Isn’t There More to ITIL than what Visible Ops Covers?
One question that comes up is, “Why doesn’t Visible Ops cover more of ITIL?” This is understandable as ITIL is comprised of a number of books with the Service Support and Service Delivery volumes comprising the core. The answer is fairly straightforward - Visible Ops was intended to help organizations stop hemorrhaging resources due to problematic changes/failed changes causing high levels of unplanned work, which is a waste of resources.
ITIL is very broad in terms of its scope and the concepts it conveys. Long term, it can make a tremendous difference but if everyone is running at 150% of capacity by working excessive overtime, then it is very hard for those same people to carve out the time to work on process improvement. Management edicts to implement ITIL with existing resources are not sustainable when the teams are struggling just to keep operational services secure and available.
For organizations that are fortunate enough not to have challenges with unplanned work arising from failed changes, they may not see the point in using Visible Ops. Instead, they may opt to start ITIL with other processes based on their needs and constraints. As a result, this approach is outside the scope of Visible Ops.
For groups that very much want to embark on process improvement but are too crushed with unplanned work to make headway, then Visible Ops makes a lot of sense. By implementing change management and then integrating change data to incident management, the IT operations group can break free of the vicious unplanned work cycle and focus on planned works – such as process improvement projects implementing more of ITIL and work to increase the overall productivity of the organization.
So, yes, there is far more to ITIL than what is in Visible Ops and that is intentional. Visible Ops is a focused prescriptive methodology intended to allow organizations to stop, catch their breath, open the door and begin down the path of process improvement.