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.

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.

I spent my late teens and early 20’s as a student in an undergraduate and graduate experimental psychology program. There were two main research paths in the program, one of them behavioral and the other cognitive. Regardless of which path a student chose, they would spend an enormous amount of time reading peer-reviewed experimental psychology literature. Many of these studies are considered “classics” in the world of experimental psychology in that they tested and confirmed critical hypotheses about human behavior, influence, and cognitive processing.

The key challenge for every IT manager is to provide reliable, available, innovative, and flexible IT products and services. Amid the mounting pressure to provide ever-faster responses to the growing demands of users and customers, we introduced best practices to our IT function with PRINCE2 and ITIL Service Management over the years. Do we really need more? This year we are told, with renewed vigour, that we need to be ‘Agile’.

Let’s face it…training budgets are limited these days, and we’d all like to know how we can maximize the results received from every dollar spent on training.

Along the lines of the theme of maximization, many organizations are pursuing the adoption of ITIL v3 best practices. The ITIL v3 best practices describe an approach to service management that can help organizations maximize many aspects of IT service design and delivery while minimizing many of the negatives that businesses often experience with IT. Typically when someone thinks about service management, thoughts about ITIL soon follow.

sort of.

A recent article on Forbes​.com debates the differences between a “rich” IT organization and a “poor” IT organization (and we’re not talking about money). Richness, in this sense, describes an IT organization that performs at a high level while maintaining a strong budget and standing in the enterprise. Poor organizations might also get ample budget allocations, but the difference is that they don’t spend the money as strategically as the rich organizations, which work to cut waste and operate more efficiently.

Having trouble getting IT to accept ITIL? Almost everyone has heard of the idea that change can be hard to accept. This sentiment often holds true when an IT organization decides it wants to move toward an ITIL-focused operation model.  A primary factor for the potential resistance is the cultural change that implementing ITIL usually […]

I was reading an article on ITSM Portal this morning and was intrigued with a comment someone left. The commenter, named Ian, said this regarding ITIL and ITSM: There is a desperate need for a role based scheme that reflects within a service provider organization, spanning the customer and infrastructure management skills. ITIL has so far […]