Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Laying down contractual agreements and meeting them is an important part of ITIL Service Level Management. Making SLAs is one of the main goals for many organizations
and it’s often the most important criterion for managers or customers to judge the IT organization.
Responding to change over following a plan.
ITIL is about predictable processes. The idea: if you think out all the steps in advance and execute them accordingly, you’ll always have the desired outcome. In many cases, the change management process is watertight and there’s no way to deviate from the original plan.
Framework vs. Philosophy
So, agile and ITIL, not exactly a match made in heaven, right? That’s jumping to conclusions. They do seem quite different, but it’s not
hard to find a way in which they complement each other. Agile is a philosophy. A set of guidelines for your work. Agile principles help you make decisions in your everyday work, but they don’t tell you how to complete specific tasks. ITIL is a framework. A collection of procedures that work in practice. As opposed to agile, ITIL does describe how to do your work — in detail.
Being agile with ITIL
It’s not that difficult to approach ITIL with an agile mindset. You can implement the ITIL process Incident Management with the agile mindset, for example. This means you pick the best option for your organization for each part of the setup. The weird thing is that ITIL is quite suitable for an adjusted implementation.
ITIL does have a reputation for being rigid and unnecessary complex, but that was never the starting point. The starting point wasn’t that organizations would implement each aspect of ITIL to the letter. The message of ITIL was always: make sure to apply this way of working to suit your own organization. And your way of implementing ITIL could very well be agile.