ITIL V3 – Readiness Assessment
The "Are you ready for V3" Email
Quick question - over the last week or so, how many emails or articles did you come across that were titled "Are you ready for V3" or something to that effect? Quite a few, I bet! And how many of these did you find useful?? Hmmm ... alright - we won't get into that part 
With the release of the core ITIL V3 texts on 30th May, there has been a good amount of buzz in the industry. But how long it will be before organizations start embracing V3 remains debatable. Ken Turbitt from BMC says in his blog that it will be between 18 months to 3 years before adoption of V3 goes mainstream. While that may eventually turn out to be true, it has definitely not stopped several organizations from already starting to think and plan out their V3 journeys.
Earlier this week, I was speaking with one of our clients here in the UK. With an ISO20K certification and a relatively mature Service Management program under their belt, one of the burning questions facing them has been how V3 will impact them. Here are some quick points from my discussion that I thought you might find interesting if you have also been thinking about starting on V3. So, is this an exhaustive list? By no means - these are some broad initial directions that can guide you as and when you plan for V3.
So, where do you begin?
Which service lifecycle stage should you start with? All of them, did you say?!
An iterative approach to developing Service Management capabilities has worked well for several organizations in the V2 world. A financial services organization where I was at, a while back, successfully adopted such an iterative approach to develop its ITSM program and significantly improved its availability measures. Will such an approach continue to work? I see no reason why not. Having said that, how do you decide which lifecycle stage to begin with? Well, for starters, look at the key business drivers. For the health care industry as an example, this would be the ability to ensure a hospital can continue to serve its patients at all times. Focusing on "Service Operations" could be a good starting point. Sounds too simple did you say? Well, we all know the old saying of keeping it simple!
Assess Service Maturity Or Process Maturity?
Well, why not look at both? Some organizations such as this client I was discussing with wish to be able to see one single holistic view of all their services broken out by lifecycle stage and processes within these. And there are still others who prefer to just continue building out specific processes and decide subsequently to move towards an integrated service outlook. Is that a problem? Surely not. What benefits do you want to see and by when – let these drive your decision.
Maturity or Compliance?
ITIL purists would shudder to hear the words "ITIL" and "compliance" mentioned in the same breath :-) But if you have a relatively "mature" Service Management program, ask yourself if you really want to reassess your entire program. Perhaps, you might be happy to use V3 to make sure your existing processes are really "complying" with what you have out there, while stitching in new threads that have been called out in V3. Take the case of Incident Management for example, which in the V3 world is now Event Management, Incident Management and Request Fulfillment, the last two supported by Self-Help. While most organizations today, in some form, do carry out Event Management and Request Fulfillment, calling these out has ensured that they are formally benchmarked and assessed against theV3 best practices, instead of being hidden somewhere in the garb of Incident Management. Simultaneously, for the core Incident Management process, ensuring that the process complies with what it has been designed for will ensure renewed focus on best practices.
Are these also the directions in which you are thinking about V3? Let me know our thoughts.
Comments
One factor that I struggle with is the ongoing cost of compliance, take for example integrating Event Management into the Project Management process at a stage when some of the critical info that impacts on cost can be somewhat vague, are you aware of a 'rule of thumb' that relates to Event Management cost as a percentage of project budget? Obviously every project requires different levels of EM but a benchmark % cost would be a rather handy start point.
Email response would be much appreciated!
Thanks
Posted by: David | November 26, 2008 02:14 AM