Aligning ITIL with agile approach. Three simple recipes for Scrum and Service Operation Teams to be more productive and avoid conflicts.

1. Aligning ITIL with agile approach
Three recipes for Scrum and Service
Operation Teams
•Author: Konstantin Polakov (07.04.2015)

2. Different Teams, Different Goals
Dev Goal: Getting It Done
The challenge with software development is figuring out a way to get development for
a given release completed and closed out, so that the Development team can move
on to building the next release.
Production Goal: Keeping it Running
The challenge to get software out into
production, and getting customers up and
running on it.
It requires that the customer's organization
can:
- manage known issues and defects
- understand the new capabilities
- train the staff and change the way they
work with delivered software

3. Challenges for both teams
• Know-How or „Keep in Sync“
• Knowhow Transfer to SO team – new functionality, bugs,
workarounds
• Knowhow Transfer to Dev team: production impact, user feedback,
requirements
• Building the DevOps Culture
• For established organizations, Scrum is very hard to deploy. Moving
from yearly or semi-annual releases to weekly iterations is very hard
and very easy to fail at.
• Everyone has a tool
• JIRA for Development, ServiceNow for Incidents, HP ALM for Project
Management, etc…
• Who’s the boss?
• Responsibilities, communications, expectations and escalation path should be
clarified before projects start

4. Before we start: What is ITIL?
ITIL is a set of practices for IT service management (ITSM) that
focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business
Service Operation
Team

5. Before we start:
Incident/Problem Mgmt Activities
• Incident management is process for logging, recording and resolving
incidents
• Problem management’s main goal is the detection of the underlying
causes of an incident and the best resolution and prevention.
Main Roles
• Service Operation Team
• Application Owner
• Business Team/Sponsor
Missing in Action
• Project Scope

6. Before we start: What is Scrum?
Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development
methodology for managing product development.
Main Roles:
• Product Owner
• Scrum Master
• Dev Team
Missing in Action
• Feedback Loop
• Operation Team
• PROD Transition

7. Where Dev meets Operation?
Service Operation
Team
Each time at the end of each Sprint when
a releasable increment of done functionality go LIVE

8. Recipe#1:
SO Team participates in Sprint Planning
Participate in Sprint Plan

9. Recipe#1:
SO Team participates in Sprint Planning
• Create feedback loop for DevTeam
• Problem tickets should be adressed to project team (linked issues,
tools integration)
• Scrum Product Owner has to validate impact for each production
problem ticket
• Customer feedback loop should be organized by service operation
team
• Build KnowHow in Production Team
• Service operation team should know about the scope of each sprint
• Join Problem Management Board
and Sprint Planning

10. Recipe#2:
SO Team prepare/validates Test-Cases
Test Preparation/Validation

11. Recipe#2:
SO Team prepare/validates Test-Cases
• Provide real-life scenarios for DevTeam
• SO Team can deliver use cases from Live environment.
• This can reduce the need to acquire and consume production data and allow
testing to be both more effective and efficient.
• Test results provide the visibility
• Service Operation Team gets overview of current development state
For more details about Test-Driven Development (TDD) :
Beck, K. Test-Driven Development: By Example.
https://groups.yahoo.com/group/testdrivendevelopment/files/

12. Recipe#3:
SO in Sprint Review & Retrospective
Participation in
Sprint Review &
Sprint Retrospective

13. Recipe#3:
SO in Sprint Review & Retrospective
• Report all your issues
• If necessary project team provide documentation for new functionality
• Each single bug/workaroud should be documented and communicated
to SO team

14. Open organisational issues
• Building the DevOps Culture
• For established organizations, Scrum is very hard to deploy. Moving
from yearly or semi-annual releases to weekly iterations is very hard
and very easy to fail at.
• Building communication environment
• JIRA for Development, serviceNow for Incidents, HP ALM for project
management, etc.
• Defining roles and responsibilities
• Responsibilities, communications, expectations and escalation path should be
clarified before projects start

15. SO Team for multiple agile projects
• With established Scrum-ITIL alignment the scheme
is highly scalable

16. Usefull links
• Scaling Lean And Agile - Thinking And Organizational Tools
http://www.craiglarman.com/wiki/index.php?title=Book_-_Scaling_Lean_and_Agile_-_Thinking_and_Organizational_Tools
• ITIL – Introducing service operation
https://www.ucisa.ac.uk/~/media/Files/members/activities/ITIL/service_operation/ITIL_Introducing%20Service%20Operation%20pdf.ashx
• Scaled Agile Framework
http://www.scaledagileframework.com/