Someone thinks that ITIL is an old school thing. Still, many big corporations are on the velvet after implementing its best practices. At the same time, the philosophy of DevOps is another trend that is captivating more and more companies. Why then we can’t combine ITIL with DevOps?
Let’s first have a quick explanation of what exactly ITIL and DevOps are.
ITSM, or IT Service Management, consists of a set of methodologies that tend to help the companies realize value. You might think that ITSM is only about IT operations, though it is much bigger than that. ITSM is an approach for developing, supporting and managing valuable products and services.
All best practices of ITSM are collected in one place – the ITIL framework. It contains 26 processes that align IT services with the needs of the business and tend to ameliorate the customer satisfaction of service delivery. The objective of the ITIL Service Operation is to make sure that IT services are delivered effectively and efficiently.
Meanwhile, DevOps is becoming incredibly popular nowadays. As a software development methodology DevOps aim is to make Dev team and Operations team work together, reducing any possible problems between them. DevOps encourages the agile team to use Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery so that it’s possible to increase the speed and quality of the software production and service delivery.
While ITIL is a structured system of IT Service Management best practices that tend to better integrate IT with business needs and strategies, DevOps is more like the philosophy of perfect software development. Still, the fact of competing DevOps and ITIL is just a popular myth, as together they can be very good friends provided businesses to understand their dynamics.
Why you need both of them
This perfect combo will let your company scale. When the percentage of sales grows, as well as the team size, it becomes extremely important to track all the processes and get a clear understanding of what’s going on. For this, you’ll need precise information about what has changed and in what process, who is in charge of it so that the right people would be involved. With all the advances of DevOps operational metrics, your team will be able to cope with all possible deployments and auto-scaling activities.
Change management, as one of the key processes of ITSM, can often interfere with fast release cycles, which is one of the most essential factors of DevOps. But it can be fixed with the help of an adaptive approach. Implementing it, it’s possible to find a balance between business agility and risks. Thereby even releases labeled with high risk got analyzed properly, discussing all possible dependencies.
As the company scale grows, Incident and Problem management are also becoming critically important. But after mixing the ITIL best practices with DevOps approach, the team has the opportunity to have a process in place to coordinate across different systems, different teams and different geographies, and the engineers are also constantly doing some introspection and looking at the underlying causes of problems to learn from them.
When the ITIL framework is integrated with DevOps, all developing, operations and support processes work together. That means the team will be able to take change requests faster from incidents. ITIL provides a complete analysis of interference and bottlenecks in Dev and Operations teams, helping the company to focus on the points of high priority. Having DevOps implemented into your business environment you’ll get the wanted transparency between the teams. Such cultural changes will let IT specialists be more aware of their role in the business and therefore encourage them to take part in the company’s decision making. And with this combination, you’ll manage to improve the quality of service delivery.
How Polontech ITSM experts and ITIL consultants can help you
We help companies to provide more reliable (with fewer incidents) and costs-optimized services in a productive and automated environment, improving relations between business. Our experts can provide you with the Service strategy (focus on Service portfolio), Service design (focus on Service Catalog management) and Service transition (focus on Change Management, Release and Deployment Management, Service asset and configuration management).
Implementing DevOps into the ITIL framework will help to run all the business process more effectively. Whether your team considers DevOps methodology or is already on its side, Polontech has the experience and resources to help ensure that your wishes fit your needs and aligned to keep them both agile and compliant.
