There are 5 ITIL Lifecycle Phases as prescribed in ITIL v3: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operations, and Continual Service Improvement.These lifecycles define what IT has to do to deliver value to the business and/or customers. ITIL v3 advises you to change your IT organizational functions and processes in this manner to deliver IT services and value to your customers. If your company makes the decision to launch an ITIL initiative, you have decided to introduce the necessary change to your current organizational structure and processes to align with ITIL advised structure and processes. Our intent is to help you understand what that really means!!

What is the ITIL v3 structure? ITILv3 defines 5 IT Lifecycle Phases with the following Goals:

1. Service Strategy: build a cost effective IT strategy. Find the right balance between performance and cost. Defines what to build and why it is needed. Its output is a business approved, business funded IT strategy.
2. Service Design: design IT services in alignment with Service Strategy. Defines how IT services will be built. Its output is a Service Design Package.
3. Service Transition: build and deploy IT services as specified by Service Design. Build and deploy services with minimal impact to the Production environment. Its output is a Live Application/Service that functions as expected.
4. Service Operations: Deliver and manage services at the agreed levels to business users/customers. Its expected output is managed services with happy customers.
5. Continual Service Improvement: Continual improvement of IT processes and metrics. Prioritize and initiate improvement projects. Its expected output is better metrics of all IT processes - cheaper, faster, better IT services.

Point Guard ITILv3 Presentation

The subprocesses and functions within each of the ITILv3 Lifecycles are:

1. Service Strategy:
   1. Strategy Generation
   2. Demand Management
   3. Service Portfolio Management
   4. Financial Management
2. Service Design:
   1. Supplier Management
   2. Service Catalog Management
   3. Information Security Management
   4. Capacity Management
   5. Availability Management
   6. Service Level Management
3. Service Transition
   1. Knowledge Management
   2. Evaluation
   3. Service Validation & Testing
   4. Transition Planning & Support
   5. Release Deployment Management
   6. Service Asset and Configuration Management
   7. Change Management
4. Service Operations
   1. IT Operations Management (Function not process)
   2. Application Management (Function)
   3. Technical Management (Function)
   4. Request Fulfillment
   5. Event Management
   6. Access Management
   7. Problem Management
   8. Incident Management
   9. Service Desk (Function)
5. Continual Service Improvement
   1. Service Measurement
   2. Service Reporting
   3. 7 Step Improvement Process

What’s the difference between a service, a function, and a process? In ITIL v3:

• a Service is a unit of measure of value to the customers (fast internet access);
• a Function is a team or group of people and the tools they use to carry out one or more processes or activities (network provisioning team);
• a Process is a set of structured activities that has an objective (upon request, provision fast internet access to a customer).

Why so picky with the language? Because one of the biggest benefits of adopting ITIL is that everyone in your organization will use the same terms for the same intent. It significantly reduces costly misunderstandings.

ITIL is all about IT delivering value to the customer. When I want fast internet access I don’t want to choose from 100 itemized components (routers, switches, etc) with 100 pricing options. I want one bill: $39.99 for a service level agreement that guarantees me 24 hours of 1GB of Internet throughput per day. Then if things are not working as agreed I can call, and complain, and get my bill reduced because my service wasn’t delivered as agreed. My internet now is as fast as my fingers. That’s the value for me as a customer. I can work more efficiently when I pay for fast internet connection without having to worry about how my Internet service provider built it or delivered it to me.

Before ITIL I would get an itemized bill with descriptions that I don’t understand for something that may not meet my needs because there were no standard terms or a common service catalog with service descriptions, service levels, service support, and pricing for me to choose from. When customers and providers lack a common understanding of expectations it is likely that no one is happy.

What does this have to do with Metrics? There’s an old saying: you can’t measure what you can’t define. How well defined are your IT processes?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 2:40 pm and is filed under ITIL Metrics for Business Process Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.