Does ITIL fit into an Agile world?
Our IT manager is pushing for ITIL, I'm only loosely familiar with it and wanted to know if ITIL fits into an Agile work-cycle well?
From my initial impression I would assume no, mainly because what our manager is proposing is to put timelines against everything, stating SLA's to the business that "high priority tasks must be completed in x hours" etc... which we get penalised as developers if we do not meet these SLA's.
If anything I'd prefer a negotiation strategy where timelines are based on agile methods of velocity and story points to negotiate an expected timeframe to end users.
We have our agile development practices in place, test driven development, continuous integration, there's areas for improvement but we're working on it.
What are others experiences with ITIL and Agile methods working together?
Answer
In my company ITIL framework is used for service delivery (production and incident support). For this SLAs are appropriate as if you are say losing customers/money per hour then it is expected that business should have some indication of when things will be fixed. It is not directly related to development methodology. Only if you decide that an emergency hotfix is required and approved then some development may be done. But hotfixes are usually very small and targeted to fix a defect and shouldn't cause any issues with agile methodology. New requirements are never done as hotfix change and are taken in normal dev/test/release process.