About PRINCE2 and ITIL

PRINCE2

PRojects IN Controled Environments (PRINCE2) is a generic, tailorable, simple to follow project management method, originally developed in the 1989 by the UK Office of Government and Commerce (OGC).  It covers how to organize, manage and control projects.  It is aimed at enabling the organization to successfully deliver the right products, on time and within budget and can be applied to any type of project. It helps to manage risk, control quality and change effectively, as well as make the most of challenging situations and opportunities that arise within a project.

A PRINCE2 project follows seven basic principles:

• Continued business justification
• Learning from experience
• Defined roles and responsibilities
• Managed by stages
• Managed by exception
• Focuses on products and their quality
• Tailored to suit the particular product environment
  
  

PRINCE2 does not cover all aspects of project management.  Areas such as leadership and people management skills, detailed coverage of project management tools and techniques are well covered by other existing and proven methods and are therefore excluded from PRINCE2.

More information: http://www.prince2.com

ITIL

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a most popular public framework of Best Practice for IT service management, originally developed in the 1980’s by the UK Office of Government and Commerce (OGC). It provides a framework for the governance of IT, the "service wrap", and focuses on the continual measurement and improvement of the quality of IT service delivered, from both a business and a customer perspective.

Some benefits include:

• increased user and customer satisfaction with IT services
• improved service availability, directly leading to increased business profits and revenue
• financial savings from reduced rework, lost time, improved resource management and usage
• improved time to market for new products and services
• improved decision making and optimized risk.

ITIL is organized around a Service Lifecycle:

Source: Introductory Overview of ITIL v3, published in association with the Best Management Practice Partnership

• Service Strategy – Understanding who the IT customers are, the service offerings that are required to meet the customers’ needs, the IT capabilities and resource that are required to develop these offerings and the requirements for executing successfully. Driven through strategy and throughout the course of delivery and support of the service, IT must always try to assure that the cost of delivery is consistent with the value delivered to the customer.

• Service Design – Assures that new and changed services are designed effectively to meet customer expectations. The technology and architecture required to meet customer needs cost effectively is an integral part of Service Design. Additionally, processes required to manage services are also part of the design phase. Service management systems and tools that are necessary to adequately monitor and support new or modified services, must be considered as well as mechanisms for measuring service levels, technology and process efficiency and effectiveness.

• Service Transition – The design is built, tested and moved into production to assure that the business customer can achieve the desired value. This phase addresses:
  1. managing changes,
  2. controlling the assets and configuration items (underlying components – hardware, software, etc) associated with new and changed systems,
  3. service validation and testing,
  4. transition planning to assure that users, support personnel and the production environment have been prepared for the release to production.

• Service Operation – Delivers the service on an ongoing basis, overseeing the daily overall health of the service. This includes managing disruptions to service through rapid restoration of incidents, determining the root cause of problems and detecting trends associated with recurring issues, handling daily routine end user requests and managing service access.

• Continual Service Improvement (CSI) – Enveloping the Service Lifecycle, CSI offers a mechanism for IT to measure and improve the service levels, the technology and the efficiency and effectiveness or processes used in the overall management of services.