I recently delivered a Managing Across the Lifecycle class to a group of students in Northern California. The Managing Across the Lifecycle class is presently the capstone class in the ITIL certification program. When students have secured enough credits in the ITIL certification scheme, complete the Managing Across the Lifecycle class, and successfully pass the exam that’s given in conjunction with the class, they earn the ITIL Expert credential.

The ITIL 2011 refresh introduced a significant new appendix to the Service Strategy book titled Appendix C: Service Strategy and the Cloud.

This appendix is significant in that it clearly defines various types of cloud services and the types of clouds in use, as well as different aspects of cloud services. This post will focus on how this appendix describes the various aspects of cloud services.

I attended the HDI conference in Orlando this week briefly to give a presentation on common cloud support issues and how some organizations respond with effective knowledge management processes.

My presentation was at 7:30 AM on Thursday morning. I had low expectations for the number of attendees, but I was pleasantly surprised. The rather large room was mostly full. People are interested in hearing what cloud-related incidents other organizations see as well as how organizations are handling those incidents.

In the current version of the ITIL Foundation class, the following exam question appears in one of the two sample exams used in the class:
Which one of the following is the CORRECT sequence of activities for handling an incident?
The rationale behind the answer is simply, “The correct order is given in the diagram in the incident management process, and in the subsections of [SO] 4.2.5.” In this post, I will provide a better explanation of why this is the correct answer.

During a recent ITIL foundation class, a student asked an interesting question. She wanted to know:

“What is the difference between a project and a service?”

To be honest, I haven’t spent much time thinking about this distinction. However, I think that those of us who practice ITIL consulting and training should have good answers to questions such as this.

Here’s how I answered this question.

Occasionally there is confusion about the key differences between projects and programs. This blog post will summarize some of the key differences and provide a real-world example of projects and program.

A project is defined as a temporary assembly of resources and capabilities designed to create a specific product or achieve a specific objective. Projects establish criteria that, when met, signify completion of the project.

Nothing as significant as ITIL exists without criticism. It shouldn’t. Some of that criticism is well-intentioned and constructive in nature while some of it is inaccurate and simply contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. While Wikipedia might be at best a questionable source that doesn’t police itself well in all cases (for example, see Talk: Haymarket Affair, Messer-Kruse controversy), it is relevant in that someone making a decision about whether not to pursue ITIL might first check Wikipedia.

The popularity of cloud computing during the past few years is undeniable. While numerous organizations have realized true benefits from utilizing services in the cloud, in many ways, what we know as cloud computing is not an entirely new paradigm.

The basic concept of cloud services is straightforward. When a customer needs some specific functionality, that functionality can be received directly from the Internet. Billing for the service is base on utilization.

In my last post I discussed aspects of problem management in the context of a real-life situation regarding the first vehicle I owned. In that scenario, and throughout this series of posts, I’ve demonstrated a real-life situation from a standpoint of the incident and problem management processes that ITIL describes.

In my last post I presented a real-life example of incident management. I described an event that happened to me that involved an interruption to service; namely, my car stopped running. I also described the technique that I used to restore service. I ended that post with a question; if I owned that car for one year and the incident that I described happened every two weeks, how many incidents did I experience?