ITIL … Apollo 13
Yesterday was I spent the day on an ITIL course, “Apollo 13 - An ITSM case experience“. The course was arranged by our central IT quality team.
It was an interesting and amusing day - its not intended as a serious day and you are supposed to have fun learning whilst learning about the principles of ITIL. Basically you get to play part of mission control for the Apollo 13 mission. The aims are to develop business processes and to see how they can help you achieve your business goals in IT provision. How do teams interface and communicate? How can you escalate and track problems? How do you effectively manage change?
I can see how some of the priniciples can be applied to a general IT provision in a University, though in a University, I think you need to be careful not to apply to much metrics-based testing, particularly when you think about problem solving rates and solving times - its all very well solving large numbers of easy problems, but in a University there are likely to be a number of hard problems which take a long time to resolve and these are probably more important to consider, and probably more difficult to assess with metrics.