ITIL: Service Transition

Service Transition is one of the five new ITIL® Service Lifecycle books published on 30th May 2007.

Service Transition is the controlled building, testing and deployment of a new or changed service which enables the planning, tracking and checking of progress against requirements at every stage through the service transition.

The Service Transition stage of the lifecycle provides guidance on ensuring that the introduction, deployment, transfer and decommissioning of new or changed services is consistently well managed. Service Transition ensures that the transition processes are streamlined, effective and efficient so that the risks relating to the service in transition are minimised. Successful Service Transition depends on an effective understanding and application of the Change Management process as well as quality assurance, risk management and effective programme and project management.

The Service Transition stage of the lifecycle receives input from the Service Design stage and provides output to the Service Operation stage.

The main goals and objectives for Service Transition include:

• Assisting organisations wishing to plan and manage service changes and deploy service releases into the production environment successfully.
• Setting customer expectations on how the performance and use of the new or changed services can be used to enable business change.
• Enabling the business change project or customer to integrate a release into their business processes and services.
• Reducing variations in the predicted and actual performance of the transitioned services.
• Reducing known errors and minimising the risks from transitioning the new or changed services into production.
• Planning and managing resources to successfully establish a new or changed service into production within the predicted cost, quality and time estimates.
• Ensuring minimal unpredicted impact on the production services, operations and support organisation.
• Increasing the customer, user and service management staff satisfaction with the service transition practices.
• Providing a consistent and rigorous framework for evaluating the service capability and risk profile before a new or changed service is released or deployed.
• Establishing and maintaining the integrity of all identified service assets and configurations as they evolve through the service transition stage.
• Providing efficient repeatable build and installation mechanisms that can be used to deploy releases to the test and production environments and re-built if required to restore service.

The Service Lifecycle