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Multimatics Insight

Agile ITSM - Responding Change Through Collaborative Development

Agile vs ITIL, IT Service Management, Agile ITSM

In the midst of business’ advancement and optimized delivery, organizations often found struggling in managing the overall operations and processes to dilver efficient solutions, specifically for their customers and stakeholders. While organizations have implemented its IT service management, this best practices should be followed by high velocity IT components to support them. Not to mention the lack of engagement of the stakeholders, the difficulty of understanding the real needs of customers’ behaviours, and the lack of agility and reactivity which worsened the workflow.

In the ever-changing business, improving agility is the best way to resolve future challenges. IT service management is the capacity to collect data, analyze, report and implement agile improvements. Successful IT service management (ITSM) can be achieved through efficient and agile processes that alter the the traditional company transformation to a digital enterprise.

Multimatics understands the need of business acceleration and efficient processes, and therefore, is ready to become organizations’ business partners in delivering the utmost performance. Multimatics offers numerous internationally-recognized certification programs such as ITIL V4 Foundation, ITIL V4 Specialist, Agile Leadership, Agile PM Practitioner and more to minimize the skill gap and optimize your team’s capability in responding to the upcoming IT challenges.

ITSM vs. Agile: The Definitive Guide

Being agile, or, in other words, agility, is the ability to respond quickly and in a flexible way to changes in the business and technical domains, but also the ability to respond the change when it prioritize the competitive advantage of customers and users explained that, by definition, agility must be light and flexible in terms of structure to enable a high speed of response to any kind of change.

ITSM is a collection of behaviours, skills, activities, and technologies applied by organizations to manage the creation, delivery, and support of IT-based services aiming at reaching the business goals and at satisfying customer needs. ITSM priorities the alignment of resources, people, information, and organization with regulatory and compliance.

Despite that it may seem peculiar to combine ITSM and agile, as the nature of ITSM heavily rely on standarized process and waterfall management, while agile heavily rely through collaborative communication and cross-functional workflow. These possibilities of implementing Agile ITSM can open to new solutions and opportunities for organizations to explore, identify, and resolve emerging issues effectively.

Multimatics understands the need of business acceleration and efficient processes, and therefore, is ready to become organizations’ business partners in delivering the utmost performance. Multimatics offers numerous internationally-recognized certification programs such as ITIL V4 Foundation, ITIL V4 Specialits, Agile Scrum Foundation, and more to minimize the skill gap and optimize your team’s capability in responding to the upcoming IT challenges. IT service management (ITSM) supports operations and activities involved around organizations’ workflow, such as capacity management, configuration management, incident management, and availability management.

Meanwhile, Agile is a methodology focuses in software development flow through cross-functional operation and continuous delivery. Agile emphasizes incremental improvement over working through the planned blueprint

Can Agile and ITSM work together?

Despite of Agile being adaptive and people-oriented framework and ITSM is a predictive and process-oriented framework, both can work collaboratively. Agile ITSM balanced out Agile software development and service management to deliver utmost performance.

Adapted from Agile Manifesto, collaborative implementation of Agile and ITSM aims to improve customer satisfaction, collaboration, flexibility, and efficiency in ITSM processes. Agile ITSM prioritize collaboration and interactions over processes and tools through comprehensive documentation to mitigate risks and maximize workflow.

Agile IT Service Management (ITSM) has emerged as a powerful approach to enhancing service delivery and customer satisfaction. However, the integration of Agile methodologies into ITSM practices also brings forth a unique set of challenges, particularly in the realms of security and compliance.

Here are 5 Security and Compliance Issues in Agile ITSM that organizations should be aware of:

  1. Frequent iterations and rapid development cycles

    The pace can sometimes lead to security measures being overlooked or implemented inadequately. Ensuring that security is not compromised while maintaining the performance of Agile processes requires a careful integration of security considerations into each phase of development.

  2. Changing Regulatory Landscape

    The regulatory environment surrounding data protection and security is continually evolving. Adapting Agile practices to comply with changing ITSM regulations can be challenging, as it demands constant vigilance and flexibility.

  3. Lack of Clear Security Requirements

    Agile places a strong emphasis on user stories and evolving requirements, which can sometimes lead to a lack of clear security requirements upfront. This can result in security features being overlooked which increases the risk of vulnerabilities.

  4. Collaboration and Communication

    Agile ITSM relies heavily on cross-functional collaboration and open communication. However, security and compliance teams might have different priorities and perspectives from development teams, which can become a challenge when not mitigate effectively.

  5. Balancing Flexibility and Control

    Striking the right balance between allowing development teams the autonomy to adapt and innovate while ensuring consistent security and compliance practices across the organization can be complex.

All in all, when implemented correctly and effectively, Agile ITSM can support organizations to implement effective agile service management while optimizing IT Service Management performance without neglecting the standardized compliance and regulatory.

If you’re interested in learning more about ITSM and its implementation towards the digital era, read more about 5 Signs Your Organization Needs ITSM Implementation and things you should pay attention to when implementing Agile.

Reference:

Mora, M., Marx-Gomez, J., Wang, F., & Diaz, O. (2021). Agile it service management frameworks and standards: A review. Advances in Software Engineering, Education, and e-Learning: Proceedings from FECS'20, FCS'20, SERP'20, and EEE'20, 921-936.

Mora, M., Gómez, J. M., Wang, F., & Díaz, E. O. (2021). A review of the IT service design process in agile ITSM frameworks. balancing agile and disciplined engineering and management approaches for IT services and software products, 248-270.

Sahid, A., Maleh, Y., & Mounir, S. (2022). Towards an agile ITSM maturity framework for organizations: A case study. EDPACS, 66(6), 1-21.

Verlaine, B. (2017). Toward an agile IT service management framework. Service Science, 9(4), 263-274.

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