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Blog posted by: Paul Jones – ITIL 4 Expert, Serco, 28 November 2019.

What did I notice most when certifying in the ITIL 4® Managing Professional Transition Module?

Above all, the agile and digital perspectives in the guidance are moving service management away from a process-only driven world.

For example, breaking down change into quick and agile approvals – even using peer approval – is a much faster way of working than the previous Change Advisory Board (CAB) approach.

If you are working in service management, this is about incorporating gateways into the real world of today and adding changes to an automated workflow. And while changes may be released within half a day, you’re still retaining change management as a process.

Supporting culture change

I think ITIL 4 Managing Professional enables conversations across the organization by offering something recognized as a standardized approach and help for the change journey.

Initially, there might be cultural resistance in organizations to what’s new in ITIL 4, but it’s not something to fight against; it’s something to go along with.

The guidance handles the cultural elements well, which is a big thing as companies start to adopt agile and digital approaches.

For more junior colleagues, this provides a very good understanding of how IT can look in an ideal world: delivering value through a structured approach within an agile framework. This means understanding the customer, what value IT is adding, how to move more quickly and what the resulting impact of change will be on the wider organization.

A timely shift in ITIL 4

The time is right for ITIL 4 as ways of working are now very different.

The previously siloed approach to IT and service management involved putting technology in place and giving the business access to it. This wasn’t interactive with either people across an organization or within IT itself.

Today, with access to new technologies such as Amazon web services and Google Cloud everything is becoming more rapid and people want things done without kerfuffle or blockages.

I don’t believe IT delivers value by telling their customers what they want and “throwing things over the fence”. The more effective way of working is to partner with the business and the customer to co-create value.

So, to work in a more interactive way and move with the times ITIL is needed to support organizations along this change journey.

Now it feels like a natural progression and is satisfying to be at the forefront of something changing for the better.