Pragmatic Application of Service Management: The Five Anchor Approach

INTRODUCTION

Thanks for picking up this book!

If you are looking for a book to help you implement COBIT®5, ISO/IEC 20000 or ITIL®, put this book down and go find the actual documentation from COBIT, ISO/IEC 20000 and ITIL. Frankly, this isn’t the book for you.

This book addresses how to use COBIT5, ISO/IEC 20000-1:2011 and ITIL together to create a stronger and more robust Service Management System (SMS). We recognize there are many service management frameworks, standards and methodologies, including those within project management (PMI®, P30®, PRINCE2®). On purpose, we didn’t include every service management framework, standard or methodology, or any of the project management frameworks for two reasons:

Project management deals with the planning and execution of a defined, funded and agreed plan of action.

We wanted to keep the book manageable:

Simple is effective.

This is a book on how to evaluate and assess a situation using the Five Anchor Framework and, based on that assessment, apply the guidance from COBIT5, ISO/IEC 20000-1 and ITIL to create a comprehensive improvement plan. We’ve provided a table at the end of the book where we have mapped COBIT5, ISO/IEC 20000-1 and ITIL to assist in the information gathering.

Use this book to think differently, leverage the strengths of COBIT5, ISO/IEC 20000-1 and ITIL, and mitigate the inherent weaknesses in each.

Happy Reading!

Suzanne and Mark

CHAPTER 1: WHY THIS BOOK

As independent consultants, we are constantly asked the same set of questions:

Aren’t these frameworks for big companies only?

"Where do we start? What do we have to do?"

What do we measure?

Is there a difference between ‘prescriptive’ and ‘suggestive’ when it comes to frameworks?

"Isn’t ITIL (insert any other service management framework/standard/methodology¹) better than COBIT (insert any other service management