ITIL Service Management solutions instead of features
One of the more interesting trends we see in the market place lately is how vendors keep adding more and more processes to their solutions based upon the ITIL 3 specification. While LiveTime currently supports 6 core ITIL 3 processes (soon to be 8), there are a number of vendors that only care how many processes they have in their product, and never consider, or care how users will interact with the product. If it takes more than a few minutes to perform a task, or it is so difficult to work out how to perform one without a PhD, what value does the product really provide? This is the classic tale of building a product to a feature set, not a solution. It is so easy to lose sight of the goals of service management when you have such a simple checklist of requirements, and miss the entire point of what ITIL is all about.
ITIL is not about features, it is about providing best practice service and support. It provides the guiding principles and underlying processes you need to accomplish this. It is about getting work done and reducing costs, not a checklist of features. Just because a product checks all the boxes does not mean it will work for you. Quite the contrary. We often see prospective customers carrying checklists, asking whether we have this process or that process, without even understanding the implications of what they are asking. Often these are companies that have never implemented an ITIL solution at all and sometimes never even rolled out Incident management or understand the importance of a CMDB in the total design.
The fact that these same people say we must have release management in any solution is interesting in itself. LiveTime has been rolling out solutions for close to a decade and is yet to see a customer require full release management. More often, what they really require is more in line with enhanced change management, not complete release management at all.
It is very easy to get carried away with all you can do with ITIL. And yes it does offer a great deal, providing important checks and balances as well as demonstrable efficiencies. However, it is even more important that your organization understands what they really need and can realistically achieve to get the biggest benefits in the shortest amount of time.