Starting the Journey - Aim, Fire, … Ready?
A proven method of initiating an IT Service Management program is to identify a set of processes based on the challenges the organization is facing and perform a current state assessment. The impact a good assessment has on the benefits realized from such a program cannot be doubted. Knowing where you are is absolutely essential to understanding how you will get to the destination.
But how do you know your organization is “ready” to perform an assessment - Is it enough to identify the best practice framework you want to align to? Is it ok to call the consultant right away and put him on the job? Or maybe send some key IT staff for an ITIL training?
From our experience with performing assessments for multiple organizations across the globe, we find organizations achieve varying degrees of success with their ITSM programs, and a key factor seems to be the way the program was initiated. If I were to summarize, the following come out to be important readiness factors to start an ITSM assessment initiative –
- Define the objectives – What pain points of end-users would the program address? What is the data available to back this up and how reliable is it? I have frequently used End user surveys and IT scorecards for this and they have proved extremely reliable sources.
- Define the scope – I have been involved in quite a few discussions where the question of “which processes do we start with” has come up. And more often then not, a consensus does not come easy. Organizations that achieved success had used a hypothesis based approach to identify the process areas for assessment based on the pain points of end users and IT staff. At the end of the assessment exercise, the roadmap for detailed process definitions and implementation of initiatives was used to validate or invalidate the hypothesis.
- Identify the “who” – The “who” of the program includes identifying not just who took the decisions about the budget but more importantly who was needed to provide inputs across the board – Process Customers (aka end users) who were impacted by the process outputs, Process Sponsors who approved the budgets and managed strategic direction for the IT organization, Process Owners who were accountable for the results from the process, and Process Members who did the hard work in operating the process on a day-to-day basis. In a recent client engagement, we spent close to 3 weeks in just identifying and agreeing on the stakeholders to be involved.
- Network with other initiatives – An often overlooked aspect, this is important to make sure the boundaries and interfaces with other competing initiatives are defined. I was working with a large US utility company on their Release Management program where the question of “overlaps” with the CMM program was perpetually brought up. We addressed the concerns by defining interfaces and hand-offs between the two programs, but the time and effort required to do this mid-way through the program was considerably higher.
- Include more Functions – I often see ITIL being framed as an “Infrastructure” framework. And therefore the effort being led by the Infrastructure function. Inclusion and active involvement of Application Development, Maintenance and Support teams ensures the “service” and “end user” view is not lost when undertaking process improvement initiatives. In my experience this is easier done, where the initiative is led by the CIO office/ Strategy group/ Quality team, than it is when led by a technology group.
How did your organization get “ready” before starting on the Service Management journey?
