What is Agile Service Management?

Agile is a mindset. It’s a set of values that helps organizations be more flexible and responsive. Agile was introduced in software development, as a solution to the long, heavily documented development processes that made it hard to quickly release new functionalities.

The Agile Manifesto

In 2001, the software branch introduced the Agile Manifesto for Software Development. The manifesto comprises four values:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Is Agile only used in Software Development?

Short answer? No.
Over the past few years, agile has been getting more traction in other fields, such as Sales and Marketing. People started to find a way to take the agile core values away from just software development and made them applicable for all types of organizations. This resulted in several versions of the Agile manifesto, the most popular of which is Modern Agile.

Now you know what Agile is, the next question arises: How do you translate it to IT service management (ITSM)? This is actually quite simple. You only need one adjustment in the second value of the Agile Manifesto:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
• Working services over comprehensive documentation.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
• Responding to change over following a plan.

The idea is that you keep to these principles when designing and delivering services. How you do this exactly, depends on the organization you’re in.

How does Agile Service Management work in practice? Some examples of how an IT-department can work more agile:

• Involve your customers in designing your processes and services.
• When releasing a new product, release a basic solution to a small test audience and iterate based on their feedback.
• Aim for simplicity in your processes, remove steps that have no value for your customer.
• Allow your team to deviate from the default process when it results in a better solution

Involve your customers

Engage customers in the design of your processes and services to ensure they meet real needs.

Iterative releases

Release basic solutions to a small test audience and iterate based on their feedback. This approach allows for rapid adjustments and improvements.

Simplify processes

Aim for simplicity by removing steps that do not add value to the customer. Streamlined processes are more agile and easier to adapt.

Empower teams

Allow your team to deviate from default processes when it results in better solutions, fostering innovation and responsiveness.

ITIL is still the most widely used framework for IT organizations. How do these Agile principles relate to the ITIL framework and what is the difference between the two? Is it possible to combine Agile Service Management and ITIL?

Well, yes. Agile and ITIL are not mutually exclusive. Agile is a philosophy, a set of guidelines that helps you make decisions in your everyday work, but they don’t tell you how to complete specific tasks. ITIL is a framework, a collection of procedures that describe how to do your work.

While ITIL does have a reputation for being rigid, the idea behind ITIL has always been that you apply the best practices to the way your organization works. This means you could implement ITIL Incident Management in an agile way.

Combining Agile and ITIL

• Incident Management: Implement ITIL Incident Management in an agile way by focusing on rapid response and continuous improvement.
• Change Management: Use agile practices to manage changes more effectively, reducing downtime and improving service quality.

Scrum is the most widely adopted framework to implement an agile way of working. Just like the Agile Manifesto, the Scrum framework was first created for software development, and is now also used in other fields as well.

Scrum basics

• Teams: Consist of 3 to 9 people.
• Sprints: Typically last 1 to 4 weeks.
• Feedback loops: At the end of each sprint, the team presents their work to stakeholders and incorporates feedback into the next iteration.

Scrum works with small, self-managing, multidisciplinary teams of 3 to 9 people. A Scrum team delivers a new or improved product within one ‘sprint’, a period of 1 to 4 weeks. At the end of the sprint, the team shows the product to the stakeholders, and, when necessary, uses the feedback to make improvements in the next sprint. The goal of short sprints and regular feedback is to make sure you can quickly respond to customer feedback and changing circumstances.