Customer Reviews

Implementing ITIL: Adapting Your IT Organization to the Coming Revolution in IT Service Management

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If your company is bringing in a room full of consultants to do a big bang conversion to ITIL this may be the book for you. If your company is more like mine where everyone is trying to move toward ITIL while doing their regular job this will not be much help. There is no index. There are many short lists of things to do and resources and planning guides. They are all general purpose. The book is not organized to match the ITIL areas. You cannot just go to a chapter on service catalogs and get help with creating one. Chapters include Adapting to an ITSM Culture, ITSM Visioning Work Stage, ITSM Assessment Work Stage, ITSM Planning Work Stage, ITSM Process Overviews, ITSM Organization Roles, etc. This book is more about project management instead of specific how-to hints for creating real world ITIL compliant policies and procedures.

Great reading! As a board member for a local itSMF LIG group, I found this book extrememly helpful in addressing the true implementation effort needed to gain buy-in for ITIL solutions. Many sources are available for helping you learn how to develop ITIL artifacts such as Service Catalogs, RFCs, etc, but the real challenge is in getting people to actually use those solutions. The practical tips and guidelines for moving your organization forward with an ITIL solution are very useful!

Randy Steinberg has created a 489 page practical guide on how to plan and implement IT Service Management Processes in real world organizations. The book is packed full of templates, checklists, tables and questions to ask yourself at regular intervals.

Much of this information is presented in a structured way based on six distinct phases: Visioning, Assessment, Planning, Foundation Work, Initial Wins and the Control Work stage.

As an ITIL Consultant myself, I found the 'Stages' straight forward to follow and easy to align with the ITIL roadmap approach (I.E. "Where are we now?").

Three particular chapters stand out for me, in addition to the Stage chapters, namely: "Nine Things That Work", "Process Inputs And Outputs" and "Tooling Considerations". In my view, these three chapters alone are worth the price of the book when you consider that real world and detailed ITIL Implementation advice is often difficult to come by.

Finally, I believe this book is a natural companion to the OGC's Core ITIL Texts. It tells you much more about the 'How To' and 'What To Consider' on topics that the Core Texts don't cover in much detail.

A worthwhile companion and recommended source of implementation governance and control.

Implementing ITSM via new or modified practices? Start here as a shortcut to planning your ITSM program's activities. This is a great reference for those tasked with implementing the changes and projects required for successful ITSM implementations. It also includes some very useful guidelines for functional requirements of ITSM oriented tools that will assist with criteria selection for acquiring or integrating tools. Illustrates a customizable model for implementation including roles, responsibilities, activities, tasks, WBS, checklists, templates and metrics. Don't be expecting a breakthrough book on ITIL process theory - this is all about the Program Office perspective that is missing in most ITIL books and often not fully understood until after the pain begins. If you seek an academic review on ITIL processes you will be disappointed and miss the true value of this reference. If you already have a mature Program Management office overseeing your ITSM implementation this guide is less critical but still valuable. Keep in mind the methodology and models presented are based on generic large scale implementations and must still be customized for individual needs and various scopes. This should be expected, as a one size fits all solution would never satisfy all the unique needs of the customers and their discrete business needs. Instead, consider it as a starting guide and adapt it accordingly to fill existing voids within your ITSM program structure or validate your chosen path.

This book has comprehensive information to help you put together a plan for your ITIL Implementation. There is information on roles, RACI breakdowns, ideas on governance, everything you need to think about to make your plan. It's making me look like a hero!

I found this book very helpful as an implementation guide following my ITIL training. The ITIL training I received did not provide any real guidance on how to actually implement the ITIL best practices and framework, and Mr Steinberg's book provided a very complete and well thought through practical implementation approach. It is very comprehensive, and I found myself picking and choosing the methods that could best be applied to different company cultures. I found the area on 'Visioning' very thought provoking and provided a customer and business oriented approach that is often missing in ITIL implementations.

This book basically takes a standard project implementation methodology and applies it to ITIL in an attempt to claim that the book will enable organization's to implement ITIL processes. The book did not help us get any close to implementing ITIL.

This might be a decent book were it not for all the typos, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. As I was quite surprised at the lousy quality of editing, I checked the publisher's web site to find that it is a self-publishing service. That explains a lot. Funny that none of the 'reviews' on the back of the book mention the author's inability to write English.