ITIL Processes

ITIL stands for IT Infrastructure Library and provides a best practice approach in IT service management. ITIL provides guidelines with process models that define what must be done. However, the concrete integration of these processes into one's own company are not predetermined, but can be developed depending on the company.

The ITIL process description formed the basis for the British Standard 15000 (BS 15000), which was transferred to ISO 20000 in December 2005 and officially published as ISO/IEC 20000. Here, it is worth quoting:

It is possible to certify the employees of a company, but not companies or management systems completely as 'ITIL-compliant'. However, companies that follow the ITIL guidelines in IT service management can strive for certification under ISO 20000. (Source: German Wikipedia, as of 01.06.2016)

The i-net HelpDesk is located in the area of "Service Support", as the part of the ITIL publications that applies here, and focuses on the daily business of an IT department. In particular, it deals with the provision and support of IT services. In this context, the i-net HelpDesk is the central contact point (single point of contact) to the customer.

The configuration of the ITIL types is done in the Configuration application → Ticket → values.

Two ITIL process types are distinguished in the i-net HelpDesk: Primary and Secondary:

• Primary - This ITIL process type represents the summary classification. Higher-level terms are used here, e.g. Change Request or Problem. Tickets that have been given a primary ITIL classification usually describe requests that are to be completed in several sub-steps and represent a work package.

• Secondary - This ITIL process type describes a specialized classification. As terms, e.g. Incident and Standard Change are used. This process type is usually used to classify tickets that comprise a single sub-step of a higher-level request, the primary ticket.

Any number of primary and secondary types can be stored in the ITIL configuration. Each ticket can be assigned exactly one ITIL type. This makes sense in that each ticket can only be either a work package or a sub-step in a package.

ITIL tickets can be linked to each other to illustrate the dependencies between work packages and their sub-steps. The following applies here:

• A ticket with a primary ITIL type, e.g. Problem, can be linked to any number of tickets with secondary ITIL types.
  Figuratively speaking: A work package can be linked to any number of sub-steps.

• A ticket with the secondary ITIL type, e.g. Incident, can only be linked to one ticket with the primary ITIL type.
  Figuratively speaking: A sub-step must belong to exactly one work package.

In the description of ITIL process types, classification is mentioned for a reason, because, as explained earlier, an ITIL process type is just that. The advantage of using ITIL process types is the linking of related work packages, which can then be taken into account in reporting.

This can be defined quite specifically by using parallel tickets in a process. Here, a primary ITIL type can be assigned to the main ticket and specific secondary ITIL types to all parallel tickets.

In addition, it can be defined for all ITIL types which users are granted access to them. This can be used, for example, to prevent the ITIL type of a ticket from being changed by unauthorized persons.