ITIL in real life

Those who have ever taken ITIL training know the toughest part is to explain people difference between incident and problem, it is very easy to explain every other difficult concept of ITIL to people but incident Vs problem is always a tricky one. Looking at a practicle example suppose every day when you come from office to home , you wife opens the door, takes your laptop from you , offers you a gilass of chilled water , this is standard operating procedure which is followed on your returning but what if one day to your surprise it did not happen , you came home and there was no one to open door, take your bag and make you comfortable , is this a problem ?
In ITIL terminology , this is a disruption from daily standard operating procedure hence it is not a problem , realisticaly if you think your wife may be caught up in some other work or she may be out to buy vegetables in grocery store near by , this was just one off incident , specially if you see that from the next day onward you are back on the same routine । But if next day also same incident is repeated and even after that you do not get the expected reception on your home coming than there are multiple occurances of the same incidents pointing to one common root cause and thats a problem for you so ITIL would take it into problem management process.

Now once you have realised that this is a problem , you would have to resolve it and for resolution you would need to do a root cause analysis , after putting some stress on your head and talking to your wife you realised that the root cause of this cold reception may be because she has been doing it from so long but you never care to talk to her about her day instead
you switch on TV and engross yourself on useless breaking news of 24X7 news channels. Now this problem ( having identified root cause) becomes a known error for you and it seems for solving it you would need request for change to change the standard operating procedure , now instead of turning to TV on your arrival you would rather have a small chat with your wife
and find out how was her day .

Even if this approach does not solve the problem than you have two alternative one is to do a functional escalation that is to escalate some one who is higher in authority and can handle the problem in this case it may be your father in law or mother in law who. Otherwise you can do a hierarchical escalation to a person who is expert in this type of problem , it may be your sister or brother in law.
See ITIL is even relevant to daily life !

Can't Fire

It will be a dejavu for Mr Naresh Goyal , head of jet airways. Last year during tougher times he tried to remove around 1900 employees from the jet payroll , which sounded a right decision for the company as many of these people were on probation and they had completed their probation period post which it was Jet's call whether it want them to continue or not, given the special macroeconomic conditions there was no other option . Of course no one can deny the human side of the story but this risk has always been associated with private jobs and people today come prepared to face it any time .

Doing a job today does not make you feel as safe as it was 4 years back or much safer before 2000 bubble burst or safest before GE Neutron Jack era when lifetime jobs were guaranteed and companies like IBM was famous for committing to life time employment of its employees . Currently once more jet fired 2 pilots facing an unprecedented situation with almost entire pilot staff going on a synchronized leave. Organizations which are service intensive and have to face volume of customers on many touch point every day turn themselves into a tricky situation by such issues , some thing similar happened in 2006 when some staff of gourmet ( a food supplier to airlines) was fired resulting a strike which meant no food in flights irrespective of the fact that many of these flights were as long as 14 hours journey.

In such conditions company would not have any choice but give it up to the demands of the union. Even though there is no such instance observed in IT industry where in last two year thousands and thousands of people have left the job but there is definitely damages, when companies remove employees who are redundant or so called non performers , people who have been retained also feel the fear and start looking for the opportunities to leave the current company . It may result to a fast attrition rate once normal times return back which leaves companies into a situation where they have work but no resources and now they are bound to hire resources from market at higher costs.

Given this vicious cycle , it seems organizations just can't fire but still they do ....