Deep Creek Center home.

Tag: tools

Filling the ITIL void

As many of you know, I’ve been intimately involved with ITIL practice for more than 10 years.  I am launching this Lessons Learned, user-consortium-driven blog to document good practices based on the ITIL and other frameworks.

My hope is that this will be a great place to get facts and support for making ITIL work in your organization.  Your moderator does not claim omniscience, and so I hope that each of you will share your own wisdom as well.

This is a great place to ask questions, share success stories and get the support and tools you need to make ITIL work in your organization.

Certification training vs tools

A number of our customers are struggling with how to implement training programs to support their service management initiative. Many approach the training need from a tools point-of-view. In other words, train them on using the Change management tools, not on the process itself. While understanding how to effectively leverage and use your tools is critical, understanding the context of the work in supporting your services is the critical link. What are the proper triggers, inputs, and outputs of the process? What are the dependency relationships between your process activities and that of other processes? How does what is happening in your functional group impact other groups?

We recommend at a minimum some core understanding of the Service Lifecycle and the role the different processes play in modeling, planning, transitioning, supporting, and improving services BEFORE the tools training. Otherwise, people will “fill in the boxes” to “get the work done” without the right level of quality or value capture in their documentation. Ultimately you are at risk of reduce quality and service availability without this core understanding.