Randy Young ::: Adopting and Adapting : Service Mgmt

Some great training on IT Governance, Risk, and Portfolio Mgmt

Randy_Young — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 00:54:48 GMT

I had the great pleasure of attending training this week at the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR). I attended the summer session at CISR which comprised classes on:

IT Portfolios and Business Agility
Enterprise Architecture as Strategy
IT Risk and Oversight
IT Governance and Leadership
IT-Enabled Change: The Human Dimension

For those with an IT governance focus, these classes are a must. It is by far the best training, from an IT mgmt perspective, that I have attended. The classes were very well structured with pertinent and dynamic guest speakers including:

Jeff Sampler, Oxford University
Rob Cohen, Vice President of Information Systems & Chief Information Officer, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals
James Cash, Board Member, GE, Microsoft, Wal-Mart
Pat Hewlett, Chief Information Officer, Exxon Mobil
Omar Baig, Senior Information Officer, International Finance Corporation
Martin Curley, Director, IT Innovation, Intel Corporation
John Petrey, Executive Vice President & Chief Information Officer, TD Banknorth
John Cross, Former Group CIO, British Petroleum

In addition to the guest speakers, there is a wealth of information presented by:

Peter Weill, Director, CISR & Senior Research Scientist
Jeanne Ross, Principle Research Scientist
George Westerman, Research Scientist

Kudos to Peter, Jeanne, and George. They provided some excellent information that I highly recommend. I will be summarizing and posting more on specific learnings in future posts.

New book available soon on the Solutions Framework

Randy_Young — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 21:04:49 GMT

Mike Turner has an MS Press book coming out soon on the Microsoft Solutions Framework. I encourage you all to get a copy when it is available. Mike has long been an expert on MSF and his learnings will provide some great insight into understanding and adopting the framework.

“Get the hands-on guidance you need to understand how to work with the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF), Version 4. MSF is a deliberate and disciplined approach to technology projects based on a defined set of principles, models, disciplines, concepts, guidelines, and proven practices from Microsoft. MSF has a long history of helping teams and organizations become more successful in delivering business-driven technology solutions to their customers.”

ITIL books spark IT improvement

Randy_Young — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 03:58:46 GMT

Pretty good article here on ITIL adoption and MOF implementation. To quote from the article:

“In February 2004, Microsoft consultants descended on ACC’s operations center for a one-week assessment of help-desk procedures for managing problems, changes, configurations and upgrades. The Microsoft team then issued a report, 10 percent of which was a snapshot of observations and 90 percent of which offered recommendations the command could act on. Center officials immediately started implementing the recommendations, and their work continues. Among the improvements:

IT managers are better able to identify and prioritize resources for the most critical IT infrastructure problems.
Managers can track relationships between system changes and network availability.
A formalized process now exists for requesting, analyzing and approving configuration changes.

What can MOF do for you?

A great stop for ITIL-MOF internet resources

Randy_Young — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 21:28:28 GMT

Tony put up a great list of ITIL and MOF links in a recent post. If you have others that aren’t listed, please let one of us know.

You can find the list by clicking here.

MOF Continuous Improvement Roadmap now available for download

Randy_Young — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 02:25:43 GMT

One of the common results to a service improvement project is the stagnation that takes place after the initial assessment, design, and implementation. A “version 1” is typically realized but once the process changes are in place, the ball gets dropped and a repetitive assessment never takes place.

The goal of the MOF Continuous Improvement Roadmap (CIR) is to make this continuous improvement actionable and achievable to help ensure that you are successful with process changes to IT operations.

In addition, the MOF CIR assists IT service management staff by identifying areas of improvement based on business value, impact on IT personnel, and the ability to gain a “quick win” versus a long term improvement project. Once these areas have been identified, then the CIR prescribes concise direction for focusing your service improvement efforts where they can benefit you the most.

The MOF CIR is based on the best practice guidance contained in MOF version 3, and is positioned for compatibility with future releases of MOF and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). It has three distinct components:

1. MOF Service Management Assessment

2. MOF Service Improvement Program (SIP)

3. MOF Service Management Guidance

Technical details on Desired Configuration Monitoring

Randy_Young — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 20:20:26 GMT

If you are currently using the free Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) solution for SMS 2003 or are evaluating this functionality, there is a great blog on MSDN which digs into the technical details of this software.

In case you are unfamiliar with DCM, this solution will allow you to automate the validation of configuration management data that you are collecting with SMS. DCM also ties into Service Monitoring and Control by utilizing MOM to alert on any “out of compliance” items.

From the documentation, “Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) enables you to author desired configuration manifests, and to monitor and report on compliance of your computers against a desired configuration. DCM strengthens the Microsoft systems management platform by checking for undesired configuration changes across multiple configuration sources.”

American ITIL expanding into goverment IT

Randy_Young — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 22:23:20 GMT

Just came across a great article at www.govtech.net on ITIL adoption in the US. The author, Chad Vander Veen, delves into why this has taken off so much in the US the last few years, the expanded adoption in government IT, and where things are going in v3.0.

It mentions that some in government circles “are finding that ITIL is renewing the focus on serving customers needs. The consolidation movement sweeping the nation would be utterly pointless if it didn't improve the functions of an organization. And in government, the primary function is serving the public.”

If you are new to ITIL and why this is becoming such a hot topic, this article is a good starting point.

A good "How To" on setting up a virtual development and test environment

Randy_Young — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 01:27:00 GMT

Need sound operational and technical assistance to setup a production emulated development and test environment? Need this environment to support change and release management? If the answers are yes, then I highly recommend you examine the WSSRA (Windows Server System Reference Architecture) Virtual Environments for Development and Test solution or WSSRA-VE for short. This is part of the overall WSSRA which outlines a standardized infrastructure architecture. The goal of WSSRA is to establish a foundation upon which organizations can design and implement solutions on the Microsoft architecture with more speed and less risk and cost.

The purpose of the WSSRA-VE is to show how to design and build an accurate emulation of a corporate enterprise data center such as the one designed and documented in WSSRA, but altered to be used by development and test teams.

So, how does this fit into MOF and process initiatives? There is extensive guidance in the Operations document as part of this solution (contained in the download from the link above) which ties this solution into the operating quadrant, virtual team, and various SMFs in the Optimizing quadrant. Roles and responsibilities are documented and skills required to setup and operate in this environment.

This is extensive guidance. Don’t download expecting some light reading. This is very detailed and meant to be distilled within a project team to implement this solution.

ITIL Adoption Clearly Outpacing all Other Process and Compliance Frameworks

Randy_Young — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 23:23:00 GMT

Evergreen Systems, a consulting firm based in Sterling, VA, recently reported its findings from an ITIL benchmark study. They surveyed 167 people representing 108 companies and organizations at the 5th Annual IT Service Management Forum annual conference.

Some results that jumped out at me from this study…

57% of those surveyed have a budgeted and approved ITIL project underway in the next 6 months.
Top 3 business drivers for using ITIL are Service Quality, IT to Business alignment, and Process Efficiency
75% plan to create, fully integrate, and maintain an active CMDB while only 24% have reached IT-wide consensus on a common model for configuration items (CIs).

Read a news article summarizing the results here on Business Wire.

Why MOF and not just ITIL?

Randy_Young — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 01:33:00 GMT

Are you very familiar with ITIL concepts and wonder why implement MOF? A new white paper on MOF: An Actionable and Prescriptive Approach to ITIL has been published to the Microsoft Download Center. This white paper explains how MOF builds on and extends (or adopts and adapts if you like those words better) ITIL, to provide improved and actionable guidance for IT operations.

The paper goes into the contrast of ITIL being more descriptive and MOF being more prescriptive with process driven tools and best practices. A great comparison table shows specific topics, how ITIL defines them, and how MOF expands on what ITIL covers. For example:

Topic Area –

Business Perspective

ITIL Definition –

Business continuity management, partnerships and outsourcing, surviving change, and transformation of business practices through radical change.
Looks at IT in business terms as a means of improving services and reducing costs.
Includes cross-organizational integration with IT services and decision-making governance.

How MOF Expands on ITIL –

Continuous Improvement Roadmap (CIR) applies business perspectives to IT as a strategic asset.
Helps companies assess current service management and form a Service Improvement Program (SIP) based on business value.
Changing Quadrant highlights best practices for planning and managing change.
MOF Team Model defines roles and responsibilities for a transparent decision-making process.

There is a valuable section that highlights the solution accelerators which help automate key service management scenarios. Solutions like:

This is a quick and easy to read document. If you require further reading, links to additional detail are provided within it.

Free Add-On Monitoring Solution Available for SMS 2003 to Support Configuration Management

Randy_Young — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 01:55:00 GMT

From the Desired Configuration Monitoring user guide…

“Desired Configuration Monitoring (DCM) enables you to author desired configuration manifests, and to monitor and report on compliance of your computers against a desired configuration. DCM thereby strengthens the Microsoft systems management platform by checking for undesired configuration changes across multiple configuration sources.
DCM uses the Microsoft Exchange Server Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA) as the underlying compliance-checking engine, Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 for the targeting, deployment, and scheduling mechanism, and Microsoft SQL Server™ Reporting Services as the reporting infrastructure. In addition, Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 can be used as the alerting infrastructure.”

When we look at Configuration Management from a MOF / ITIL perspective, the goal of configuration management is to ensure that only authorized components, referred to as configuration items (CIs), are used in the IT environment and that all changes to CIs are recorded and tracked throughout the component’s life cycle. To achieve this goal, the configuration management process includes the following objectives:

To identify configuration items and their relationships and add them to the configuration management database (CMDB).
To enable access to the CMDB and CIs by other SMFs.
To update and change CIs following changes to IT components during the release management process.
To establish a review process that ensures that the CMDB accurately reflects the production IT environment.

If you already have SMS 2003 SP1 and MOM 2005 already in place, this tool can help support your configuration mgmt process by automating some of the review process to ensure that CMDB matches production configuration and also ensure that unauthorized changes to production don’t go unnoticed.

Another great source for MOF and ITIL training.

Randy_Young — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 16:57:00 GMT

I saw an email recommending ITpreneurs.com as an excellent source for training classes. They offer traditional classroom delivered, e-learning (self paced, virtual instructor led), and Virtual Classroom style training.

They have courses on:

MOF
ITIL
COBIT
HDI
BS15000

Here is a link to their online catalog of classes.

FYI, I made a dangerous move and started messing around with CSS to give my blog a different look. If you have any issues viewing it on the web, please let me know.

Interested in a more secure and well-managed infrastructure?

Randy_Young — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 21:32:00 GMT

Keith Combs presented a great webcast on a “more secure and well-managed infrastructure” by outlining effective implementation and optimization of MOF principles. Keith posted about this in a recent blog entry which outlines details from the webcast. If you haven’t viewed it yet, I encourage you to do so. Register here.

He delves into how MOF fits into the Windows Server System Reference Architecture (WSSRA), MOF relating to ITIL, solution accelerators, and operations guides. He mentioned that there might have been an issue with the webcast recording, but I was able to register and download for offline viewing and see the whole thing, as far as I can tell. Check it out.

The Love Triangle - Change Management, Configuration Managment, and Release Management

Randy_Young — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 21:51:00 GMT

In a recent article in ict*World, Russell Steyn wrote about the “love triangle in ITIL – configuration management, change management, and release management.” Interesting that this image arises as within the MOF training curriculum, there is a graphic similar to the following one which depicts a triangle between these three service management functions.

To flow through this triangle…

Change Mgmt receives a request for change (RFC).
Configuration Mgmt performs a baseline assessment of the environment which is used by Change mgmt to evaluate the impacts of the RFC.
The CAB authorizes, if approved, release mgmt to plan and implement the release. Change mgmt monitors the release process.
Release and configuration mgmt work cohesively to ensure that applications move out of and into the definitive software library (DSL) in a controlled fashion. Configuration mgmt assists release mgmt to identify the affected CIs and the impact of that affect.
Release mgmt executes the implementation and provides CI updates to configuration mgmt.
Throughout, change mgmt monitors the release, development, testing, and implementation to resolve issues and ensure planned schedules are adhered to.

Viewed another way, the following graphic depicts the release management process overlapping the change and configuration management processes.

To summarize, it is impossible to focus on one of these SMFs without a focus on the others. This is also true of the MOF process model in general. While quadrants can be examined for gaps and needs for maturity, a holistic approach should always be taken when examining these processes within your organization.

How to Apply MOF Risk Management Discipline in Your Organization

Randy_Young — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 00:19:00 GMT

To continue discussion from previous post on risk management tied to IT decision making…

First the “why”. There are many reasons listed in the MOF Risk Management Discipline white paper for why risk management is important to an organization. One of the more important ones to me is that there is less time between failure of a service and impact to a business than ever before. The failures are generally more visible as IT supplies many business critical systems that directly interact with customers. As stated in my previous post, it would be impossible to remove risk completely, but sound risk management techniques can drive risk to an acceptable (and more predictable) level.

MOF defines the risk managment process in the following 6 steps:

Identify. Risk identification allows individuals to identify risks so that the operations staff becomes aware of potential problems. Not only should risk identification be undertaken as early as possible, but it also should be repeated frequently.’
Analyze and prioritize. Risk analysis transforms the estimates or data about specific risks that developed during risk identification into a consistent form that can be used to make decisions around prioritization. Risk prioritization enables operations to commit resources to manage the most important risks.
Plan and schedule. Risk planning takes the information obtained from risk analysis and uses it to formulate strategies, plans, change requests, and actions. Risk scheduling ensures that these plans are approved and then incorporated into the standard day-to-day processes and infrastructure.
Track and report. Risk tracking monitors the status of specific risks and the progress in their respective action plans. Risk tracking also includes monitoring the probability, impact, exposure, and other measures of risk for changes that could alter priority or risk plans and ultimately the availability of the service. Risk reporting ensures that the operations staff, service manager, and other stakeholders are aware of the status of top risks and the plans to manage them.
Control. Risk control is the process of executing risk action plans and their associated status reporting. Risk control also includes initiating change control requests when changes in risk status or risk plans could affect the availability of the service or SLA.
Learn. Risk learning formalizes the lessons learned and uses tools to capture, categorize, and index that knowledge in a reusable form that can be shared with others.

So based on this need for risk management and the process that defines it, how do we begin to apply it? MOF recommends that “operations integrate risk management into decision-making in the same way it has already integrated such critical factors as time, money, and labor:

Risk management should be integrated into operations decision-making in every job function and role.
Risk management should be taken seriously and given an appropriate amount of effort and formality.
Management at all levels should encourage the view that identifying risks is a positive activity that is crucial to an effective risk-management process.
Risk management should be performed continuously to ensure that operations deals with the risks that are relevant today, not just the ones that were relevant last quarter.

Fortunately, formalizing risk management practices is an achievable goal. Organizations can enhance the achievement of this goal by fostering a risk management culture.”

Also, built into the downloadable version of the Risk Management Discipline white paper, at the bottom of Appendix B, is a Contoso Master Risk List Worksheet object that is embedded into the document. Open this Excel spreadsheet and you will have a formatted sample risk worksheet that you can begin utilizing within your company.