Factors affecting magnitude of effort required to implement ITSM
Posted by - Atul Porwal
Not all organizations are same and neither is the effort required to implement ITSM. In my last blog I talked about the ITSM implementation stages and activities, which provided pointers towards areas “where” the effort is required. “How much” of that effort is required is driven by some of the Organization-specific factors. So what really are those factors ?
- Organization Size – Size of the Organization is one of the most important factors to be considered when doing effort estimation. During any ITSM implementation, the major chunk of effort is required in the number of stakeholder interviews and workshops that you conduct. These stakeholders could be in the form of process sponsors, process owners, process members and process customers. The number of stakeholders for an organization with IT staff size of 50 will definitely be less than the number of stakeholders for an organization with IT staff size of 1000, resulting into less number of interviews and less effort requirements.
- Number of Process areas to be covered – Number of interviews to be conducted as part of the “Current State Validation” stage is directly proportional to the number of ITIL processes to be covered as part of the program. Generally there is a defined set of stakeholder interviews for each process area and more the number of in-scope processes more will be the effort required towards conducting interviews. Number of in-scope processes also hugely impacts the number of users, who will have to be considered during the Organization Change Management effort.
- User Awareness on IT Service Management – Awareness of users on the ITIL framework and potential benefits coming out of its adoption can make a huge difference during ITSM implementation. Implementation is always easier if users have brought-in the idea of “why” IT service Management. During one of my projects, where I was involved in implementing Release Management process, lack of user awareness on ITIL caused program team to spend much more effort on Organization Change Management than warranted. It not only slowed down the process adoption but also extended the effort estimated during the start of the program.
- Language Consideration – Most of the leading ITSM tools are readily available in English language, but if in case an Organization would like to implement the processes and tools in different language, then corresponding effort needs to be estimated for interpreter and translation (as needed). I was recently involved in ITSM tools implementation planning for a south-east Asia based financial Organization and the cost and effort estimated were spiked by 20% due to requirement of implementing tools and processes in local language.
- Sourcing Model for the Organization (In-source, Outsource, Multi vendor environment) – Current sourcing model is another key considerations for effort estimation. For a completely in-sourced organization there will be a single set of stakeholders, but if you consider a case where multiple vendors are involved, the set of process members increases in proportion to the number of vendors involved. So to take an example, a large organization, where core infrastructure is managed by vendor-A and telecommunications services are managed by Vendor-B, for this organization the set of stakeholders, who needs to be interacted with, will include at least three sets - one each from parent Organization, vendor-A and vendor-B.
