Scoping for SCSM - ITIL

Before i go into ITIL portion of scoping for SCSM I would like to explain a little about why i have been off my board for a while.

I definitely mentioned before now how important it is to proper understand what the client wants (Project Scope) and what the product can offer, well i fell victim to this, i got myself into a little fix, I had started a project hoping (thinking) I had given the client all the necessary information needed to move to the next phase of the project, all the information was agreed to, before commencement but something was not properly highlighted and I only got to recognize this i did my homework but…

In my case the Clients Project Initiator was changed and i was stuck not with a hanging project, but a new personal might seem like bad news but wait till i get the part where i had to retell the Product scope to the client who decided that the company was not getting enough from the solution even after explaining we had all previously agreed to the scope of the project, well in the past couple of days i was trying to get that sorted and since the client is almost always right (though i disagree with that because most of them need to be guided in the right direction) i had to accommodate them with help from Travis Wright and Paresh Gupta they have been very helpful.

Scoping-ITIL
ITIL stands for 'Information Technology Infrastructure Library. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of concepts and practices for Information Technology Services Management (ITSM), Information Technology (IT) development and IT operations. ITIL is essentially a set of standards, or good practices, for IT service management.

The adoption of ITIL provides the opportunity for an organization to become more cost efficient and effective through the improvement of existing and the introduction of new process and disciplines. Most organizations are probably undertaking elements of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), but more often than not in isolation from other disciplines and often not across the whole of the IS or IT department.
Every Organization has to define the various processes that would work best for them ITIL and MOF provides generic defined steps which can be adopted and modified to suit any organization needs.
ITIL provides processes which have been approved as standard for any organization these standards can be used to optimize the organizations mode of work, ITIL comprises of a few processes and these are listed below:

• Configuration Management
• Service Desk Management
• Incident Management
• Problem Management.
• Change Management
• Release Management
• Service Level Management
• Availability Management
• Capacity Management
• Continuity Management
• Financial Management

For More information on these processes check out the link below

http://www.itilfoundations.com/processes/

But for SCSM we are going to be dealing with Just 3 basic processes, these processes are by default the processes considered out of the box even though we have Asset management add-in provided by Provance a company that has done a good work building an IT asset Lifescycle management solution for SCSM

Incident management:
An 'Incident' is any event which is not part of the standard operation of the service and which causes, or may cause, an interruption or a reduction of the quality of the service.
The objective of Incident Management is to restore normal operations as quickly as possible with the least possible impact on either the business or the user, at a cost-effective price.
This is what SCSM tries to achieve by making it easy for users to get the best and effective response from IT.

Problem management:
Problem Management aims to resolve the root causes of incidents and thus to minimize the adverse impact of incidents and problems on business that are caused by errors within the IT infrastructure, and to prevent recurrence of incidents related to these errors. A `problem' is an unknown underlying cause of one or more incidents, and a `known error' is a problem that is successfully diagnosed and for which either a work-around or a permanent resolution has been identified.

Change management:
Change Management aims to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient handling of all changes,
A change is "an event that results in a new status of one or more configuration items (CIs) approved by management, cost effective, enhances business process changes (fixes) - with a minimum risk to IT infrastructure.
The main aims of Change Management include:

• Minimal disruption of services
• Reduction in back-out activities
• Economic utilization of resources involved in the change

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd320379.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb821261.aspx