Ivanka Menken

As always we have the same discussion again in relation to ITIL V3: Are the ‘processes’ in the Service Operation Lifecycle, really processes or merely procedures within a larger process?

Today the discussion flared up again in relation to Request Fulfillment Management. Should this really be a separate process, or should it be a component of Incident Management? And to be honest, I think the authors of the book really don’t know what it is that they want because in the scope section it says:

“it is up to the organization to determine and to document which services are considered to be standard and therefore part of the request fulfillment process”

So what happens when the organization answers: 0 (zero)

Do you still need to implement request fulfillment process or are you going to run it just like you did before with the activities of request fulfillment as part of Incident Management and Change Management?

Personally I think it really doesn’t matter that much – you can have day-long academic discussions about this subject but at the end of the day it comes down to what works for the business. What is best for our support objectives to the business. What is most effective and efficient? If it means running these activities via Incident Management and Change Management? Go for it!!
But to be honest, I think that in most cases the answer would be: We really would like these activities in a separate process so we have the ability to split the monitoring and reporting activities so we have better measurements and also because it gives us the ability to automate these processes separately.

And does the business care about the naming conventions of the processes? All they (should) care about is that it helps US to support THEM according to our agreed Service Levels, as well as proven continual improvement!