ITIL and PRINCE2 Touch Points
Organisations run projects to create new products, new services and new ways of working. These projects help the organisation achieve strategic goals. For successful project delivery a structured approach should be used. Using a structured approach enables everyone involved to know what is happening, when it is happening and who is responsible. The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) offers a widely used best practice method, PRINCE2.
IT runs across all parts of the organisation, and is often the mechanism, via new software and hardware, by which business processes will be changed to enable new ways of working or new services to occur. The OGC offers a structured method for managing the services IT provides – IT Infrastructure Library – ITIL.
ITIL training courses and PRINCE2 courses have different objectives and focus. PRINCE2 cannot be used to manage IT services and ITIL cannot be used to run a project. A simple but important difference is that PRINCE2 is concerned with managing an isolated change whilst ITIL is concerned with managing a continuous service.
However there are many touch points between PRINCE2 and ITIL in main they focus on the same ways of working:
- Each of these methods (PRINCE2 and ITIL) promotes a structured management approach
- Each aims to improve productivity, as everyone adopts the same standards and procedures. Time is not lost by recreating the approach each time a new piece of work is required
- Each aims to improve use of skills and experience, as using the same structure for each piece of work enables lessons to be learned and improvements to be applied to each new initiative
- Each aims to improve customer/user satisfaction through a more professional approach to project and IT service delivery
So, if you work within an IT service management environment you would benefit from understanding how projects are initiated, controlled and implemented using the PRINCE2 method. And in turn if you are rolling out projects which have an impact on IT services you would benefit from knowing how IT services are best managed using ITIL® service management methods.
