-- DanielZrymiak - 08 Apr 2020

ITIL 4 Foundation Knowledge For Testers

OVERVIEW

This page was created to provide a high level summary of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Libraries) terms and standards that may be encountered while immersed in client operations. The source is the ITIL v4 Foundation knowledge, which I encourage everyone to pursue at your convenience.

Dimensions of Service Management

These are the dimensions by which Service Management is controlled within an organization.

1.ORGANIZATIONS AND PEOPLE

• 1. Formal org. structures, culture, required staffing for competencies, roles and responsibilities

2.INFORMATION & TECHNOLOGY

• 1. Information and knowledge, Technologies, Relationships
• 2. Information Criteria: availability, reliability, accessibility, timeliness, accuracy, relevance
• 3. Organizational culture and the nature of the organization’s business

3.PARTNERS & SUPPLIERS

• 1. Define the activities, workflows, controls, and procedures needed to achieve the agreed objectives
• 2. Partnerships with collaborations and common goals

4.VALUE STREAMS AND PROCESSES

• 1. Define the activities,
• 2. Value stream optimization, process automation, adoption of emerging technologies
• 3. Delivery model, agreed outputs, who or what performs the required service actions?

Guiding Principles

Recommendations that guide organizations in all circumstances, allowing organizations to integrate the use of multiple methods into an overall approach to service management.

1.FOCUS ON VALUE

• 1. Everything the organization does should link back to value itself.

2.START WHERE YOU ARE

• 1. First consider what is available to be leveraged. Reuse what you are able from the current state.
• 2. Get accurate and objective information, supported by measurement.

3.PROGRESS ITERATIVELY WITH FEEDBACK

• 1. Working in a time-boxed, iterative manner with feedback loops for flexibility and faster responses.
• 2. Discover and respond to failure earlier, for overall improvements to quality.
• 3. Organize work into smaller, manageable, and sequential actions.

4.COLLABORATE AND PROMOTE VISIBILITY

• 1. Involve the right people in the correct roles
• 2. Gain better buy-in and more relevance.

5. THINK AND WORK HOLISTICALLY

• 1. Holistic approach requires an understanding of how all the parts of an organization work together in an integrated way.
• 2. Look for collaborations and interactions.

6. KEEP IT SIMPLE AND PRACTICAL

• 1. Outcome-based thinking should produce practical solutions and valuable outcomes.
• 2. Use the minimum number of steps needed.
• 3. Ensure value, simplicity, do fewer things better, respect the time of people involved.

7. OPTIMIZE AND AUTOMATE

• 1. Optimization: Make something as effective and useful as makes sense. Optimize prior to automation.
• 2. Automation: The use of technology to perform steps correctly and consistently.
• 3. Automating frequent and repetitive tasks helps organization scale up and frees human resources for complex-decision making.

Service Value Chains

PLAN: Ensure a shared understanding of the vision, current status and improvement direction for all four dimensions and all the products and services across the organizations

IMPROVE: Ensure continual improvement of products, services, and practices across all value chain activities and the four dimensions of service management.

ENGAGE: Provide a good understanding of stakeholder needs, continual engagement with all stakeholders, transparency and good relationships with all stakeholders.

DESIGN AND TRANSITION: Ensure that products and services continually meet stakeholder expectations for quality, costs, and time to market.

OBTAIN/BUILD: Ensure that service components are available when and where they are needed, and meet agreed specifications.

DELIVER AND SUPPORT: Ensure that services are delivered and supported according to agreed specifications and the stakeholders’ expectations.

Continual Improvement Questions

WHAT IS THE VISION?

Business vision, mission, goals and objectives.

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Perform baseline assessments

WHERE DO WE WANT TO BE?

Define measurable targets

HOW DO WE GET THERE?

Define the improvement plan

TAKE ACTION

Execute improvement actions

DID WE GET THERE?

Evaluate metrics and KPIs

HOW DO WE KEEP THE MOMENTUM GOING?

Return to WHAT IS THE VISION?

ITIL PRACTICES

Change Control

PURPOSE

Maximize the number of successful IT changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed authorizing changes to proceed, and managing the change schedule.

Change: The addition, modification, or removal of anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on IT services.

KEY ACTIVITIES

• STANDARD: Pre-authorized, implement without additional authorization

• NORMAL: Authorization based on change type, low-risk to very major.

• EMERGENCY: Expedited assessment and authority; may be a separate change authority.

• Change authority is a person or group who authorizes a change.

• Common practice is to decentralize change approvals to peer reviews.

• Change schedule is to help plan changes, assist in communications, avoid conflicts, and assign resources

Incident Management

PURPOSE

Minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operations as quickly as possible.

Incidents should be logged, managed to agreed target resolution times, and prioritized.

Incident: Unplanned interruption to a service, or reduction in the quality of a service.

KEY ACTIVITIES

• Design incident management for different types of incidents.

• Prioritize incidents based on agreed classification to resolve high impact incidents.

• Use a robust tool to log and manage incidents, linked to configuration items, changes, problems, known errors, and other knowledge.

• Provide incident matching to other incidents, problems, or known errors.

• Incidents may be escalated to support teams, based on the incident category.

• Swarming and collaboration facilitates information sharing and learning, and solving incidents more efficiently and effectively.

Problem Management

PURPOSE

Reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents, and managing workarounds and known errors.

Problem: A cause or potential cause of one or more incidents.

Known Error: A problem that has been analyzed and has not been resolved.

Workaround: A solution that reduces or eliminates the impact of an incident or problem for which a full resolution is not yet available. Workarounds are documented in problem records.

KEY ACTIVITIES

• Problem Identification

• Problem Control

• Error Control

• Problem Mgmt. interacts with Incident, Risk, Change Control, Knowledge Mgmt., and Continual Improvement

Other ITIL Practices

IT Asset Management:

PURPOSE

Plan and manage the full lifecycle of all IT assets. Help the organization maximize value, control costs, manage risks, support decision making about asset purchase, reuse, and retirement, and meet regulatory and contractual requirements.

• IT Asset: A valuable component that can contribute to the deliver of an IT product or service.

Monitoring and Event Management:

PURPOSE

Systematically observe a service or service component, and record and report selected changes of state identified as events.

Identifies and prioritizes infrastructure, services, business processes, and information security events. It establishes the appropriate response to those events, including conditions leading to potential faults or incidents.

• Event: Change of state that has significance for the management of a Configuration Item (CI) or IT Services.

Release Management:

PURPOSE

Make new and changed services and features available for use. (i.e. traditional or waterfall, Agile, DevOps workflows)

Service Configuration Management: PURPOSE

Ensure that accurate and reliable information about the configuration of services and the CIs that support them, is available when and where needed.

• Configuration Item (CI): Any component that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT Service.

Deployment Management:

PURPOSE

Move new or changed hardware, software, documentation, processes, or any other components to live environments.

May be involved in deploying components to other environments for testing or staging.