Aligning ITIL with agile approach - Three recipes for Scrum and Service Operation Teams
1. Aligning ITIL with agile approach
Three recipes for Scrum and Service
Operation Teams
•Author: Konstantin Polakov (07.04.2015)
2. Different Teams, Different Goals
Dev Goal: Getting It Done
The challenge with software development is figuring out a way to get development for
a given release completed and closed out, so that the Development team can move
on to building the next release.
Production Goal: Keeping it Running
The challenge to get software out into
production, and getting customers up and
running on it.
It requires that the customer's organization
can:
- manage known issues and defects
- understand the new capabilities
- train the staff and change the way they
work with delivered software
3. Challenges for both teams
• Know-How or „Keep in Sync“
• Knowhow Transfer to SO team – new functionality, bugs,
workarounds
• Knowhow Transfer to Dev team: production impact, user feedback,
requirements
• Building the DevOps Culture
• For established organizations, Scrum is very hard to deploy. Moving
from yearly or semi-annual releases to weekly iterations is very hard
and very easy to fail at.
• Everyone has a tool
• JIRA for Development, ServiceNow for Incidents, HP ALM for Project
Management, etc…
• Who’s the boss?
• Responsibilities, communications, expectations and escalation path should be
clarified before projects start
4. Before we start: What is ITIL?
ITIL is a set of practices for IT service management (ITSM) that
focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business
Service Operation
Team
5. Before we start:
Incident/Problem Mgmt Activities
• Incident management is process for logging, recording and resolving
incidents
• Problem management’s main goal is the detection of the underlying
causes of an incident and the best resolution and prevention.
Main Roles
• Service Operation Team
• Application Owner
• Business Team/Sponsor
Missing in Action
• Project Scope
6. Before we start: What is Scrum?
Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development
methodology for managing product development.
Main Roles:
• Product Owner
• Scrum Master
• Dev Team
Missing in Action
• Feedback Loop
• Operation Team
• PROD Transition
7. Where Dev meets Operation?
Service Operation
Team
Each time at the end of each Sprint when
a releasable increment of done functionality go LIVE
9. Recipe#1:
SO Team participates in Sprint Planning
• Create feedback loop for DevTeam
• Problem tickets should be adressed to project team (linked issues,
tools integration)
• Scrum Product Owner has to validate impact for each production
problem ticket
• Customer feedback loop should be organized by service operation
team
• Build KnowHow in Production Team
• Service operation team should know about the scope of each sprint
• Join Problem Management Board
and Sprint Planning
11. Recipe#2:
SO Team prepare/validates Test-Cases
• Provide real-life scenarios for DevTeam
• SO Team can deliver use cases from Live environment.
• This can reduce the need to acquire and consume production data and allow
testing to be both more effective and efficient.
• Test results provide the visibility
• Service Operation Team gets overview of current development state
For more details about Test-Driven Development (TDD) :
Beck, K. Test-Driven Development: By Example.
https://groups.yahoo.com/group/testdrivendevelopment/files/
12. Recipe#3:
SO in Sprint Review & Retrospective
Participation in
Sprint Review &
Sprint Retrospective
13. Recipe#3:
SO in Sprint Review & Retrospective
• Report all your issues
• If necessary project team provide documentation for new functionality
• Each single bug/workaroud should be documented and communicated
to SO team
14. Open organisational issues
• Building the DevOps Culture
• For established organizations, Scrum is very hard to deploy. Moving
from yearly or semi-annual releases to weekly iterations is very hard
and very easy to fail at.
• Building communication environment
• JIRA for Development, serviceNow for Incidents, HP ALM for project
management, etc.
• Defining roles and responsibilities
• Responsibilities, communications, expectations and escalation path should be
clarified before projects start
15. SO Team for multiple agile projects
• With established Scrum-ITIL alignment the scheme
is highly scalable
16. Usefull links
• Scaling Lean And Agile - Thinking And Organizational Tools
http://www.craiglarman.com/wiki/index.php?title=Book_-_Scaling_Lean_and_Agile_-_Thinking_and_Organizational_Tools
• ITIL – Introducing service operation
https://www.ucisa.ac.uk/~/media/Files/members/activities/ITIL/service_operation/ITIL_Introducing%20Service%20Operation%20pdf.ashx
• Scaled Agile Framework
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/