From the course: Putting ITIL® Into Practice: Applying ITIL® 3 Foundation Concepts

Applying ITIL doesn't have to be this way - ITIL Tutorial

From the course: Putting ITIL® Into Practice: Applying ITIL® 3 Foundation Concepts

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Applying ITIL doesn't have to be this way

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- [Instructor] Before we dive into the seven ways, I want to make one thing clear that applies to all of them. And that is this. There is no reason why your ITIL implementation has to be a heavy top-down affair. Layer it on top of existing work, like rolling a giant boulder up a hill. It may surprise you to find out that service management started out as lean and lightweight. Based on Jan Carlson's conception of moments of truth. His idea was that processes are what people do, and that working on the micro-interactions between people, what he called moments of truth, was the right way to improve things. Sounds a lot like the Agile Manifesto's people over process, doesn't it? In fact, in the early v1 ITIL books, the word process was used interchangeably with discipline. I like the word discipline a whole lot better. A discipline is something individuals and teams have to apply themselves to learn. It's something you practice, that you do that you reflect and act on, that you work to master. It's not something someone else does that you have to comply with. Well, that's weird, you might say. How do we get to this process heavy conception of service management? Well, back in the day, there was a revolutionary idea of process re-engineering. And it a right-headed approach. For complex processes, to manage them end-to-end. While there's nothing wrong with this approach, per se, where it can be used to provide value in the right circumstances, there is a problem if it's the only approach you use. And where you forget that processes are what people do and as a result, where you end up having no ask of individuals and teams to learn, and think, and act, and drive toward shared outcomes and change their behavior, and all you do is organizational-level process engineering. Where the only ask you have of people is to comply with processes. There are a lot of publications and guidance out there you can get around organizational-level end-to-end process engineering. So we'll skip discussing this approach entirely. Often, it seems like this is the only approach that's discussed or applied. I hope you find the approaches I've come to rely on refreshing and helpful. And better suited to today's work environment, where ideas and practices like Agile, and Lean, and DevOps are in use. So let's go. Let's get on and see what these seven ways are.

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