Question

Q 2: SDLC and ITSM [20 marks]

(a) What new ITSM trends and technologies are surfacing? [4 marks]

(b) Discuss the roles and responsibilities of Incident Manager and Change Manager in ITSM. [6 marks]

(c) How does the Spiral model overcome the limitation of the Waterfall cycle model and the V-shaped cycle model? [5 marks]

(d) Compare and contrast the Waterfall and V-Model of SDLC. Present two cases where each of the models will be best suited. [5 marks]

Answer 1

Question: (a) What new ITSM trends and technologies are surfacing?

Solution: The ability to ‘shift-left’ and deliver quality self-service is a top priority for many IT organizations today. Self-service helps keep IT support costs down and the appetite for knowledge-centric support continues to grow as IT teams look for ways to break down silos and make it easy to share information. We see many IT organizations aggregating knowledge in a single repository. Modern ITSM tools make it easy for support teams to identify when knowledge is needed and enable them to quickly publish a knowledge base to deflect new requests. Heavy and burdensome review processes are being replaced by peer-reviews.

We’ve seen a growing interest from IT organizations in adopting lean and agile ways of working. This often begins with the IT Ops teams that support software releases. Then, it expands to change management and even level 1 support teams that want to use Kanban boards to better manage the flow of requests. There is a more compelling need to strengthen the way that IT and development teams work together.

Automation also serves as a key for improving data sharing between IT and development teams. It plays an ever-increasing role in streamlining IT support, from the basics of routing tickets to the right team or pre-approving standard changes, to the complexity of connecting external systems via webhooks to fulfill a request process. We are also seeing a shift toward managing infrastructure changes as code. IT teams are embracing automation to streamline these types of changes. Some are even moving this type of planned activity into the realm of software development so they can better coordinate their software releases with planned changes to the infrastructure.

Question: (b) Discuss the roles and responsibilities of the Incident Manager and Change Manager in ITSM.

Solution: The role of the incident manager is responsible for the overall coordination of the incident management process, in particular whenever there are major incidents. His primary responsibilities are –

• Planning and managing support for incident management tools and processes
• Coordinating interfaces between incident management and other service management processes
• Driving the efficiency and effectiveness of the incident management process
• Producing management information
• Managing the work of incident support staff (first- and second-line)
• Monitoring the effectiveness of incident management and making recommendations for improvement
• Developing and maintaining the incident management systems
• Managing major incidents

The Change Manager acts as a facilitator, responsible for the overall change management process. His primary responsibilities are –

• Authorize and approve minor/low change
• Coordinate and conduct meetings with Change advisory board (CAB) to discuss higher risk changes
• Authority to implement or reject a change
• Ensures that all the activities designed to implement the change are as per the standards. The policies and procedures should be well defined, recognized and reviewed
• Prepare Change Summary Sheet that summarizes all RFC’s. This sheet helps the CAB team to understand and evaluate the proposed change

Question (c) How does the Spiral model overcome the limitation of the Waterfall cycle model and the V-shaped cycle model?

Solution: 1. The first limitation of the Waterfall model was, In the software development life cycle, business requirements are frozen after the initial phase.

but the Spiral model overcome on this In the spiral model, requirements are not frozen by the end of the initial phase. It is kind of executed in a continuous mode.

2. The second limitation of the Waterfall model was In terms of project execution, there is a high level of risk and uncertainty because of the missing stringent risk management.

The spiral model overcomes this limitation by handling better risk management.

Question (d) Compare and contrast the Waterfall and V-Model of SDLC. Present two cases where each of the models will be best suited.

Waterfall model	V-Model
1. The waterfall model is Rigid.	V-Model is flexible.
2. The waterfall model is less costly.	V-Model is expensive.
3. The waterfall model’s steps move in a linear way.	V-model’s steps don’t move in a linear way.
4. In Waterfall model testing activities start after the development activities are over.	In V-model testing, activities start with the first stage.
5. Software made using the Waterfall model, the number of defects is less in comparison to software made using V-model.	Software made using V-model, the number of defects is greater in comparison of software made using the Waterfall model.

V-Model Suited for

1.Restricted Projects: Due to the stringent nature of the V-Model and its linear design, implementation, and testing phases, it’s perhaps no wonder that the V-Model has been heavily adopted by the medical device industry in recent years.

2.Ideal for Time Management: Along the same vein, V-Model is also well-suited for projects that must maintain a strict deadline and meet key milestone dates throughout the process. With fairly clear and well-understood stages that the whole team can easily comprehend and prepare for, it is relatively simple to create a timeline for the entire development life cycle, while generating milestones for each stage along the way.

Waterfall model is suited for :

Mostly “mission critical” projects, like payment gateways, stock trading, examination portals (like CAT, JEE etc), e-commerce supply chains, anti-virus software, flight controls, or manufacturing plants.