Is ITIL Really Necessary?

Many companies with small IT Support departments neglect to establish standard policies and practices to manage change. Consequently, they resort to incomplete and ad hoc practices leading to total mismanagement of IT enhancements. All of us understand that adjustments in IT might arise out-of reactive responses to problems, or as exogenously imposed demands, e.g. Legal or regulatory imperatives, or out-of proactive quests for enhanced efficiency, or equally as business improvement projects.

ITIL was originally developed by an agency called CCTA under the auspices of the British government, and ITIL is a registered trademark of the UK Government’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC).The challenges and pitfalls in effectively managing IT improvements are numerous. For successful IT departments , the ITIL Change Management doctrines act as guiding principles, which integrate itself effortlessly. ITIL has an affiliated network of service management requirements like configuration management, service desk, request management, service catalog management, service level management and others.

Prevention of unauthorized alterations for the CIs while in the CMDB repository is another important factor of change control. Frequently, emergency elements, in lack of clear guidelines, may push changes to be introduced by the stakeholders without any file, with impactful penalties. ITIL change management contains and stops these problems through procedural instructions. For urgent changes, ITIL recommends setting up of an ECAB or Emergency Change Advisory Board, to get rid of any issues that might be associated with emergency change management.
Is it required to possess a tool or application to manage IT Change Management? Definitely not. However it is absolutely required to possess a well-defined procedure and some strictly enforced guidelines. That’s why ITIL principles are essentially procedure-driven, and can be applied without the ITIL compliant Change Management application. The ITIL processes propose who, how, and when to (i) enroll and accept proposed changes,(ii) categorize, prioritize changes,(iii) perform risk and impact analysis, (iv) coordinate change approval,(v) schedule and coordinate change setup,(vi) conduct post-change review, and (vii) regularly share management data and reviews. One crucial facet of change management is actually to abate any change-related risk. It’s required to possess a clear visibility to the correlation of all issues and solutions. The issue will be to ask: just how many software/services should be impacted or /indirectly relying on this change? The next problem will be to learn: while in the framework of the venture how crucial are these companies? If this assessment results in an answer the suggested change is fraught with danger, appropriate mitigation policies must certainly be in place.

The aims of the ITIL targeted Change Management approach accept many factors – setting the procedures and guidelines like a framework of strategies and practices of successful change management, structurally creating part-based incumbents as change supervisor(s) or change coordinator(s), formalizing a change analysis and authorization exam body frequently known as Change Advisory Board(CAB), making visible a Forward Schedule of Changes (also known as change calendar), writing contextual support supply stories and, among other things, speaking pre and post change signals and doing post-change review.

Every IT organization or department progresses through various stages of maturity with time. This maturity, by and large, is assessed and measured by the strength, its investment in technology, process-improvement strategies and skill-enhancement programs to supply superior IT solutions for the venture. Plainly, responsibility for the best practices exemplified while in the ITIL framework will greatly improve the backbone of any IT department to degree higher standards of effectiveness and performance.

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