Incident vs Problem vs RFC

[nclifford]

Hey guys!

First post, love the site. Be kind on me please!

Working on implementing ITIL at a firm in Brisbane (have done fundamentals course etc).

Looking for thoughs on the following:

I understand the incident -> problem -> RFC workflow, how problems can be created without an incident etc.

We have decided to have RFC's not only come from problems, but ALSO Operational Directive Initiaves and Technical Directive Intitiatives. ODI is coming from the business - 'We have the need to investigate changing software vendors due to complaince reasons' and a TDI - 'This server will need upgrading soon... or will run out of space' Project work will spawn TDI's and ODI's also.

The thinking is that both represent a change, but have been generated internally, and are not an incident, or a problem (yet!)

What are peoples thoughts on this? Is this a accepted practice?

ALSO, the CAB in our case will work on the whole CM process, such as assessing, prioritisng, rejecting, etc (expection of high budget etc, going to senior team as normal).

One other question to clear things up in my mind. Looking at a whitepaper from unnamed source, and for CM they have the following:

Request/Register/Plan/Approve (CAB Cases) -> CAB -> Build/Test/Evaluate/Implement.


Now I thought the Build part would be traditional Project Management and the Implement Release Management? Please clear this for me.

Kind regards all, and thanks for reading!!!

Hopefully will be more posts in soon!

Nick.

[blackbeard]

Welcome aboard Nick.

RFC's should indeed be able tyo come from anywhere within the business, whether they are in response to Problems, Incidents, Service Requests or anything really, so your model is spot on!

There is no problem with what you are doing in the CAB either, although if you have a lot of changes going through CAB then the meetings may well start taking a long time.

As for the Build/Test/Evaluate/Implement part, Project Management / Release Management would indeed be involved for large changes and rollouts, however it is unlikely they will be involved in the majority of Changes. Whether for Major rollouts, Projects or minor changes the Change Manager would oversee these stages so that the change can be pulled back to the CAB in the event of any deviation from the schedule.

This is the way I see it, however this can be very different from organisation to organisation.