v2 and V3 certifications

Now, you want (or your smart boss wants you) to become certified.
Don't worry! the process is simpler than it may appear.

ITIL Foundation in service management is the entry level, it is now available in v3 (and still available in v2 if you really want/need). For those who already have a v2, a 4 hours bridge course/exam can bring you to a foundation v3.
With ITIL Foundation, you'll see ITIL's most pragmatic aspects. To me, it's a must-have for each and every IT staff member.
You'll find 3 to 5 days courses to bring you to the certificate but you can also DoItYouself with a good ITIL book (and some self-discipline).
Note that ITIL is a dangerous substance. For me, my first ITIL book has been like the first time I flew a plane, a very disturbing and addictive experience that I'll never forget. Severe psychological disorders may occur, you have been warned!

Once you're addicted, what's next? Today's ITIL Holy Grail is the "v3 expert" certification.
It is modules and credits based and you'll have 2 main options since v3 is still kind of new on the market and some courses/exam are not yet available:
- go though a v2 ITIL manager certification and wait for the V3 manager bridge to be available (in 2009 I guess), or go though a V2 practitioner that you'll complete with v3 modules to have the 22 required credits for the "v3 expert".
- Complete v3 modules when they become available, and then the "Managing though the lifecycle"

Your choice will depend on why and how quick you need to be certified, and, as always, on your budget.

Know your limits!

I'm currently working on my basement that I'd like to turn into a home theater by the end of the year.

A project is a project and my Debbie Travis's renovations can't be too far away from an ITIL implementation.

In both cases you have 3 different approaches: DIY (Do It Yourself), hire a designer but implement yourself, outsource the whole project.

Usually, the size of the project, budget and when you need the project to be completed, are driving the decision. But the most important key factor remains...

... your skills set.

So know you limits, don't overestimate your availability, know what you are not good at, and get some help.

If your budget is limited and doesn't allow external resources, descope your ITIL project. Do less but do it right, ITIL's Deeming wheel will help you setting up the future milestones.

ITIL and open source

Your first step to put ITIL in practice will probably be looking for a tool that will fit your organization. And if your organization is more comfortable with free or Open Source, you'll probably look for an open source ITIL tool, right?

Wrong way my friends, wrong way! There is no gnuTIL, no broad spectrum open source software (don't feel bad, there is no proprietary tool covering completely ITIL either).

This been said, you can find hundreds of open source tools that can be used as part of your ITIL processes on availability management, capacity planning, incident management...

Like for all open source projects, some are reliable and function rich, and some are just embryonal projects.

With ITIL v3 that is now offering a better cover of your company's activities (especially design and development), I'd recommend to use ITIL on your ITIL implementation: create a portfolio of open source tools and enhance them with an ITIL approach.

This way, you can experiment ITIL on an internal project, create personalized tools to support your upcoming ITIL processes, and last but not least, contribute to the open source community.

Good Karma guaranteed!

High Availability dollars

According to BMC, for every $1 spent buying infrastructure, their customers say it costs another $3 to manage it.

They also say that 80 percent of downtime is caused by mis-configuration or operator mistakes.

Think about it. Let's assume that scheduled downtime is not included and let's do some math!

How much money do you spend each year on the 20 percents? on building and maintaining High Availability, redundant and resilient systems to maintain your uptime and comply with your SLAs?

Now multiply this dollar amount by 5 and you get (in an uptime driven World and purely mathematical approach) what you should spend on improving change and release management.

Take off!

I see a lot of discussions around v2 versus v3. My 2 cents, starting with V1....

In aviation, V1 is the maximum speed during takeoff at which a pilot can safely stop the aircraft without leaving the runway. V2 is the takeoff safety speed and V3 is the flap retraction speed.

In the ITIL World, V1 was not necessarily providing you all it takes to take off.
If V2 is a real framework you can fly with, it is only providing you tools to get to destination, you still need to have a map and define your itinerary.
Finally, V3 is a offering more structured and iterative approach.

As you know, physically, ITIL is a library.

V1 is a set of 31 books published between 1989 and 1995.
To me, at that stage, ITIL had no "core" and was not a best practices framework yet, just a set of recommendations.

V2, released between 2000 and 2004, is a more closely connected and consistant set of 7 books. I have always seen v2 as a CMDB centric framework. Most processes orbit around the configuration database.

V3 is a different bird. Even if you'll find pretty much all the V2 processes in V3, as well as your beloved CMDB, the framework itself is articulated differently, around services. Service lifecycle is the secret sauce that structure all the best practices together.

V3 tells you exactly where to look at, you won't leave the runway!

ITIL and security

Ordering the ITIL v3 publication suite this week made me realize (one more time) how weak ITIL can be on security.

Even if security coverage has improved between v2 and v3, it's still sad to see that the itSMF (or itSMF.ca if you want to order in Canada) doesn't eat its dog food and does not encrypt online purchases credit card information.

Continual Service Improvement they say... :)

ITIL for small organization and statups

Ok, you're running a startup, or the IT of a small company and wonder what ITIL can do for you...

Chances are you'll find ITIL too bureaucratic but keep in mind that a/ ITIL is based on common sense and b/ you don't have to implement all the ITIL processes to be on tracks to success.

In a small company, time and money are rarely available to implement a large scale project such as a full ITIL implementation.
Anyway, successful startups knows how to eat an elephant: one bite at a time.

What's most important for you? Choose what you need, define a core set of ITIL best practices and get started.

Of course it is still important to have a vision about "where you want to be" over time and always keep the deming wheel approach in mind, but bet on first small steps that will earn you quick wins, and the confidence of your team.

Even if I've not read it, I'd like to mention this book: ITIL small scale implementation.

Where NOT to start?

ITIL is a tool to make your life easier. This been said, every ITIL implementation starts with a nightmare question: where to start?

If there is no universal order (it all depends on your organization), to me, every ITIL implementation should start by reading (or re-reading) The Method Discourse from René Descartes.

Identify the most urgent need (aka the bleeding) and implement Decartes 400 years old's approach.

 

Now, where not to start:

• Problem Management: Incident Management is a prerequisite.
  
• Release Management: hard to start without Change Management.
  
• Service Level Management: Can't really be started without Change Management, Incident Management and Availability Management.
  

In an ideal World, if discovering an organization, here's the order I'd suggest:  

availability mgt, incident mgt, problem mgt, configuration mgt, change mgt, helpdesk, service level mgt, capacity mgt, continuity mgt, IT financial mgt.

I always like starting with availability management because it helps you understanding the technical architecture and all its moving parts, it's a prep work for building your CMDB and puts you on the tracks for incident/problem management.

In an ideal World only!

How many nines?

In the last few years, many system vendors have begun to offer contractual uptime guarantees.
Service Level Agreements often refer to monthly downtime to calculate credits.
In many cases, "scheduled maintenance" is not included within the availability calculation.

Availability	Downtime per year	Downtime per month	Downtime per week	Downtime per day
90%	36.5 days	72 hours	16.8 hours	141 minutes
99%	3.6 days	7.2 hours	1.68 hours	14.4 min
99.9%	8.8 hours	43.2 min	10.1 min	86 s
99.99%	52.6 min	4.3 min	1.01 min	8.6 s
99.999%	5.3 min	25.9 s	6.1 s	0.86 s
99.9999%	31.5 s	2.6 s	0.61 s	0.086 s

Calculations and metrics are great. This being said, what's the nines model does not take into account is timing!
It assumes that all time is worth exactly the same amount to the customers or organization that has deployed the highly available critical system.
Would 1 hour of downtime hurt CNN.com the same way if occurring in the evening of the US election date versus at 4am on a Sunday in July?

Measuring Availability

This first post has to deal with what initially brought me to ITIL a couple of years ago: Availability.

You have defined your Vital Business Functions, your Availability plan has been finalized, your SLAs are signed: now is showtime for some maths!

Let's start easy with the basics:

• AST = Agreed Service Time
  
• DT = Downtime
• TAM = Total Available Minutes for all services delivered
• TNI = Total Number of Incidents
• TNIIC = Total Number of Incidents Impacting Customers
• TUM = Total Unavailable Minutes for all services delivered

availability = (AST - DT) / AST * 100

resilience = 1 - (TNIIC / TNI)

reliability = 1 - (TUM / TAM)

Other metrics to track:

- how much unplanned costs you spent of maintaining needed availability?

- how much of your SW/HW infrastructure is supported by external vendors?

- how vulnerable are you you to security threats?

(from Incident Management:)

- what is your average response time on a customer impacting incident?

- what is your average resolution on a customer impacting incident?

Note that a lot of metrics are not related to systems uptime but to services uptime, which measurement is a challenge by itself!