ITIL and Project Management Interestingly enough, the ITIL and PM frameworks are not conflicting disciplines.

As a matter of fact, they complement each other in a rather synergistic manner when adopted by an organization with a defined objective for consistency and quality in IT products, service, and support. To simplify the relationship In business, the ITIL may be considered the discipline driving the company to Do the right things. On the other hand, PM may be considered the discipline driving the company to Do things right the first time. One must bear in mind that while ITIL may focus on the information technology infrastructure of the organization, project management may cover all business areas of the organization. This makes ITIL unique in its purpose and a strong complement to preparing for and supporting a technology-focused PM project. Additionally, the ITIL concepts are appropriate for the Project Management Office (PMO) in establishing some of those high-level protocols to be in place as guidelines for the overall enterprise program management portfolio. Leveraging the Synergy between ITIL and PM There are several concepts of the IT Infrastructure Library that are crucial in guiding the organization toward selecting profitable projects, and strengthening the project management process in delivering satisfactory products. Leveraging the attributes of the PM and ITIL frameworks provides an organization the ability to deliver projects with a higher level of quality and satisfaction to the customer. These attributes provide detail guidelines of how the performing organization should manage the project to deliver a satisfactory product. The Ten (10) Core Processes of ITIL The 10 core processes of ITIL V2 are encapsulated under two main categories: Service Support and Service Delivery, both of which are key considerations in project management especially when planning for the implementation of an Information technology solution.

Service Support The service support category constitutes 5 important management processes: 1. Incident Management The objective of incident management is to return a system to normal operations as swiftly and efficiently as possible, after an incident, while minimizing any adverse impact to the business. 2. Problem Management Problem management focuses on identifying and eliminating the root cause of the incident and institute solutions to prevent recurrence of such incidents. 3. Change Management The objective of change management is to minimize the impact of changes to the infrastructure, and ensure proper protocols and procedures are in place to handle

approved changes efficiently. 4. Release Management This process enables efficient distribution of software and hardware services and licenses across the IT infrastructure. Quality control in development of software and hardware is also enforced. 5. Configuration Management Configuration management tracks and monitors all the individual configuration items in a system. These may be considered technical assets that may be affected by the change process. Service Delivery The service delivery category constitutes 5 important processes: 1. Service Level Management With regard to a service level agreement (SLA), this process ensures continuous review, monitoring and documenting of the performance levels of IT services agreed upon in the SLA to the customer. 2. Capacity Management This process provides for the most cost-effective IT services as companies try to align available IT resources with business demands. 3. Availability Management This concept deals with ensuring the ability of the organization to sustain a high-level of IT components service availability to support ongoing business, at a justifiable cost. 4. Financial Management This process involves managing the organizations ability to sustain the overall IT cost impact required to efficiently service the customers needs, while maintaining a profit. 5. Continuity Management IT service continuity management involves designing efficient disaster recovery plans to consider critical service needs in maintaining operations under adverse circumstances. As is evident from the two key service concepts described above, the synergy between ITIL and PM is strong and effective given the consideration for processes that must be addresses by both disciplines, but from different management perspectives. The Project Management Areas Project Management considers best practices from the ITIL service delivery and service support processes within its nine (9) project management areas, especially when dealing with IT-related solution development projects: 1. Integration Management 2. Scope Management 3. Time Management 4. Cost Management 5. Quality Management 6. Risk Management 7. Human Resources management 8. Procurement Management 9. Communication Management Given these nine project management areas above, it is easy to identify the potential synergies from leveraging best practices of each discipline, while combining the protocols of ITIL and PM during any given project.