Capacity Management: Guided Practitioner Satnav – How do I get there?(4 of 17)

Satnav will maybe offer you a set of options for route selection - Fastest, cheapest, shortest, safest?

In ITSM what does management want?  What does the business need? I need to search for some authoritative options for all of this.  Ah, ITIL.

ITIL V3 has four books named to a standard – Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Operations and Service Transition.  The fifth is hung up on the dictionary definition of continuous and continual and feels obliged to add the word ‘Continual Service improvement’ to its title because so many people in error refer to ‘Continuous Service Improvement’.  It would have been much simpler just to call it Service Improvement.  But some people like to be pedantic….

In much the same way, the books describe some capacity management activities as iterative and some as cyclic but both affirm the key message that none of them are single snapshot activities.

The sixth book, the Introduction, instead of laying down the foundation or framework (SF) for the entire library and defining everything that is common to all the books (glossary, jargon, dataflows, interfaces etc) sadly turns out to be a retrospective summary of the other five books.  Like all of them, it was reviewed in isolation, hence the need for an early refresh.

There is a lot of talk about process and function, but mostly just about practice and procedure.

So ITIL describes the overall objectives without much attention to the costs and practicalities of achieving them in any given environment.  That is the job for the local decision makers, to adopt and adapt as appropriate.

This is where all the issues described by Paul Wilkinson in his ABC of ICT (ISBN 9789087531423 published by Van Haren)come in.  Essentially, the problems associated with attitude, behavior and culture.

Paul’s messages come across loud and clear largely by use of packs of cards, simulation games and cartoons making amusing and pithy observations about ITSM.

He talks about all the issues that ITSM consultants find to be the major obstacles at most sites – management commitment, Projects, Committees, Business liaison.

The lessons learned by many users of his Apollo 13 simulation game boil down to the statement that you need to get all the people relationships right to achieve effective implementation of ITIL (or any ITSM infrastructure framework) and priorities clear to avoid the CAB (Change Advisory Board) creating undue obstacles.

On Friday I’ll be looking at ‘What has to get there?’

Adam Grummitt

Distinguished Engineer