ITSM – ITIL : How Similar and How Different?

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Let’s understand the connection between various philosophies, methods and Scrum framework.

First a definition of what the terms Philosophy, Framework, Methodology and Standards mean

• Philosophy: Broad values and principles which people follow. Philosophy is more of a mindset than telling you actually how to do things.
• Framework: Framework is a bare minimum essential guideline under which you operate and solve specific types of problems. E.g. Scrum and Kanban are frameworks which give broad guidelines.
• Methodology: Methodology gives guidelines about tools, techniques and sometimes includes a framework to operate too. It is not necessary that an approach of describing everything is always great. Most times, methodologies are over-defined and a lot becomes irrelevant for use. Some of the methodologies are PRINCE2 by Axelos, Extreme Programming (XP)
• Standards: Standards collect best-practices, tools, techniques, processes which are generally used in the industry. It’s basically a collection of various things put together. For e.g. PMBOK by PMI is a standard of project management.

Lean

Lean is an effective way of eliminating waste and implementing Customer Value focus. Lean is the over-arching philosophy consisting of the 5 broad principles as described as: 

Within the umbrella of lean, there are various other philosophies are prevalent in the industry – DevOps and Agile being the most widely used philosophy

Agile

Agile is a philosophy and consists of thought processes which are summed up in the Agile Manifesto. Agile Manifesto consists of 4 values and 12 principles. The 4 Values are

• Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
• Working Products over Comprehensive Documentation
• Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation
• Responding to Change over Following a Plan

Some of the key thought processes on which Agile principles are based on are

• Focus on Value
• Elimination of wastage and improvement of productivity
• Respecting Change
• Iterative and Incremental Delivery
• Collaborating teams
• Working with variable scope
• Focus on working product
• Time boxed delivery
• Focus on continuous improvements

Most Agile values and Principles are directly complying to the broader Lean philosophy.

Scrum

Scrum is a framework to handle complexity. Scrum complies to all of the agile principles and values in some way or the other. The framework consists of the 3 Artifacts, 5 Events and the Three Roles which are the minimum in handling the complexity in work effectively.

DevOps

DevOps is a philosophy. DevOps isn’t a framework or methodology in and of itself. It doesn’t stand alone. DevOps adopts and leverages multiple frameworks and methodologies such as agile, lean and ITSM. DevOps is benefited tremendously from the work the Agile community has done, showing how small teams, operating with high-trust, small batch sizes with smaller, more frequent software releases, can dramatically increase the productivity of development organizations.

ITSM

IT service management (ITSM) is the activities that are performed by an organization to design, plan, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers – commonly called Support/Maintenance/Production Support services. Various Six Sigma tools, XP techniques, software development techniques, DevOps Tools are used.

Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a set of statistical quality improvement techniques which can be used to achieve Agility or become Lean. Without quality, the product may not deliver value to the customer. Hence the Six Sigma techniques are used frequently while executing work in various frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, XP.

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