ITIL & Agile: a strategic alliance for more efficient IT – Interview with Pascal Bouthillon

How can you combine the structure of ITIL with the flexibility of Agile to optimise IT Service Management? Pascal Bouthillon, ITIL expert, shares his vision on this strategic alliance. Discover his advice, feedback and tips on how to leverage these two methodologies in a constantly evolving IT environment.

Can you explain how ITIL and Agile complement each other in modern IT Service Management? And why is this alliance essential in today’s IT environment?

To understand modern IT Service Management and why the combination of ITIL and Agile is essential today, it is necessary to take a brief look at history.

ITIL is a framework for organising an IT service. It has been around since the 1990s, has been recognised worldwide since the 2000s (V2) and is now used by almost all IT organisations. ITIL provides a common foundation for all these organisations, even though they have very different needs. Differentiating examples include a freelancer in the IT sector, an IT department in the public sector, and an IT services company that sells IT services and products.

Since the 2000s, each of these entities has organised itself to be as effective and efficient as possible by adopting and adapting, to various degrees, the proposals of the different versions of ITIL.

Each version of ITIL was adapted to changes in IT and customer needs:

• V2 (2000) – Moving from a traditional to an industrial model (Using processes, etc.)
• V3 (2007/2011) – Continuous improvement and the need to adapt to remain aligned with customer needs (service lifecycle).
• V4 (2019) – Integration of DevOps and Lean IT to be more Agile and improve resilience.

Agile IT was born in 2001 with the signing of the software development manifesto. Agility has gradually matured to the present day and offers an alternative to traditional project management, particularly in the field of IT product and service improvement projects.

In this context, Agility allows application developers to work hand in hand with customers/businesses and be more responsive by moving forward step by step and offering incremental development and deployment of successive lightweight versions, rather than waiting a long time for a single, definitive version to be completed.

Until the 2010s, Agile IT projects were appealing and began to be used, but they encountered deployment infrastructure designed to stabilise production and lacking the technological capacity to support frequent deployments without compromising that stability.

Since 2015, technologies have been evolving and DevOps has emerged as the solution for enabling continuous deployment.

From this stage onwards, there are no further obstacles, and ITIL can integrate project Agility and DevOps technologies to build an IT organisation that can evolve towards increasing Agility. This was done with the release of ITIL 4 in 2019. ITIL 4 cameat the right time, as IT and non-IT companies alike increasingly needed to work on their adaptability and resilience, and IT Agility was one of the areas that could help improve this adaptability and resilience.

Which areas of ITIL benefit most from Agile Principles?

In its fourth edition, ITIL identifies 34 practices.

These practices include methods such as project management, processes such as incident management, change authorisation, continuous improvement, , and service centre teams. They are considered to be ‘best’ practices that have been implemented in all IT entities since the 1990s.

Agility could be defined as: the ability to respond quickly to business needs and therefore improve the efficiency and resilience of the company, particularly in the face of competition.

The first answer to this question is that all practices can benefit from Agility. Since Agility is a capability, it depends on the needs of the business or customers.
Overall, we can still identify practices that will certainly benefit greatly from or be greatly impacted by Agility:

• Project management methods
• Infrastructure (adoption of new technologies) and deployment management
• Continuous improvement (Lean IT)
• Organisational change management (Agile culture)
• Enabling change (decentralisation, linked to the previous bullet point)
• …

How can organisations adapt ITIL to make it compatible with Agile approaches?

Depending on its activities, customers, objectives and therefore the environment in which it operates, each IT department has very different needs. These departments serve their customers or internal users. As a result, their need for Agility depends on the business area of the companies they work for.

There is therefore no single answer to this question, but as many answers as there are IT entities’ working environments.

For some IT departments whose companies are not subject to aggressive competition but need security and stability, it may make sense to stick with the fundamentals of V2 or V3 while starting to use Agile project methods and slowly beginning to change the company culture.

However, for banks operating in a competitive environment that need to be responsive to their customers, adopting ITIL v4 will be necessary. This does not mean transforming everything at once, but rather starting by implementing DevOps platforms to work in an Agile manner and carry out incremental deployments, focusing on elements that require a high level of responsiveness.

Banks are a good example of this ongoing transformation. They have retained their large AS400-type computer systems, which require and provide stability, while creating high-tech DevOps development and deployment chains to manage user application interfaces.

Other companies such as start-ups, hosting providers and software publishers have already been using the concepts of the ITIL 4th edition and DevOps for several years.

When it comes to incident or change management, how can Agile Principles be combined with established ITIL processes?

For incident management, it is necessary to understand users’ jobs: why and how they use the services we support. Overall, there is less ‘technical liability’ on the part of users, and support technicians must help users utilise services for their jobs in order to maximise the value provided by these services.
Using new technologies (AI, chatbots, self-service) can help improve customer support to create, for example, better collaboration.

As for enabling change, this involves decentralising and empowering teams, promoting an Agile culture and a less vertical organisation, moving away from the ‘Command & Control’ model. Involving key users as ‘ambassadors’ allows for daily collaboration on the evolution of IT services, ensuring smooth adoption and better alignment with operational needs.

What tangible benefits can this combination bring to end users?

Better collaboration and integration between IT and business teams brings less conflicts within the team, fewer silos and greater efficiency for everyone.

For users, the benefits are diverse:

• Services that are better tailored to needs because they are developed step by step together
• More frequent deployments that also bring more frequent business benefits
• Much faster bug corrections, which improves business benefits
• Improved innovation, which leads to less risk in relation to the competition
• Productivity gains and, overall, significantly improved value provided by IT services

What advice would you give to an organisation that wants to integrate ITIL and Agile into its processes?

I would advise conducting a research study to assess the maturity of the teams and technologies in relation to this goal.

Here are a few areas to consider:

• The company’s Agile culture
• Corporate governance (highly vertical and ‘Command & Control’ or more horizontal and decentralised with empowered teams)
• The technologies used in IT infrastructure and our suppliers’ technologies
• Development techniques or those of our suppliers
• Our project methods
• Our Agile/DevOps expertise

I would also recommend using risk management and business case techniques to carefully analyse which projects to launch and how to organise them; start from what already exists and move forward step by step, as a sudden revolution could cause chaos.
It will be a long, complex and costly programme, but it may prove necessary (or even mandatory) and highly beneficial for the entire company.

In terms of skills, what do IT professionals need to learn in order to navigate effectively between these two methodologies?

From the previous questions, you have probably understood that Agile integration projects in ITIL are not based just on technical transformations.

Organisational changes must be implemented in collaboration with the company’s HR department and all company staff. These reorganisations must be supported by change management and awareness-raising initiatives promoting an Agile culture.

These changes will take time because they will involve gradual changes in everyone’s behaviour in order to slowly transform the corporate culture.

General Agile training courses, ITIL , and change management training courses can help in this context.

In terms of project management; training courses such as AgilePM, Scrum, SAFe, and PRINCE2 Agile, depending on the initial context, can help change the behaviours and practices of project managers.

In terms of infrastructure and software development, ITIL and DevOps will be very beneficial, as will technical training in these new technologies.