TIPA Tools and Methods
TIPA provides the following supporting material to perform a standard, structured, objective, and repeatable assessment of IT Service Management processes. The ISO/IEC 15504 standard requires that the assessment be based on a Process Assessment Model (PAM), which in turn is based upon a suitable reference source of process definitions—one or more Process Reference Models (PRM).
PRM: Process Reference Model
The Process Reference Model aims at defining the domain and scope of the business concerned. It defines the processes by giving a high-level description of the processes in terms of process purpose and outcomes, together with a description of the relationship between those processes.
PAM: Process Assessment Model
The standard process definition (as specified in the PRM) is completed within a PAM with process capability indicators that will be examined during the assessment process. These indicators can be low-level activities or process work products (indicators of a performed process) depending on the particular context of an evaluation.
A Complementary Approach
The PAM will usually vary somehow, whereas the PRM will remain the same, as it defines the business at a higher level. The PRM tells what the processes are, and what they should normally produce, and the PAM gives us a list of lower-level activities, records, and documents that are supposed to be met in the particular context of this evaluation.
The TIPA Toolbox
- Tools for TIPA assessment
- The TIPA toolbox gathers methodological and IT tools for supporting the main stages of a TIPA assessment. All TIPA Certified Assessors are free to use this toolbox for performing their TIPA assessment.
- TIPA Assessment Organization Tools
- The TIPA assessment organization tools are used at the beginning of a TIPA assessment to understand the context, the scope and the objectives of a given TIPA assessment, as well as to plan relevant interviews and document reviews.
- TIPA Evidence Management Tools
- The TIPA evidence management tools are used during the assessment activities performed within the assessed organizational unit (i.e., document reviews and interviews). These tools enable the assessment team to collect all the necessary information in order to provide an actual and objective "snapshot view" of the assessed processes.
- TIPA analysis and assessment result tools
- The TIPA analysis and assessment result tools are used during the last activities of an assessment for formalizing and structuring the evidence analysis, the process rating, and the final assessment result and report.