Are you confused about the differences
between project management and service management?
In this VS episode, I'm going to explain the different career paths,
certifications and processes that set these two amazing fields apart.
Hey, everyone, Chris Ward here,
one of the Edutainers at ITProTV.
And today we are looking at project management
versus service management. And quite frankly,
what's the big deal?
As an ITIL for managing professional and strategic leader
as well as a PMP, which is Project Management Professional,
both are near and dear to my heart.
But quite frankly, they're not that much different.
And they can complement one another.
But they are different in their focus and approach.
So, before comparing the two,
we should first understand what exactly the two terms mean.
So start off with project management.
It primarily focuses only on the project, and on, you know,
what's really happening right there.
It's all about the application of techniques
and knowledge for following laid down plans.
And that can be big plans, like in a waterfall
or a small plans, or sprints for Agile.
And we follow those plans and meet the expectations of customers
and stakeholders alike.
On the other hand, we have service management.
Now, this is a process based practice
that focuses on delivering IT services that benefit customers.
It aligns the delivery of the IT services
with the needs of an organization that uses them.
For our intents and purposes,
we focus on the IT side of things,
and you might hear it called IT Service Management or ITSM.
So what are the other differences when we talk about these two things?
Well, on this table, we can see a lot of things.
And so, we're going to zoom in a bit
and give you the 30,000 foot overview.
So you look at this,
we've got everything from project management,
which focuses primarily on individual projects.
Then, you have IT Service Management or service management
that focuses on the management and delivery of the services
that you might have created as IT project, the duration.
That's another big one.
For project management, they are temporary endeavors
to produce a unique product service or result.
So there's a beginning, and there's an end.
Where a service management
has more of a ongoing operational type of thing,
that once you start delivering the services,
you want to continue to deliver the services.
The processes, there's five of them.
And we'll talk a little bit about that later on.
As well as in service management,
where you have all these different practices that you would follow
to help make sure that the operation, the delivery and the value
of those services does take place.
There are benefits, obviously, by looking at something as a project
because it does have a beginning and an end.
You can kind of focus on that.
I mentioned earlier on that depending on whether you use
a predictive waterfall approach to project management,
where you do a lot of planning up front
and then change takes a little bit more to get accomplished.
Or whether you use more of an agile approach,
which is going to be very small, what they call sprints,
where you take small bits of work, work on it, review it,
see how well it worked, if you need to redo it.
You can. If not, you move on, pull some information
from the backlog and off you go and finish that particular project.
Very good for software development,
Where you have the benefits of IT Service Management
is where you give that value co-creation.
Where the service provider and the service consumer
work together to not only deliver but also receive the services
and make sure that everybody's getting what they need.
It could be anything from profits for the service provider
to hey, I have needs, I need outcomes
that I'm trying to achieve as a service consumer.
We also of course have the objectives that are slightly different.
And of course, the certifications that we'll talk about a little bit later on.
Now, why don't we go ahead and give you an example
of maybe how this might work in an organization.
Let's take Elon Musk's very cool company called Tesla.
Now, when Elon and let's face it, his design and development team,
created the new cybertruck,
or we would say any of the other new models,
that's, I would say, that initial creation was a project.
It had a beginning and it had an end,
and it definitely created what many people would call,
a unique product service or result.
But hey, once that project was finished,
and you have your new shiny cybertruck, service management,
or in the case of something like a cybertruck,
IT Service Management steps in.
There are constant feature of updates, software patches.
Maybe there's some bugs in the system that need to be fixed.
There's customer support,
hey, I need to have it repaired, hey, when can I find...?
Or where can I find the latest, you know,
plug in stations and get my car my cybertruck charged up.
And don't forget that Tesla, as a company,
has internal systems and services
that allow them to support the different models of vehicles,
and even those solar power cell systems that they install on houses.
See, they're closely related, but there are real differences
in the two different modalities that we see here.
Now, something else that shows the differences
are what we would call the KPIs or key performance indicators.
For projects, we can see this typical list of KPIs
that show whether you're hitting your objectives and key results
or critical success factors.
We can see several here from schedule variance
to effort variance, cost variance.
We take a look at the quality,
the number of changes that are identified,
implemented or rejected.
These are all ways to measure the success of whether something
is working within projects.
And by the way, that is true of whether it's an agile project,
or a traditional waterfall, more of a predictive type of project.
Now, for service management,
we can see that there are a lot of different things.
In fact, a bigger influence of things like TCO,
or total cost of ownership,
operational and standard service level agreements.
You've got performance and availability.
This is where you start hearing things like five nines uptime.
You hear terms like meantime between failure
and meantime to restore service.
Or perhaps number of feature releases and upgrades that might happen there.
All of those things as KPIs for service management,
tie into much more of a day to day operational type of environment,
versus projects, which typically are going to be
what we started here, we're doing things here.
And eventually there is an end game that we want to accomplish
the requirements that our customers,
or even within our own organization, we would say is looking for.
Alright, Chris. So what?
What would this look like if I wanted to continue on
in a career, perhaps is being a project manager?
Are there some differences?
Well, here we see a generalized path from being a project coordinator,
which simply requires a high school diploma
or equivalent secondary education.
Here in the States, we would say something like a GED,
a general education document.
This can climb up to ultimately being the vice president
of project management at a major company.
Now, the nice thing here is, how high you go
is only limited by your willingness to continue learning
proper project management skills,
and doing as many projects and doing them well as possible.
For IT Service Management,
there are way more roles and positions that you see here.
But the ones that we are showing are broken down
into fairly typical, what we call, the three point areas.
Strategic, developmental,
sometimes called Tactical, and operational.
Now, to get to these positions, you know, we do a lot of things,
from education to experience.
We can see everything from strategic type of roles
of you know, you could be a service level manager
creating those service level agreements,
to security architects, IT architects.
You can move into something that's more of a developmental type of thing.
whether you're into software or application development.
And that's going to be things like change management
and configuration management,
release and deployment management positions.
And then operations.
Those are the parts that, a lot of times,
when you're getting your start in IT,
this is where you show up.
You're going to be on the service desk,
maybe helping out with Incident Management,
maybe being the IT operations manager
as you move up along that particular path.
So like I said, not only with project management,
and IT service management, education,
and certification can be your friend.
So let's start off with something in the realm of project management.
Now, these project management certifications,
I'm just showing you a small list of some of them that are available.
These are probably some of the more well known ones, okay?
And I will be the first to say that you don't need to hold certification
in order to get some of those positions that we were talking about,
whether it was project management,
or whether it was IT ServiceManagement.
But let me tell you something,
definitely will help you with career advancement and yes,
more money, alright?
So, let's first look at these project management certs.
And we can see that we have everything
from, if you're looking at it from a level,
we can start over there on the left with the beginner levels
of CAP M, which is the Certified Associate of a project management.
CompTia is project Plus.
There's also IT project management,
and APM, which is another one.
Then, we have advanced, which is going to be something
that I am a PMP, which is a Project Management Professional.
I will warn you that some of these certs in the advanced areas,
more than likely will require some sort of project management experience.
Just for example, the PMP requires at a minimum,
if you have a four year university degree or,
you know, graduate level degree,
you need 4500 hours of project management experience.
So, there's the PMP, there's the PPM,
which is just another different way of looking at things.
CPD, MP, mean, managing projects master.
And then, different types of industry.
You've got the IT industry,
which if you are part of the IT industry,
some good ones here would be the CPMP,
the project management, IT services,
These are great certifications.
If you're in the government, and that type of industry,
the Prince2, which comes from Axelos,
which is also the same organization that produces ITIL,
which is an IT service management certification,
which we'll see here in just a minute.
These are really good because they were developed
by, believe it or not, the UK government.
So, Prince2 kind of came out of that.
And then Agile, one that's very well known,
there are more, but Scrum Master, or Certified Scrum Master,
is a great certification to grab,
if you are into that Agile type of project management.
Okay, that was a lot.
Let's take a look at IT service management as well.
Now, the one that I'm going to show is the one I'm most familiar with.
Now, there are others here that we have.
Things like COBIT, there is Siam, which is run by (((scope ism))).
There is VeriSM.
Several others that you can see here,
but let's move on to this slide that talks a little bit about the ITIL.
So, ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library.
It is probably the most well known
IT Service Management Certification System out there.
It's been around for 30 plus years,
and it is one that is recognized worldwide.
You can find these ITIL managing professionals
and strategic leaders and everybody all over the globe.
So take a look. You can start off with something
as simple as an ITIL for Foundation,
which is simply attend maybe one of our IT Pro TV courses,
which we do have.
And you can go out take an exam in your ITIL for Foundation,
or ITIL, I should say, for Foundation certified.
From there, you can move up into those middle.
And we would say almost intermediate level type certifications,
which can be just, if you want to do one or a couple,
there are ones that are just for you.
You can do anything from the create, deliver and support,
drive stakeholder value.
There's high velocity IT.
And then, one that works both for the ITIL for managing professional
and strategic leader, is something called Direct Plan & Improve,
which deals with, how do you create those improvement initiatives?
How do you take your organization from here maybe higher?
And then something that has just been released,
as of the recording of this versus episode,
something called the ITIL for Strategic Leader,
in which case you can take the ITIL leader certification,
which is digital in IT strategy,
which myself and my co hosts Zack (((((Memos, does a lot of fun.
It's a great one that you can check out.
If you get both ITIL for Management professional
and the ITIL for strategic leader,
you have the option to become an ITIL master.
And I gotta tell you something,
there are very, very, very few ITIL masters in the world,
and it's kind of like having your PhD in IT Service Management.
Well, there you have it.
A detailed look at the differences between project and service management,
as well as if maybe you're looking for some certification.
We gave you some good examples.
If you're looking for certification training in any of these career paths,
feel free to check us out over at,
Oh I wonder, maybe IT Pro TV.
And don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel
for more vs episodes, including a very fun one
with my friend Anthony Sequeira.
Thanks so much for watching.
We'll see you next time.