Agile IT Service Management

“Why agile?”
“Why IT Service Management?”
“Why Agile IT Service Management?”
 
Have you asked the above questions to your colleagues? Don’t be surprised! Each one will have their own version.

The aim of this blog is to give you an overview of agile, overview of IT service management (ITSM) and how these two can be combined to react to the rapidly changing needs of your customers. This blog also gives links to useful agile resources and IT service management resources.

Agile

It is a way of working fast to deliver software products quick to an uncertain market. It is an umbrella term that represents various frameworks / methodologies like scrum, extreme programming (XP), Feature driven development (FDD) etc., that helps you to be agile.

These frameworks follow the 4 values and 12 principles listed in the agile manifesto. The agile manifesto was originally published in 2001 (18 years back!) which can be found in https://agilemanifesto.org/.

One of the famous, widely used and proven agile frameworks is ‘Scrum’. The scrum guide can be found in https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html.

Have a look at the tool JIRA https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira OR a similar free and open source tool Redmine https://www.redmine.org/ for agile project management.

IT Service Management

ITSM is defined as below by one of the ITSM best practice frameworks called ‘Information Technology Infrastructure Library’ (ITIL).
 
“The implementation and management of quality IT services that meet the needs of the business. IT service management is performed by IT service providers through an appropriate mix of people, process and information technology. See also service management.” Where service management is defined as: “A set of specialized organizational capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services.”
 
ITSM has 5 lifecycle stages such as Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continuous Service Improvement. Each stage has a number of processes associated with it. ITIL standard explains the best practice steps to be followed on each of those processes. More details on these stages, processes and steps within the processes can be found in https://wiki.en.it-processmaps.com/index.php/Main_Page.

Have a look at the tool Remedy https://www.bmcsoftware.uk/it-solutions/it-service-management.html OR ServiceNow https://www.servicenow.com/ OR a similar free and open source tool iTop Hub https://www.itophub.io/ for IT Service Management implementation.

Agile IT Service Management

IT Service Management (ITSM) is changing due to digital transformation! Being digital first, customer centric, data driven and innovative are essential focus areas for the success of your digital transformation programmes. Its very important for you to be agile in all of the above focus areas to truly adapt a digital culture. Customers want everything fast at every touch point of their digital journey with your business. Your employees want features fast to easily provide an experience that your customers expect.
 
You can be agile in all of 5 lifecycle stages of ITSM by following the agile values, principles and methodologies. The picture in this blog shows how you can apply scrum methodology to be agile in 3 steps of release management process, which comes under the service transition stage of ITSM. These steps are Plan, Build and Test.

How to implement Agile Service Management using scrum with the focus on plan, build and test phases?

1. Spend enough time to shape any idea to do a proper impact assessment.
2. Produce project plan. (Agile means fast. Agile doesn’t mean ‘no plan’. So you still have to have a plan).
3. Stack all requirements (user stories) and their linked tasks (e.g., test data preparation) into a product backlog.
4. Ensure the requirements at the top of the backlog are well refined and ready to be built and tested without any impediments.
5. Set a goal for a short period (usually 2 weeks), which is a sprint.
6. Produce a plan for the sprint by sizing tasks and stories.
7. Develop and test the items planned for the sprint.
8. Run daily stand ups to communicate sprint progress and to highlight impediments that need to be unblocked.
9. Refine product backlog to make stories ready for following sprints.
10. Show and tell to customers so they can review and provide feedback.
11. Conduct retrospective sessions to identify good and bad about the sprint and improvement ideas for the following sprints.
12. Park the release and move to the next sprint if the product is not shippable.
13. Deploy the release and move to the next sprint if the product is shippable.

As mentioned above, the purpose of Agile IT service Management is to be quick to react to changing needs of customers. Understand this.

1. To be proactive in IT Service Management, it is imperative to apply predictive analytics in IT service management.

2. To be agile in service operations (e.g. incident management process), you can apply scrum.

We will soon come up with blogs on the above topics.