Does ITIL fit into an Agile world?

Question

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 1

That doesn't look good at all, if that's the case, it really doesn't fit agile at all.

I'm suspicious if ITIL really calls for that, specially since "high priority tasks must be completed in x hours" goes beyond not fitting agile, it doesn't fit software development i.e. all tasks aren't born equal.

update:

So would you say that normal development processes can be exempt from ITIL methodologies and have ITIL purely concentrate on the infrastructure/incident support areas?

I don't think this is mutually exclusive. While it might be the case that ITIL isn't applicable in how you manage the team, it doesn't mean there aren't valid areas of it that affect what you develop.

Development needs to include considerations in the design/product that are required by infraestructure / support, and such may relate to practices suggested in ITIL.

Maybe a more appropriate question would be: are management aspects/practices of ITIL applicable to management of software development? which I don't know, but suspect is addressed specially in ITIL. At least I know that ITIL 3 introduced changes that relate to Enterprise Architecture practices, that are definitely compatible with agile (in fact are enablers) --- but at least those are far from anything related to fixed estimations / task tracking / dev response times.

Answer 2

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.