ITIL is a comprehensive collection of consistent and coherent best practices focused on the management of IT service processes. It’s intended to promote a quality approach to achieving business effectiveness and efficiency in the use of business systems. It has a subsection known as IT Service Management, which is concerned with delivering and supporting IT services that are appropriate to the business requirements of the organization.

It’s popular, it’s used worldwide, and it isn’t aimed specifically at large organizations – it works equally well for large, mid-size or smaller IT groups. It doesn’t tell you exactly what to do – it’s a set of best-practice guidelines that you customize as you implement them within your own organization, taking advantage of your local knowledge. You can use ITIL in part, or in whole, it’s up to you, and your individual requirements. ITIL originated in the United Kingdom, and the home page of the Office of Government Commerce, who “own” process definitions, can be found here.

There are a number of high-level sections to ITIL, and I spent a lot of time working within the IT Service Support and IT Service Delivery areas – the diagram below (created in MindManager) shows the top-level working areas addressed within these two sections. I’m expanding that MindMap currently, including definitions, goals, benefits, risks and KPI’s, as well as descriptive notes for each area, and I’ll publish specific sections of each of those over the next days & weeks. If you want a particular MindMap in full-form, just let me know in the comments.

technorati tags: Process, MindManager, ITIL

Edit/Update: A later post of mine, which can be found here, has the “complete” mindmap I have done on ITIL Service Support & Service Delivery.  Help yourselves…

When I hold the meeting tomorrow, I’ll give out copies of the map, with the “Notes/Thoughts” section collapsed, but everything else expanded, for the participants reference. The “Notes/Thoughts” section is for me, as the meeting lead, to remind me of “discussion methods” that can be useful for these kind of things – simple brainstorming, the Six Thinking Hats, and SCAMPER.

During the meeting, I’ll make notes on the whiteboard, on my copy of the agenda, and on regular paper as I see fit. As it’ll be a fairly interactive meeting, I’m not going to try and take digital notes, either in OneNote or straight into MindManager, as I might under other circumstances; instead I’ll update everything into the MindManager map as appropriate after the meeting, and then send out both the map itself, and a Word document generated from it, for participants reference.

technorati tags: Process, MindManager, Meetings

Update: I realised that although I can’t use the MindManager web embed option, I can load the file up to WordPress for those of you that have MindManager itself, and want the file. I’ve got no way of tracking that, so if you take it and like it, or have any other comments, do please let me know in the comments section. Thanks.

Update 2: Well, apparently not. It worked in testing yesterday, but WordPress.com won’t allow me to upload a “.mmap” file now. I don’t know if that is a deliberate change, or a temporary thing. I’ll check again later. So, the original still applies – if you want the file, just let me know.

Final Update: Kai reminds me in the comments below that I was going to embed the Mindmap using the MindJet viewer plugin once I had things up and running on this new site.  Well, I’ve been trying…  I can embed the map, and it works perfectly – that really is a good plugin.  Displays great in IE as well.  Trouble is, it completely destroys the page layout for every post below it in Firefox – completely removes the formatting and such that is applied through the theme here.  Now, someday/somewhen, I’ll spend a bit more time understanding the inner workings of what’s going on here, and I’m sure I can work around it, but in the meantime, I want to focus on producing content for the site, rather than dealing with the mechanics of it.  So, old school approach:

Click here to download the “Taskforce Template MindMap” (Requires MindJet MindManager, or their free viewer).

technorati tags: Process, MindManager,

Glad you’ve come around to this stuff Ant – I don’t think a day goes by at the moment that I don’t do some form of mindmap. Not always as formal as a MindManager produced version, maybe just a back-of-the-envelope one, but it definately helps with the thought process.

And if you haven’t already seen it, you might want to look at the browser plugin for MindManager.

technorati tags: Process, MindManager,