Implementing ITIL Change and Release Management
ITIL® (Information Technology Infrastructure Library®) can help organizations streamline and integrate their operations, dramatically improving efficiency and delivering greater business value. For the first time, there's a comprehensive best-practice guide to succeeding with two of the most crucial and challenging parts of ITIL: change and release management.
Leading IBM® ITIL expert and author Larry Klosterboer shares solid expertise gained from real implementations across multiple industries. He helps you decide where to invest, avoid ITIL pitfalls, and build successful, long-term processes that deliver real return on investment. You'll find detailed guidance on each process, integrated into a comprehensive roadmap for planning, implementation, and operation—a roadmap available nowhere else.
Klosterboer offers in-depth coverage of the crucial issues every implementer will face, including make-or-break challenges most consultants can't or won't talk about. For example, he demonstrates how to set a reasonable project scope, migrate data, execute successful pilot programs, and continually improve quality once ITIL practices are in place.
This book's practical insights will be invaluable to every IT executive, professional, and user who wants to bring their current change and release practices in line with ITIL—and transform them from a source of frustration into a source of value.
Review By: John Snuggs
08/07/2009
This book would be a good choice for a person responsible for an organization-wide adoption of the ITIL processes. It begins with an overview of ITIL and a description of why change and release management should be addressed in tandem. The author provides a compelling case, even for a skeptic like me. This is followed by a throw-away chapter on requirements and subsequent chapters containing valuable information about defining processes and building work flows. The book bogged down on tool selection and implementation. While I appreciate that there are valuable nuggets of information, my experience at an organization large enough so that ITIL process is recognized as valuable would almost certainly have a standard approach to tool selection. The whole section on implementation is just not worth the time it takes to read it unless you don't already have organizational guidance about how to implement third party tools.
Section 3—Operational Issues covers a number of meaty topics: forward schedule of changes, definitive media library, release packages, and auditing and compliance management. The author objectively identifies challenges in each area. The final section of the book explains how to pull valuable information out of your newly implemented ITIL change and release management tool.
Overall, this book starts slowly and is not recommended as one where you should sit down and read from start to finish; instead, use it to address your immediate needs more like a reference book. If you’ve already implemented the ITIL processes, you will still get benefit from the final two sections that emphasize how to capitalize on your investment.
The book includes free access to the on-line version on Safari books for forty-five days—a nice perk if you are trying to read it while travelling.