Does VO Assume Many ITIL Processes are in Place?
A while back I was asked if Visible Ops presupposes that the Service Desk and Incident Management ITIL processes are already in place because we touch on them in the book but don’t go into any detail about how to set them up.
To explain, Visible Ops was intended to help organizations reduce their levels of unplanned work in order to free up resources to work on process improvement initiatives via ITIL. Visible Ops did not assume that other formal ITIL derived processes were in place but did make the assumption that most IT organizations would have some form of helpdesk/service desk and method for handling incidents.
Some of these help desks have been more sophisticated than others but fundamentally a call or email will come in asking why some service is down and then investigative and corrective actions take place. Regardless of how an incident is ultimately dealt with, we want that person, or group, manning the Service Desk, or traditional help desk, to have access to any proposed, performed, or detected change information so they can immediately decide whether a change has transpired or not. The sooner these people can determine whether a change was involved with the incident, the sooner they can take corrective actions and restore service or move on to other troubleshooting methods.
In closing, basic help desk and incident management work can be done without formal ITIL processes being in place. Of course, we believe that organizations will benefit from the adoption of ITIL and that’s why we designed Visible Ops to assist them in reducing unplanned work so they can embark on that effort.