Can ITIL and DevOps Work Together?

If you earned a certification in ITIL V3 or earlier, you’d remember many processes that seemed cumbersome. ITIL’s thoroughness in anticipating most scenarios could feel like a lot of red tape. Change management, with approvals, was critical in ITSM. Meanwhile, DevOps cheers on frequent changes–with some DevOps teams releasing multiple times an hour in their quest toward continuous deployment.

How can a framework with so much focus on change control and change approvals work well with DevOps?

ITIL V4 Guiding Principles

Because ITIL V4 dropped many of ITIL v3’s defined processes in favor of practices that organizations can customize, it is not as rigid as previous versions. The guiding principles even start to resemble many of the lessons of DevOps.

Reconciling the approaches of ITIL and DevOps

ITIL V4 comprises six books, each including Agile, DevOps, or Lean methodology references. Given the seven guiding principles, this isn’t surprising. As a quick exercise, let’s map the ITIL V4 principles to the Three Ways of DevOps:

In fact, many of the ITIL processes that were formerly cumbersome can be sped up through automation – such as automating approvals for low-risk, known changes. At the same time, a little more of ITIL’s focus on controls can be applied to DevOps to catch riskier changes that require more of the team to review before pushing to production.

If your ITIL organization is curious about DevOps, ITIL V4 is more flexible and provides guidance on integrating these two frameworks. And remember – you don’t need to adopt all of ITIL or try to change every project to DevOps overnight. Adopt the components that work well for where you are while setting your teams up to iterate and improve continually.

Atlassian and AXELOS have partnered to help jumpstart your agile journey with this free guide: The future of ITSM is agile.

Case Study: Hear how we helped the Colorado Secretary of State office migrate and consolidate multiple legacy tools and processes into Jira Service Desk, aligned with the DevSecOps principles of fast flow, continuous feedback, and high trust.