All administration industry including information technology requires that the services they convey are of high caliber. To assure quality administration management, two strategies are being utilized broadly – IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and Six Sigma. Both have their points of interest. In any case, most organizations incline toward using them two together.

What are ITIL and Six Sigma?

ITIL:

ITIL Information Technology Infrastructure Library is a set of detailed practices for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of the business.

The ITIL Practitioner certification offers practical guidance on how to adopt and adapt the ITIL framework to support your business' objectives. It is the next step after ITIL Foundation for experts who have already learned the basics of IT Service Management (ITSM).

ITIL will empower you to utilize and implement IT service and capabilities to provide and maximize value within your organization. By adopting the method and utility within ITIL will increase productivity, optimize costs and improve customer experience.

Six Sigma:

Six Sigma is an analytical, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving toward six standard deviations connecting the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process – from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service.

The essential objective of the Six Sigma methodology is the implementation of measurement-based tactics that focus on process development and variation reduction through the application of Six Sigma development projects. The analytical representation of Six Sigma describes quantitatively how a process is executing. To execute Six Sigma, a process must not produce more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. A Six Sigma error is persistent as anything outside of customer specifications.

Deconstructing the manufacturing process down to its essential parts, Six Sigma defines and evaluates each step of a process, searching for ways to improve efficiencies in a business structure, increase the quality of the process and increase the bottom-line profit.

The Difference Between Six Sigma and ITIL:

Information Technology Infrastructure Library is a comprehensive set of best practices and guidelines for the IT Industry. On the other hand, Six Sigma is a data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects in all process – from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service.

In a conventional situation, ITIL and Six Sigma are not utilized together in the genuine sense. Be that as it may, they are appropriated as a part of a blend as a respectful arrangement of practices to enhance businesses to a vast degree.

Six Sigma is for the most part in light of calculations, formulas and the investigation of business forms to enhance them. It concentrates on the most skilled method to improve applications, ITIL bargains more with the hypothesis and rules required to discover the "what" of the procedures. While using both models can benefit businesses, Six Sigma and ITIL aren’t generally used together, but rather in combination with a complimentary set of practices that can improve businesses from some aspects.

Six Sigma is a procedure based on formulas, calculations and the analysis of business means to improve them. While Six Sigma concentrates on the ‘how’ of developing processes, ITIL is more concerned with the approach and guidelines put in place to determine the ‘what’ of the processes.

By utilizing ITIL methods, a business can determine what needs to be done to develop processes and areas. Six Sigma, contrarily, can benefit a business work out what the root of a problem is or where an error in a process lies and then determine how this can be solved. However, as Six Sigma relies on statistical analysis, it is best practice to sample process improvements on a small trial basis to ascertain whether the advantages are scalable.

Combining the ITIL and Six Sigma:

Even with these distinctions, these two approaches when combined offer a lot of benefits. ITIL specifies what should be carried out in the industry but, not how. So, the IT professionals in the organization have to determine the process flow and make detailed work instructions themselves. Also, Sig Sigma tells how to find the cause of problems and how they can be solved. With the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of quality improvement determined, the two approaches together improve the quality of IT service support and delivery.

Six Sigma can be applied in the improvement of the organization’s existing processes that are already using the ITIL framework or just migrating to it. If it is in the migrating stage, the organization can use the strategy of analyzing the risk, finding out what needs to be done to make the processes ITIL-compatible and then use a business case to define how it will migrate to ITIL-compatible state.

As both the approaches of ITIL and Six Sigma are essential to the success of a business, attending ITIL training along with Six Sigma will prove extra beneficial. Experts believe that this gives the knowledge to implement Six Sigma to provide an ITIL compatible process which is in sync with the business goals of the organization.

Six Sigma can correlate to the existing processes of a business organization which is already following the ITIL framework. It can also be implemented in an enterprise which is about to migrate to ITIL framework.

ITIL is a complete set of best practices and guidelines for an IT Organization to build their processes for managing a Service Desk. When you overlay Six Sigma, a methodology, and tools for continuous quality improvement, you add a way to standardize and optimize any process, a valuable tool for building your ITIL workflows.

ITIL defines the “what” service management, and Six Sigma defines the “how” of quality improvement. Together, they are a perfect fit for improving the quality of Information Technology service delivery and support.