Itsm Process Maps Whitepaper 6.08 Web
Itsm Process Maps Whitepaper 6.08 Web
Itsm Process Maps Whitepaper 6.08 Web
IT Service Management Process Maps: Select Your Route to ITIL Best Practices
JUNE 2008
Nancy Hinich
CA S E RV I C E S
Robert Sterbens
CA SO LU T I O N S M A R K E T I N G
Table of Contents
Executive Summary
SECTION 1: CHALLENGE
1 2
SECTION 4: CONCLUSIONS
16 16 17
SECTION 5: REFERENCES
Conflicting Directions Can Keep Service Excellence Out of Reach The Need to Move from What ITIL Describes to How It Can Be Achieved ITIL Elevated to Business Imperative Attention to People, Process and Technology for a Healthy ITIL Ecosystem
SECTION 2: OPPORTUNITY
15
Copyright 2008 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document As Is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised of such damages. ITIL is a Registered Trademark and a Registered Community Trademark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Executive Summary
Challenge
Even as more organizations embrace IT Service excellence as essential to effectively compete, many stumble in their efforts to change current practice. While expert guidance from the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) adds significant value, obstacles arise in interpreting and applying ITIL best practices and justifying the significant effort to the business. People circumvent processes when they dont understand their relevance or what is in it for them. Manual, repetitive procedures and workflows overburden IT resources and block pathways for change. To propel an organizations journey to service excellence, business and IT must come together, accept and use ITIL processes as the vehicle, and find and follow the optimal path.
Opportunity
Universally, the first step on the ITIL journey to service excellence is to ensure that stakeholders understand where we are now. Then, these same people must understand where we need to go and how we need to proceed. The answers and the pathways to start will likely be unique to each organization. A successful journey is navigated from a high-level, strategic view with consideration for people, process and technology the critical components of a flourishing ITIL ecosystem. An easy-to-understand visual framework for ITIL processes and relationships can ease complexity and derail unproductive detours that can disrupt service improvement initiatives.
Benefits
By planning the steps in the ITIL journey using well-defined process maps, engaging the right people and investing in the right technology, organizations are able to automate processes, reduce complexity and free staff to innovate. IT and the business become partners in this innovation, which leads to higher quality services that customers are demanding and that can set a business apart. CA process maps for ITIL version 3 (v3) expose the best routes and inter-dependencies across the five phases of the Service Lifecycle: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Service Improvement. CA and its solutions help change the perspective from another IT project to an ongoing IT service excellence program focused on driving business growth.
SECTION 1: CHALLENGE
Still, a chasm remains between what needs to be done, which ITIL describes, and the best route for a particular organization, which IT must determine. This gap, and the complexity of translating ITILs critical guidance to actionable change, presents a significant challenge that can derail initiatives to distinguish service quality. Attention to People, Process and Technology for a Healthy ITIL Ecosystem The points of derailment often center in one of three areas: people, process or technology. Thus, attention to each is essential for an ITIL ecosystem to flourish. People circumvent a process when they dont understand its relevance, which often happens when they dont have the information to understand what, why and how so-called best practices will change their organization and jobs for the better. Automation of repetitive procedures and workflows, which requires technology, is important both to engage people, so they can contribute at a more strategic level and to assure those processes improve services. This paper discusses how CA helps organizations simplify ITIL v3 implementations by reducing complexity and keeping them on track with CA ITSM process maps. These maps, which are CAs visual interpretation of ITIL v3, borrow from the concept of an urban subway system. As such, they provide an easy-to-navigate, high-level view of the ITIL terrain that IT executives, business managers and implementation experts alike can understand and follow. CAs comprehensive approach to ITIL v3 adoption encourages senior management to champion, train and understand performance measurements. The result is a faster, smoother journey with tremendous opportunities for business growth along the way.
SECTION 2: OPPORTUNITY
FIGURE A
To ensure continuous improvement across the service lifecycle, the processes for adopting ITIL v3 best practices should also align with the well-known cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Act, developed by W. Edwards Deming.
Continuous Improvement
D
2 3 1 4
P A
Quality Management 1. Plan 2. Do 3. Check 4. Act
Determine the Optimal Path A proven, successful path to ITSM best practices is one navigated from a high-level, strategic view with consideration for people, process and technology the key components of a flourishing ITIL ecosystem. Its critical that neither ITIL nor ITSM are seen strictly as IT initiatives. Rather, the newly integrated business/IT team needs to apply best practices to service delivery and service support, and to continuously improve services across their lifecycle. The service lifecycle is described in Table B. Universally, the first step on the ITIL journey to service excellence is to assure that stakeholders across the organization understand where we are now. Moving forward requires that these same people understand where we need to go and then how we need to proceed. These items will be unique to each organization. There are many different pathways based on pressing needs, current capabilities and the assessed maturity level of existing processes. These factors are helpful to determine the readiness of an organization to adopt an ITIL v3 approach to ITSM. And to gain momentum, organizations are encouraged to choose specific, well-documented pain points and apply ITIL best practices to move to the next level of maturity. In this way, organizations gain controls where they may not have had any and are able to achieve near-term results.
Maturity
FIGURE B
ITIL v3 extends ITSM processes across the five phases of the service lifecycle. Process activities, requirements, procedures, roles and responsibilities can be tailored to any organization.
Service Strategy
Design, develop and implement service management; this is the control center for policies and objectives. Design and develop the architecture, processes, policy and documents associated with strategic IT services, defined in phase 1; design goal is to meet current and future business requirements. Develop and improve capabilities to transition new and modified services to production. Effectively and efficiently provide and support services to ensure value for the customer and service provider.
Service Design
Service Transition
Continual Service Improvement Maintain and create new value for the customer through design improvement, new service introduction and operation.
Service Operation
A Visual Framework to Make Sense of Each Step and Interrelationship With complete visibility into existing processes using an easy-to-understand framework, organizations can ease complexity and prevent unproductive detours that can disrupt initiatives to improve service. This visual framework is a series of CA ITSM process maps. Modeled after the interrelated maps of an urban subway system, they illustrate every process (or track), each activity (or station) and the key relationships that are relevant to navigating continuous IT service improvement. The goal in any implementation is to avoid detours and delays en route to change. As such, the CA ITSM process maps are designed for stakeholders across the organization to navigate and follow as they would a subway map. They dont need to understand the entire system the density and complexity of the ITIL volumes. They simply need to get from point A to point B and stay on course to continuously improve rather than continuously revisit IT service management. This new paradigm for business operations IT/business integration with a shared focus on service excellence requires buy-in from the top down, as well as important roles for technology and education. Among the capabilities enabled by technology are: Portfolios of service catalogs Service level monitoring Financial stewardship and transparency
Service Strategy is the Control Center A subway system has a central point of management to coordinate many levels of tracks and stations. Likewise, the control center for processes, activities and key interfaces of an ITIL journey resides with the Service Strategy phase. Think of this as the circle line that forms the heart of the maps. The first phase of the service lifecycle, Service Strategy offers a significant competitive advantage. Before moving in any direction, business and IT decision makers join together to define what services will add the most value for customers. And, customer value equals business value. To reduce risk and optimize business/IT integration across the service lifecycle, strategic controls are needed along the way, as illustrated on the three points of the triangle centered in the Plan-Do-Check-Act quality circle (Figure C). They are: Service Portfolio Management Demand Management Financial Management These strategic controls help in evaluating, prioritizing and assuring the appropriate levels of financial and human resources for existing and new services. They compel strategic thinking: Do we have to realign projects and priorities to make this service a reality? Can we afford it? What is it worth to the business and to the customer? At the same time, these controls provide visibility into other strategic initiatives and the relationship to business value.
FIGURE C
Strategic controls at the Plan-DoCheck-Act intersections help reduce risk and optimize the IT/business relationship and integration.
O
D
CH
EC
AN
Demand Management
Financial Management
Traversing Critical Service Lifecycle Phases using the CA ITSM Process Maps Once defined based on business strategy, new services emerge after following the three phases of the service lifecycle, the process maps for Service Design, Service Transition and Service Operation. Using these maps, along with expertise and technology from CA, an organization can keep moving forward to service excellence. Each map clearly illustrates the process intersections and process activities along with quality and control mechanisms. Attention paid to those interrelationships and interdependencies pays back in greater efficiency and effectiveness. The role of incident management, for example, is to quickly restore service. But, unless the root-cause is identified (problem management) and a correction implemented and moved to operations (change management), organizations will continually revisit the same issues.
CT
PL
In the Service Design phase (Figure D), a service specification is produced for each new IT service, major change or IT service retirement. The process activities, junctions and checkpoints help an IT organization do the following: Associate a new service with a business requirement Determine whether it has or can trade off or invest in the availability, capacity and security to support the service Define and deliver the levels of service the business needs and is willing to fund
FIGURE D
The CA ITSM Process map for Service Design visualizes the journey to define all aspects of an IT service and its requirements through each lifecycle phase.
Service Design
Forecast Requirements
Model/Trend
CH
EC
K
Analyze Assess Risk Test Proactive Management Build Plan Determine Vulnerabilities
Capacity Management
Mitigate Risk
AN
Monitor Demand
Service Review
Report Achievements
CT
Demand Management
Optimize Availability
PL
Monitor Performance
Service Catalog Management Service Level Management IT Service Continuity Management Capacity Management Info. Security Management Availability Management Continual Service Improvement
Key Intersections
Strategic Controls
In the CA ITSM Process map for Service Transition (Figure E), the critical junction with configuration management is crossed. ITSM demands the active management of configuration items and relationships that are critical to business services. A configuration management database (CMDB) provides the business context for IT services, for example, to understand the impact of service change and to perform impact risk analysis.
FIGURE E
The CA ITSM Process map for Service Transition visualizes the journey to develop and improve capabilities as new or modified services are moved to production.
Service Transition
Schedule Change
Business
Planning
Responsiveness
Validate & Verify Impact Analysis
Status Reports
O
Preparation
CH
EC
Perform Tests
Verify
AN
Demand Management
RFC Analysis
Categorize
Coordinate Resources
Identify Configurations
PL
Change Management
Manage Build/Release
Assure Quality
CT
Prioritize
Configuration Control
Financial Management
Deploy
A
Service Validation and Testing Service Asset and Configuration Management Change Management Transition Planning and Support Release and Deployment Management Continual Service Improvement Key Intersections Strategic Controls Strategic Inputs Configuration Management System
The Service Operations phase of the lifecycle, as shown by the CA ITSM Process map for Service Operation (Figure F), is typically where organizations have begun the ITIL journey to simply address the complexities of keeping the lights on. Its role in the service lifecycle has far reaching impact, as its tracks are responsible for executing processes that optimize the cost and quality of services. In the next section, we will walk through a sample journey that starts with incident management to understand how the process map linkages work.
FIGURE F
The CA ITSM Process map for Service Operation visualizes the journey to improve day-to-day IT processes by providing essential service support to ensure continuous business operations.
Service Operation
Secure Service Access Prevent and Eliminate Problems
Monitor / Track
Incident Management
Raise Incident
Informed Decisions
Resolve
Request Fulfillment
Service Request (Incl. Self-Service) Error Control
Record
Event Management
CH
EC
K
Provide Rights
Verify
Record
Investigate
AN
Demand Management
Escalate
Problem Management
Access Management
Problem Control
Known Errors
Problem Management Incident Management Event Management Request Fulfillment Knowledge Management Access Management Continual Service Improvement
Key Intersections
Strategic Controls
CT
PL
Capture Info.
Work Around
Resolve/ Recover
Restore Service
Knowledge Management
The most commonly implemented ITIL process is incident management (Figure G), because its a direct line to what enterprises are experiencing and represents a critical output to the other supporting processes.
FIGURE G
The goal of incident management, as illustrated as the last stop on the track, is to restore service as quickly as possible. Along the route, there are stations (process activities) that should be in place to optimize this ITSM process, including event management and request fulfillment. These are now incorporated into v3 to address rapid restoration of services.
Service Operation
Secure Service Access Prevent and Eliminate Problems
Monitor / Track
Incident Management
Raise Incident
Informed Decisions
Resolve
Record
O
D
Provide Rights Executive utive Executive Pol cy lic Policy
CH
E EC
Verify
AN
Demand ma ge Management
Escalate
P bl Problem Management M t g
A A A
Known Errors
Problem Management Incident Management Event Management Request Fulfillment Knowledge Management Access Management Continual Service Improvement
Key Intersections
Strategic Controls
CT
P P PL
Capture Info.
Work Around
Resolve/ Recover
Restore Service
The P-D-C-A junctions the circle line serve as a means to gather or contribute inputs from other processes and process maps. For example, incident management crosses the ACT junction because actions are required to restore services to the agreed service level. Crossing the CHECK junction is visualized because incident management gauges the effectiveness of other processes. For example, incident management can never be fully optimized without effective change management (located on the service transition map) to prevent unauthorized changes from introducing more unplanned service disruptions. Down the line, most organizations will want to link incident management and problem management. Proceeding through the P-D-C-A cycle (Figure H) is a means to link process relationships to continual service improvement. Ultimately, finding the root cause of a problem and instituting a fix in the IT infrastructure results in the need for a change request.
ACT JUNCTION: THE INTERSECTION OF INCIDENT MANAGEMENT AND PROBLEM MANAGEMENT TRACKS
FIGURE H
A process focused on removing problems, the problem management track starts at the ACT junction.
Service Operation
Secure Service Access Prevent and Eliminate Problems
Monitor / Track
Incident Management
Raise Incident
Informed Decisions
Resolve
Record
Event E t Management M t g
O
D
Provide Rights Execu ive Executive Pol y Policy
CH
E EC
Verify
AN
Demand ma ge Management
Escalate
Problem Management
A A A
Known Errors
Problem Management Incident Management Event Management Request Fulfillment Knowledge Management Access Management Continual Service Improvement
Key Intersections
Strategic Controls
CT
PL
Capture Info.
Work Around
Resolve/ Recover
Restore Service
K Knowledge l d ge M t Management g
The junctions are also used to highlight the key intersection points for the Service Transition or Service Design process maps spanning the service lifecycle. An accepted change request is elevated to the Service Transition map from the Service Operation map (Figure I) via the CHECK Junction; then proceeds down the change management track (Figure J) and the change is deployed into production by the release management process.
FIGURE I NAVIGATING BETWEEN SERVICE OPERATION AND SERVICE TRANSITION PROCESS MAPS
A change request is created from the problem management track. The change request is elevated to the service transition track from the service operations via the Check junction and continues down the change management track.
FIGURE J
Service Transition
Schedule Change
Business
Planning
Responsiveness
Validate & Verify p Impact Analysis
O
Preparation
CH
C C EC
Perform m Tests
Verify
AN
m Demand Management g
RFC Analysis
Categorize
Coordinate Resources
Identify Configurations
Note how release management ends near the start of incident management a graphical depiction of the business reality that with every change release, there is a chance for more incidents. So the cycle begins again. Planned and implemented with the appropriate expertise and technology, its a cycle of continuously improving service performance.
PL PL
Change Management
Assure Quality
C C C CT
Prioritize
Financial an M g Management
Deploy
A
Service Validation and Testing Service Asset and Configuration Management Change Management Transition Planning and Support Release and Deployment Management Continual Service Improvement Key Intersections Strategic Controls Strategic Inputs Configuration Management System
SECTION 3: BENEFITS
SECTION 4
Conclusions
The goal of IT Service Management is to improve service by optimizing technology, controlling costs and maximizing the time and talent of an organizations most valuable resource its people. As such, ITIL provides an excellent vehicle for tackling the journey to service excellence. However, as a notoriously complex framework, ITIL provides the what not the how to or even where to start. For this, organizations need a partner with the competency and capabilities to accelerate the ITIL journey by unifying the three critical elements of a healthy ITIL ecosystem people, process and technology. CA does this with ITSM process maps, ITIL expertise and technology to integrate and automate ITIL processes. CAs Academy of Service Excellence offers basic and advanced training and tactical and strategic guidance to educate and unite entire organizations around ITIL principles and goals. The CA ITSM process maps come to life for executives who can sit in the control center for a simulation to see how communications across organizations, process structure and enabling technologies can affect schedules, costs and business growth.
SECTION 5
References
Forrester Research, February 14, 2007, Who Changed my Network?
SECTION 6
Nancy Hinich is a world-wide ITIL Solution Manager. She consults with senior management of customer organizations to quantify the opportunity for ITIL best practices and advises them on implementation programs for business service improvements. She has ten years of IT experience and holds a Managers Certificate in IT Service Management. Robert Sterbens is the Sr. Director of Solutions Marketing driving ITIL Service Management initiatives across CA. He is responsible for developing marketing strategies and business plans for ITIL. Robert is currently a member of the itSMF USA Advisory Board where he provides technology and thought leadership and is ITIL v3 Foundation Certified.
Robert Sterbens
CA Solutions Marketing
CA (NSD: CA), one of the worlds leading independent, enterprise management software companies, unifies and simplifies complex information technology (IT) management across the enterprise for greater business results. With our Enterprise IT Management vision, solutions and expertise, we help customers effectively govern, manage and secure IT.
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