Technical Management role

Technical Management plays a dual role:

• It is the custodian of technical knowledge and expertise related to managing the IT Infrastructure. In this role, Technical Management ensures that the knowledge required to design, test, manage and improve IT services is identified, developed and refined.
• It provides the actual resources to support the ITSM Lifecycle. In this role Technical Management ensures that resources are effectively trained and deployed to design, build, transition, operate and improve the technology required to deliver and support IT services.

By performing these two roles, Technical Management is able to ensure that the organization has access to the right type and level of human resources to manage technology and, thus, to meet business objectives. Defining the requirements for these roles starts in Service Strategy and is expanded in Service Design, validated in Service Transition and refined in Continual Service Improvement (see other ITIL publications in this series).

Part of this role is also to ensure a balance between the skill level, utilization and the cost of these resources. For example, hiring a top-level resource at the higher end of the salary scale and then only using that skill for 10% of the time is not effective. A better Technical Management strategy would be to identify the times that the skill is needed and then hire a contractor for only those tasks.

Another strategy in larger organizations is to leverage specialist staff out of ‘central’ pools so that specialists can be well utilized and provide an economy of scale to the organization and minimize the need to hire in contractors. Specialized skills should be identified among resources in the IT organization, then leveraged for specific needs as they arise, analogous to a special tactical unit, whose members also perform regular duties but who are assigned to tasks needing their specialized skills. This type of resource utilization is particularly useful both for project teams and problem resolution.

An additional, but very important role played by Technical Management is to provide guidance to IT Operations about how best to carry out the ongoing operational management of technology. This role is partly carried out during the Service Design process, but it is also a part of everyday communication with IT Operations Management as they seek to achieve stability and optimum performance.

The objectives, activities and structures that enable Technical Management to perform these roles effectively are discussed below.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 885