Where do you go to get good requirements for ITIL?

So where do you go to get good requirements? The best place to start is where you are. Most likely you are involved in building configuration management because of your role in the enterprise. Look at your job description. If it says anything about configuration management, those are probably some requirements. Look at the problems that you, your team, and your organization are experiencing because you don’t have good configuration data. Those problems are a great place to look for a description of what’s needed. Attend some incident management meetings— document what you learn about how configuration data could help, being careful to get only configuration management requirements. Do the same with meetings regarding change approvals, capacity planning, or service levels. In each of these disciplines, you’re likely to discover some way in which configuration management data could help. In addition to these formal meetings, you also want to talk to people both inside your organization and in other organizations who are implementing ITIL. All these areas will help you when looking for requirements.

Certainly you’ll want to schedule time with your stakeholders. Anyone who has a dream, hope, wish, or expectation of configuration management is a stakeholder, and the more of them you can listen to, the better you’ll be able to compile a complete picture of what will satisfy your organization. Be sure to consider those stakeholders outside of information technology (IT). Although you may need to educate them a bit about what configuration management is and why you’re interested in it, you’ll often find the fresh perspective they can bring worth the effort of seeking them out. Also don’t get bound to a single geography. If your organization spans the world, you should talk to people all across the world and not just in your home country. In this exploratory stage of requirements gathering, you will most likely get a much better education about how your organization thinks, and not just about configuration management. Any time spent seeking out your stakeholders will be returned threefold in time saved getting your project approved and keeping it moving forward when obstacles arise.

Beyond talking to people, you can also look at documents for clues to the requirements. Is there a configuration management process description somewhere? It probably has a lot of requirements in it. Descriptions of related processes can also be sources for good requirements. Look up configuration management tools and read the descriptions of the features they support. Which of those features are requirements for your tool set? By all means read the ITIL volume on service support. You’ll find some general guidelines there for what the configuration management process should be, and those guidelines can be distilled into requirements for your organization. If you have been handed any project description or scope documentation for the configuration management project, those would be excellent sources of requirements. While you’re between appointments with all your stakeholders, take the time to read all the documents you can find.

The key thing to remember is that when looking for requirements, it is impossible to cast your net too broadly. Every corner you fail to examine has the potential to unleash a projectcrippling surprise later. Every person you fail to ask will come in at the eleventh hour with a completely new thought that needs to be implemented. Remember that the filters defined in Figure 2.1 and explained earlier will help center these discussions and provide actual requirements. Skipping directly to the easy requirements without considering some of the less obvious sources will leave you with an incomplete picture of the project.
[Implementing ITIL Configuration Management, Larry Klosterboer, IBM 2008]