Friday. 6.20 pm. The weekend has finally come! It has been a hectic week. It is always like this in IT by the way… Too many implementations, masses of urgent tasks. Each Department in the Company seems to be competing for a privileged spot in your agenda… More than an IT manager you appear like a juggler and it really is a relief to put the balls away for the weekend.
You have just left your office and are walking along the street, time to travel back home. Ring, ring (your cellular phone clamors for attention). You glance at the display and your perfect weekend is suddenly jeopardized. The caller ID displays "Jack Smithers" (ouch, the Sales VP!).
You: - Hi Jack, how…. (interrumption)
Jack: -@X¥?????!!!!!!!! Our latest sales promotion just launched and the telephones are going crazy and that all singing and dancing application you put in last month isn't working! WHAT-DID-YOU-DO???
You: Well… Errrr… let me check… (again interrupted)
Jack: There are hundreds of sales still waiting to be loaded into the system and it's not working! It's down! Can you explain to me what did you do? We called the Service Desk and they say they are implementing a new patch… Is it possible? Are you kidding? Don't you understand that on Fridays we generally finish the data entry about 8.30 pm? I am sick and tired of explaining that! When will you learn? And be sure of this… I'll bring up this point at the next Steering Committee meeting (click!!!! - Call ended).
Does this state of affairs sound familiar? Unfortunately for a large amount of firms it does.
What can ITIL v3 do for you?
ITIL v3 is a framework of good practices to manage IT operations and services, explicitly aimed to help aligning IT with Business. In other words, alignment means that when every person in the company (from the CEO to all of the key areas) is duly involved in the implementation process, there is no place for undesired surprises.
ITIL v3 contains an array of procedures and functions to assist your IT team to improve the IT service delivery. Keep in mind, this collection of processes and functions became gradually over time generally accepted by the industry as the chief standard reference for superior IT Service Management practice.
Let us look at this illustration in ITIL V3 where two specific processes that can directly help resolve this sort of issue: ITIL Release Management and ITIL Configuration Management.
ITIL Release Management
The main objective of ITIL Release Management is to plan, educate users and apply changes smoothly so as to eradicate (or at least minimize) unpredicted impact on the production services and operations. From an IT standpoint, it helps you easily roll out changes to your IT without any disruptions.
Some actions recommended by ITIL Release Management are:
" The change to be deployed should be deeply tested in a sandbox (with similar conditions to the production environment);
" Maintain a Release strategy with information about what to deploy, how to deploy and specifications in which it will work.
" Record baseline configuration value before the change is applied.
" Confirm and analyze if the changes requested are met, etc.
ITIL Configuration Management
The objective of ITIL Configuration Management is to maintain the approved IT service provision by defining and controlling the components of services and infrastructure and keeping accurate configuration records. This process firmly recommends establishing a CMDB (Configuration Management Database) so as to put together and maintain an asset repository of hardware, software, associated documents (a.k.a. CI - Configuration Items) and their relationships. This would permit the impact of working on one or a collection of CI's to show the impact to the services presented. Impacts such as this must be circulated and approved by all stakeholders ahead of system work to circumvent these nasty surprises.
The other side of the coin
Lastly, let's think about what would have occurred with Jack and his Sales Team if a few of the ITIL v3 recommendations had been considered.
When analyzing the problem, you revealed that Security people had applied the latest security patch in the system, and this made it unavailable during the procedure. They had been basically following a strategy to guarantee that the most recent security patch was applied on all servers.
If a Release plan had been in place, you could have been able to examine (together with the business) eventual impacts to operations. Additionally, a short consult to the CMDB could have alerted that this particular server habitually supports the Sales team up to 8.30 pm.
Then, if Jack had been informed regarding the high importance of the patch, he might have timed the advertising campaign to go live avoiding the outage schedule. Even without the sales campaign he could have ordered his team to terminate sales entry two hours earlier, or if this had been impractical, the security patch may well have been applied later.
As you may see, it does not appear very complicated. It really is just about defining and following some essential -and logic based- procedures.
And bottom-line, if this had occurred IT may well have shown one important "quick win" to increase visibility, to reflect that systems are aimed to help people, to enhance service delivery…. Moreover the most important thing: you could have enjoyed your weekend!
Author Resource:
Angela Whittaker is an experienced programme manager who has successfully implemented ITIL procedures in a variety of IT projects. You can learn more at http://www.itilsecrets.com.
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