the next days & weeks. If you want a particular MindMap in full-form, just let me know in the comments.

ITSM

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Edit/Update: A later post of mine, which can be found here, has the “complete” mindmap I have done on ITIL Service Support & Service Delivery.  Help yourselves…