Implementing ITIL Change and Release Management

The Business-Focused, Best-Practice Guide to Succeeding with 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.

Coverage includes

• Discovering and managing your change and release management requirements
• Identifying the resources you’ll need to succeed
• Building comprehensive schedules for executing change/release management projects
• Moving from planning to real-world implementation
• Choosing the right tools—or modifying the tools you’ve already invested in
• Using change/release management to facilitate auditing and ensure compliance
• Leveraging the full business benefits of mature change/release management processes

Covers ITIL version 3 

Acknowledgments xv

About the Author xvi

Part I: Planning 1

Chapter 1: Change and Release Management: Better Together 3

Chapter 2: Discovering and Managing Requirements 13

Chapter 3: Defining Change and Release Management Processes 27

Chapter 4: Building Logical Work Flows 41

Chapter 5: Completing the Implementation Plan 51

Part II: Implementing 65

Chapter 6: Choosing the Tools 67

Chapter 7: Migrating or Consolidating Data 85

Chapter 8: Bringing the Process to Life 97

Chapter 9: Choosing and Running a Pilot 109

Chapter 10: Moving from Pilot to Production 121

Part III: Operational Issues 133

Chapter 11: The Forward Schedule of Change 135

Chapter 12: Building the Definitive Media Library 143

Chapter 13: Defining Release Packages 153

Chapter 14: Auditing and Compliance Management 163

Part IV: Reaping the Benefits 173

Chapter 15: Business Impact Analysis 175

Chapter 16: Reports and Service Levels 185

Chapter 17: Linking to Other Processes 199

Index 209

Larry Klosterboer is a certified IT architect specializing in systems engineering. He works for IBM’s global service delivery team out of Austin, Texas. He has more than twenty years of experience in service delivery, spanning technologies from mainframe to networking to desktop computing. Most of that time has been spent designing and implementing service management solutions. Larry currently works as a lead systems engineer for IBM’s large outsourcing customers.