Adopt ITIL across Engineering

Background

ITIL is a set of best practices that cover the whole service management lifecycle. Many of the principles are already reflected in the our approach to change management and continuous improvement, but there's some divergence across departments.

Having a centralized set of principles with independent certification will help GitLab to:

• secure external credibility that we're following best practices
• provide a single source of guidelines and practices that various departments can interpret to their needs
• build into team member careers by providing certification valued by many employers

More than change management, ITIL addresses a large number of organizational problems in a standard fashion.

While GitLab has documentation for nearly all of the areas that may be covered by ITIL, there's some divergence and inconsistency across areas within Engineering.

State of the Art

• Business Technology has most of their team certified in ITIL or PMP as of FY24-Q2: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-OKRs/-/work_items/2251

Change Management:

• Infrastructure Change Management
• Business Technology Change Management
• Support Change Management

Continuous Improvement

• Engineering Retrospective
• GitLab Engineering RCA
• GitLab Security RCA Process

Service Performance

• Engineering KPIs
• GitLab.com Monitoring and Service Availability

Considerations

• ITIL will require significant buy in from department leads in Engineering
• There's a significant cost in training and certification