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The Agile Service Management Guide
This is a short book discussing how the Agile methodology can be applied to delivering and enhancing ITIL service management practices.
Consider service management as a set of practices/processes/services or whatever.
Key is that the intention is to manage services so that the outcome for the customer is best.
Various frameworks tell you to continually be improving your services (ITIL/DevOps/Lean). Here is an obvious way to do implement improvements – Agile Service Management.
Apply the Agile methodology to continually improve your service management practices in line with what your customer needs.
Start with quickly delivering the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Or as ITIL 4 might call it a minimum viable practice. Or as I like to say, minimum viable service. Ah, what’s in a name!
The Guide compares Agile roles, artefacts and events with those of Service Management. The correlation is clear.
explaining how individuals respond to change – but we no longer have the luxury to determine where each individual, or group of individuals, is on the curve and put in place tactics to move them along the curve.
The Accelerated Implementation Methodology® (AIM) from IMA also has three-phase process – plan, implement and monitor.
Even, Prosci®, one of the most widely used approaches to organisation change today, has a three phase process – prepare for change, manage change and reinforce change.
We are living in a different world that is going to require a different approach to change and transition.
We are not in a state where we can plan, do, embed and then wait for the next change. Rinse and repeat! Those days are gone. Constant change is the new black!
We Need a Different Approach
Today, transitioning people through change is continual and multi-faceted. We need a more agile and iterative approach to organisational change.
As the title of the Hamel and Zanini article cited earlier advises – “Build a change platform, not a change program”.
We are no longer in a situation where change is linear and episodic – where it happens every so often and disrupts what we were doing. It is driven from the top and cascades down through a hierarchical chain of command.
(from the Agile Service Management Guide)
Agile terms are all readily applicable to development and enhancement of service management processes. What could be more natural?