The current article is the third of the five-part FAQ series on the ITIL process stages. If you have missed our earlier article in this series covering FAQs on Service Design
Service Transition helps organizations to build and deploy IT services. It also ensures that changes to services and Service Management processes are coordinated and documented in a proper way.
Features of ITIL V3 Service Transition
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What is the Business Value of Service Transition in ITIL V3?
Service Transition helps in adding business value by doing the following.
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- Improving technology management used to deliver and support services
- Improving the success rate of releases and any changes in the process for the business
- Enhancing the overall design of the IT process
- Reducing known errors and risks
- Set customer expectation
- Enable integration
- Increase Continual Service Improvement competency of the organizational
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What is the Major Difference Between ITIL V3 and ITIL V2?
ITIL v3 introduced multiple new processes and enhanced the scope of a few others. Transition Planning and Support, Service Validation and Testing, Configuration Management Systems (CMS) and Knowledge Management are the new processes introduced. Additionally, Release Planning Testing and Change Models have been covered in considerable detail.
The most important change is considering testing as a separate process. Any successful deployment of a new or changed service needs thorough testing to find any breakdowns and minimize risk. It also helps in setting customer expectations.
The overall service validation process constitutes four steps. First is Test Models Definition; this defines the testing concept and specific test cases to be tested. The second is Release Component Acquisition, which ensures that the components that meet quality levels are moved into the stringent testing phase. The third is Release Test, to test all components and tools required for deployment, migration, and rollback services. It ensures that the most stringent quality checked and tested components are made live. Fourth and last is Service Acceptance Testing, to verify from a customer that all requirements of the service are met.
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What is the Knowledge Management Difference in ITIL v3 and v2?
Many aspects of Knowledge Management were available under multiple processes in ITIL v2. ITIL v3 brought all those processes under a new head of Knowledge Management. For example, Problem Management handled managing the Known Error Database; this is still available in ITIL v3. However, in ITIL v3 Knowledge Management has emerged as one central process for providing knowledge to all IT Service Management processes thus avoiding rediscovery at any stage.
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What is the Difference between Transition Planning and Support from Release Management in ITIL v2?
Transition Planning and Support (Project Management) is about managing service transition projects. The main objective is to bring coordination between resources to deploy a major release within planned time, cost, and minimal downtime. ITIL v3 introduces Transition Planning and Support as a new process. ITIL v2 covered a few facets of this process in Release Management, but ITIL v3 provides improved direction. Therefore, Transition Planning and Support can be considered as an extension of Release Management.
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Between a Configuration Management System (CMS) and a Configuration Management Database (CMDB)?
According to ITIL, CMS is a repository of information on configuration items (CIs), such as their attributes, history, and details of important relationships with other CIs. CMDB is a database used to store configuration records throughout their lifecycle. The CMDB resides within the CMS.
CMS can maintain one or more CMDB, with each CMDB storing attributes and relationships with other CI’s. CMS helps remove confusion in v2 that CMDB covers just one database with all CI’s possible.
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What are the ITIL Service Transition certification advantages for professionals?
The processes in the Service Transition module help organizations and professionals to manage better and implement changes in the process in line with users’ expectations. It also covers the management of technology challenges and risks associated with the transition. If you are a configuration manager or a change manager or wish to get familiar with the knowledge around change management, then a certification in Service transition might be of help.
We hope that this article helped you answer some frequently asked questions related to ITIL Service Transition. If you have any further questions, feel free to post them in the comments section below.
