Faster innovation cycles and increasing security risks lead to constantly changing requirements with high urgency. This is in contrast to bureaucratic and often slow processes within organisations. The result? At best, ”only” dissatisfied stakeholders, at worst, perceptible competitive disadvantages on the market or even exploitable security vulnerabilities.
Rapidly changing conditions require flexible structures, because in order to meet the needs of business customers, IT organisations must be built in a service-oriented manner. This is where agile service management comes into play. We explain exactly what this means, what advantages it promises and how to anchor agile approaches sustainably in the IT service organisation.
The Agile Manifesto and its principles
Agility originally comes from software development. In 2001, 17 developers met in a ski lodge in Utah and created an agile manifesto with 12 principles that better address the increasing complexity of modern software projects than conventional approaches. Since then, agility has been applied primarily in IT project management with frameworks such as Scrum and SAFe.
Agility refers to the ability to move quickly and easily, think quickly, solve problems and generate new ideas.
It is important to understand that agile service management does not aim to integrate agility into existing best practices and processes, but focuses on conveying the values, mindsets and perspectives you need to integrate agility step by step into your way of working.
Introduction to agile service management
IT service management (ITSM) is a process-oriented management approach in which customer needs and IT services for customers (rather than IT systems) are the focus and are continually improved.
Agile service management ensures that ITSM processes reflect agile values and have just enough control and structure to efficiently deliver valuable services. These services are implemented in incremental steps, which promotes continuous learning and improvement.
In-depth look at relevant agile frameworks
Scrum
Scrum is a framework that supports teams in generating valuable and adaptive solutions to complex problems using an iterative, incremental approach. It relies on groups of people who collectively have the know-how to successfully complete a project.
Scrum is based on empiricism and lean thinking and is underpinned by five values: commitment, focus, openness, respect and courage. The Scrum artefacts contain information used by the team and stakeholders:
- The product backlog: all measures (roughly described) needed to complete the overall project
- The sprint backlog: all measures (refined) that can be completed within the current sprint
- The product increment: the definition of done
Kanban
Kanban is a method with its origins in software development. The term «kanban» comes from Japanese and means something like «signboard». The aim of the methodology is to limit the amount of parallel work (work in progress) and thus achieve shorter throughput times.
Lean
Originally invented at Toyota, Lean comes from production and had the goal of reducing waste. The targeted use of resources such as materials, time or personnel is the focus of the methodology.
ITIL 4
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has developed into the world's leading framework for the coordination, control and management of IT services. ITIL 4 is based on seven guiding principles:
- Focus on value – every activity must contribute to value creation
- Start where you are – existing best practices are retained and continuously improved
- Progress iteratively with feedback – continuous improvement in small steps through feedback
- Collaborate and promote visibility – more clarity and transparency
- Think and work holistically – take responsibility across the entire process
- Keep it simple and practical – the right measure for efficient value creation
- Optimize and automate – automated steps reduce susceptibility to errors
DevOps
DevOps stands for the collaboration of the areas of software development (Dev) and system administration (Ops). Within a DevOps model, development and operations are no longer isolated from each other but work together throughout the entire product lifecycle.