IT Service Management ITIL 4
A set of specialized organizational capabilities for enabling value for customers in the form of services.
Developing the specialized organizational capabilities mentioned in the definition requires an understanding of:
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the nature of value
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the nature and scope of the stakeholders involved
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how value creation is enabled through services.
Incident
Purpose of the incident management practice is to minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible.
Definition
An unplanned interruption to a service or reduction in the quality of a service.
Problem
Purpose of the problem management practice is to reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents, and managing workarounds and known errors.
Definition
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Problem A cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents.
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Known error A problem that has been analysed but has not been resolved.
Change
Purpose of the change control practice is to maximize the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing the change schedule.
Definition
The addition, modification, or removal of anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on services.
Release
Purpose of the release management practice is to make new and changed services and features available for use.
Definition
A version of a service or other configuration item, or a collection of configuration items, that is made available for use.
What is Incident Management?
Incident Management restores normal service operation while minimizing impact to business operations and maintaining quality.
Incident Management process follows these steps:
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Incident identification
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Incident logging
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Incident categorization
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Incident prioritization
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Incident response
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Initial diagnosis
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Incident escalation
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Investigation and diagnosis
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Resolution and recovery
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Incident closure
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Incident Identification
The first step in the life of an incident is incident identification. You can report incidents through emails, sms, phone call, support chats, walk-ups, and applications. The service desk decides if the issue is truly an incident or if it is a request.
Incident logging
Once identified as an incident, the service desk logs the incident. The incident should include information, such as the caller, business service, configuration item, and contact type. The logging process includes categorization and prioritization of an incident.
Incident categorization
Incident categorization is a vital step in the incident management process. Categorization involves assigning a category and at least one subcategory to the incident.
Incident prioritization
Incident prioritization is important for SLA response adherence. The priority of an incident is determined by its impact on users or business and its urgency.
Incident response
Once identified, categorized, prioritized, and logged, the service desk can handle and resolve the incident. Incident resolution involves five steps:
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Initial diagnosis: Occurs when the user describes his or her problem and answers troubleshooting questions.
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Incident escalation: Happens when an incident requires advanced support, such as sending an on-site technician or assistance from certified support staff.
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Investigation and diagnosis: Takes place during troubleshooting when the initial incident hypothesis is confirmed as being correct. Once the incident is diagnosed, service desk can apply a solution, such as changing software settings, applying a software patch, or ordering new hardware.
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Resolution and recovery: Happens the service desk confirms that the service of the user is restored within the stipulated SLA time.
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Incident closure: At this point, the incident is considered closed and the incident process ends.
Relationship with Other Process
Incident management interacts with other ITIL processes in many ways, for example:
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Creates new incidents using the service catalog.
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Tracks changes that caused incidents and creates changes to resolve incidents.
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Tracks CIs (components and/or services) affected by service interruptions.
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Uses knowledge articles to troubleshoot and resolve incidents.
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Uses workarounds for recurring incidents being investigated by Problem Management.
What is Problem Management?
is responsible for managing the life cycle of all problems and to prevent problems and resulting incidents from happening. It also aims at eliminating recurring incidents and minimizing the impact of incidents that cannot be prevented. Resolving a problem includes the activities required to diagnose the root cause of incidents and to determine the resolution for the problem. Problem resolution and elimination of root cause often calls for applying a change to the configuration item in the existing IT environment.
Problem Management also maintains information about problems and the appropriate workarounds and resolutions, so that the organization is able to reduce the number and impact of incidents over time. In this respect, Problem Management has a strong interface with Knowledge Management so that the known error articles are documented thoroughly for any future reference.
Problem Management supports the ITIL process to find and fix the root cause of issues that result in incidents. You can record problems, associate incidents, and assign them to appropriate groups. You can create knowledge from problems, request changes, escalate, and manage problems to its resolution and reporting.
What is Change Management?
to control the life cycle of all changes, facilitating beneficial changes to be made with minimum disruption to IT services.
What is Release Management?
encompasses the planning, design, build, configuration, and testing of hardware and software releases to create a defined set of release components.
The Release Management application handles releases using the task record system. Each planned feature is generated through various means as a task record, populated with the pertinent information in individual fields. These tasks can be assigned to appropriate release management team members, who deal with the tasks as appropriate until the release has been properly deployed.
Release Management can be effectively used to coordinate releases as a vehicle for planning releases, composed of individual work items such as, projects, epics, stories, problems, and so on. After the release scope (projects, stories, and so on) is finalized, you can generate Change Items and associate them to the release, allowing the implementation and deployment of a release to be handled within the change management process.
Release management comprises of a series of activities performed to ensure that the changes are applied successfully to both pre-production and product environments.
What is Service Level Management?
enables you to monitor and manage the quality of the services offered by your organization.
Service Level Managers are responsible for a set of agreements between a service provider and customer that define the scope, quality, and speed of the services being provided. The intention of SLM is to provide the customer with an expectation of service within a known timescale and the ability to monitor when service levels are not being met.
SLM can be used across the organization in departments such as HR, Facilities, and IT to track how internal and external teams are performing against their agreed service levels.