ITIL Intermediate – Operational Support and Analysis (OSA): Combating chaos
- Blog
- Incident management
- IT Services
- Problem management
- Processes
- Value
- ITIL
August 23, 2019 |
3 min read
- Blog
- Incident management
- IT Services
- Problem management
- Processes
- Value
- ITIL
For any operational department it’s obligatory to have processes and an approach to things – otherwise it would all be chaos!
In my view, if you don’t adopt and adapt knowledge from one of the IT operational approaches such as the ITIL® Intermediate module, Operational Support and Analysis (OSA), IT will end up being super busy, fighting fires with nobody being very happy, especially users.
What you must remember is that users – in their relationship with IT – are not dealing with design or strategy, it’s with operations. And if you can’t support services or products, all the other stages of the ITIL lifecycle have been wasted.
Therefore, OSA provides a very good set of processes and functions which are strongly interconnected: incident management, request fulfilment, event management and problem management, for example, are so important when delivering IT services.
OSA – at the sharp end of IT
You might design a great IT service and create a smooth transition, but you never know what to expect when the service then becomes the responsibility of operations; the reality of managing a live service is much more complicated and you can’t predict everything that can happen.
So, with OSA, you are enabled to develop different approaches to solve a range of issues and problems.
It sounds obvious, but if you don’t support your organization’s IT services how can you deliver value to customers and users? Operational support directly relates to business requirements and this provides the one chance you’ve got to prove that the other parts of the lifecycle have worked – and that the customer can enjoy the results of effective design and transition.
OSA – a career choice
As an ITIL Expert, studying and certifying in OSA helped me develop many techniques for problem management, to the point where I actually love problem management! In fact, I’d been in an operations role for many years already and didn’t know how to handle those problems before.
I’ve also valued its interconnection with other parts of the ITIL lifecycle, so I better understand the place of operations in IT – following the path from strategy, design, transition and then into operations.
As well as learning from a training course and exam, studying with other people means you have the opportunity to meet other brilliant practitioners who have similar issues and problems in their industries. It’s a great chance to discuss the different challenges and learn from each other.
Thankfully, in the companies where I’ve worked the management has put a lot of effort and investment into IT operations as they understood the reality of supporting IT services. And this is something that should be taken more seriously across all organizations.
The content of ITIL v3 Intermediate modules is key for professionals working in ITSM today due to the essential knowledge they contain, creating increased understanding and the ability to handle immediate work challenges more effectively.
Also ITIL-certified practitioners wanting to gain accreditation in the new ITIL 4 guidance can get a helping hand from the existing v3 credit system. By obtaining 17 credits from any combination of the ITIL Intermediate modules or ITIL Practitioner you can take the new Transition Module to achieve ITIL 4 Managing Professional. More information about ITIL 4 Managing Professional will be released throughout the second half of 2019.