ITIL and Agile

So you have a AMS project, which currently uses ITIL and you want to move to Agile Development.

What is the background of this change? In my opinion ITIL is a good framework for operations in AMS projects, whereas Scrum has its strength more in the new development. So the question is, how much will be operations and how much is new development and are the CR major stuff or minor tasks.

If you have little CRs and those are mainly minor tasks, I would rather go for Kanban than Scrum or Scrumban. Espescially the operational tasks are hardly manageable in pure Scrum, as you cannot say when which cases come up, so you cannot have them in the Planning. So just have them on the Kanban Board, easily managed.

If you have huge CRs, Scrum or Scrumban may be a good choice and there are two options to go. Either you have the team commit less than 100% for the CRs, which are managed in Sprints, so that they have a certain availability for operations. Or you go for Scrumban, where you plan your Sprints but have everything on the Kanban Board and can pull the operations on the board as well.

Now would like to know whether the SLA agreement has to be removed if working in Agile.

Perhaps it might be wise to replace it with a Service Level Expectation, expressed as a probability or range, and which is evidenced by actual data. This might be more realistic than an "agreement" of some kind which cannot be so supported.

I worked with a team that worked on nothing but customer inquiries. They used Scrum events, but they really were just doing Kanban. What is your team trying to get out of business agility?

The SLA is still a part of the ITIL 4 framework (AgileITSM).



A service level agreement (SLA) is a documented agreement between a service provider and a customer that identifies services required and the expected level of service.

   ▪ SLA is a tool to measure the performance of services from the customer’s point of view.

   ▪ Key requirements for successful SLAs:

           ● Related to a defined service

           ● Should relate to defined outcomes, not just operational metrics

           ● Should reflect an agreement between the service provider and the service consumer

           ● Must be simply written and easy to understand for all parties

Using an Agile framework for managing your L2, L3, CR and PBI would not conflict with having an SLA, personally still having an SLA will be necessary since it's the documented agreement between service provider and customer. 

I would say that Kanban and PSK lent themself better as Agile frameworks than pure Scrum.



Hope that this helps.

Hi All,

 Thanks a lot for all your replies . Here are some of the answers raised by some of your above .

The team works on l2 and l3 support predominantly working on incidents , PBI and CR spanning from small to large enhancements . The delivery the releases as and when the CR is completed and signed off . 

Business agility is delivery faster with change in the business requirements .

I somehow felt ScrumBan way works  with this type of set up . Would like to know your views

Most ScrumBan does not exists, because it's a mix of some Scrum practices and some Kanban practices, yet Scrum can only exists in its entirety.



Best is to read the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams (PSK I) (https://www.scrum.org/resources/kanban-guide-scrum-teams) if you want to have the benefits of Scrum and Kanban.



If you want to implement a "pure" Kanban framework, you have two options:

1) https://prokanban.org/  which lies inline with with the PSK I

2) https://www.kanban.university/



Hope that this helps.