Written by Graham Furnis
It’s been several months since the 2011 refresh ITIL books were released and I’ve enjoyed reading through them. This article is another in the series I will present that discusses new Refresh ideas and concepts.
Design Coordination is a new process in the lifecycle stage of Service Design. Its reason for being is in recognition of the complexities and details for activities across the Service Design stage and for the need to coordinate these activities. Design Coordination provides the single point of coordination and control necessary for all Design processes and their activities to succeed in order to meet the required business outcomes.
The scope of Design Coordination activities, according to the ITIL framework, is limited to the Service Design stage. The process acts as a resource coordinator by prioritizing and scheduling staff and other resources to balance multiple demands coming from changes and projects. At a higher level, Design Coordination sets the policies, guidelines, budgets, and models that are used to decide on the extent and detail of design activities in relation to the impacts and priorities of changes and projects.
The latter point above is what wins me over to the need for Design Coordination, as this is something I’ve been doing all along. You can’t – nor should – do everything at 100% effort. Some changes and projects are more critical and significant than others and thus justify extensive design. Others may require little or no design effort. Design Coordination sets the rules and evaluation criteria to consistently and appropriately handle making these decisions.
And so to answer my question posed in the title of this article – Do we really need Design Coordination? the answer is “yes”.
It is something that should have been done all along and justifies itself. The caveat is that ITIL is not prescriptive and does not state that you must implement this as a defined and separate process. You may choose to combine the process activities and concepts within another ITSM process area. The key is to recognize that alone or within another process, the activity and concepts should not be ignored.
Graham Furnis is fully immersed and passionate in providing ITSM solutions. He is a business-driven IT professional with 20+ years of technology and management experience. He is certified as an ITIL Manager and Expert as well as an accredited instructor.