The answer to the nagging question as to whether ITIL best practices and Agile can be used together is a big YES! Agile’s enhanced and rapid development benefits ITIL as this provides an opportunity for needing a well-structured framework and established rules for governance. Providing the focus of the improvement process on the necessary stakeholders on the part of ITIL is a huge probability in an Agile setting. What can be the overall benefit of this blend of ITIL and Agile? Obviously, a higher level of quality spanning across the whole infrastructure of development!
Some of the similarities between ITIL and Agile are as under:
1. CAB Gathering can be used to highlight the Backlog
CAB can make use of Agile method in terms of handling Request for Change (RFC). Change Advisory Board can have frequent Scrums for highlighting and prioritizing change requests. Then the less exigent ones and non-repetitive change requests can be placed in the product backlog. An estimated time period or a deadline can be fixed by the various teams as to what portion pertaining to the backlog can be successfully accomplished in a relatively lesser time.
2. RFC’s can be documented using Story Points/User Stories
The various change requests can be scrutinized to make sure they are appropriately fragmented down in the identical manner of featuring requests linked with User Stories with Story Points allocated while breaking things down by developers of Agile software.
3. Scrum Master and Change Manager become synonymous
The Change Manager can perform as the Scrum Manager managing swift day-to-day intense meetings to discourse about development on the present Sprints or Requests for Change. The Scrum Master’s principle would then be to Plan less; do less; test less which can form a tight response loop.
4. Agility would be augmented through Continuous Improvement
The speed of successful changes and better transparency regarding the kind of logjams can be adjudged through focus on well-determined sets of changes or Sprints and through decrease in the volume of work in development at a specified time. A burn down chart can be used during every Sprint evaluation which can enable the possibility of measuring the relevant velocity.
5. Full Compatibility in terms of automated testing
Automation is an arena common to both ITIL and software development under Agile in terms of testing and deployment.
Agile is about rapid changes while ITIL is all about how to deal with those changes.
Very good analyses. However I disagree that Scrum Master and Change Manager are synonymous. The Change Manager should be rather owner of the Product Backlog (SCRUM Product Manager) and the Scrum Master the owner of the Sprint Backlog.