Service Matters! ITSM & IT Management

In my experience one of the key activities, which ensures that the required budget, time and resources are available to run and sustain the initiative, is the planning and bucketing of all potential effort-heads. The first step to estimate the effort needs for ITSM implementation is to identify the different stages in ITSM journey and also the key tasks and activities, which will be accomplished.

I have seen different Organizations adopting different approaches, but typically they all involve 3 stages (as mentioned below) during ITSM implementation - 

Stage 1 – Current State Validation– This stage helps in identifying where an Organization is with respect to industry best practices and also the potential areas of improvement in current IT Service Management landscape. Some Organizations also refer to this stage as “As-Is Maturity Assessment and Gap Analysis”

Typical activities carried out as part of this stage are:

·          Identification and Scheduling  interviews with stakeholders
·          Identifying, gathering and reviewing process documents
·          Stakeholder interviews (X per process, Y processes)
·          Input validation Workshops (N per process)
·          Review of current Service Management tools
·          Analyzing information gathered to identify gaps in current setup
·          Preparing Gap analysis report

Stage 2 – Planning for “To-Be” State – Once the gaps are identified in current setup next step is to identify and document the improvement initiatives, which enables an Organization to reach the desired state.  Considerable amount of effort is involved in this stage and is mostly spread across following activities - 

·          Preparing and conducting workshop session on priority setting
·          Identifying initiatives and preparing implementation roadmap
·          Identifying data migration strategy, architecture, interfaces, roadmap for Service Management tool (if new tool is used)
·          Organization Change Management
·          Identifying channels to communicating the change 

Stage 3 – Implementation Rollout– This stage involves activities related to communication and roll-out of the initiatives identified as part of “planning for To-Be state” stage into the live environment.
Though the actual effort needs here will be primarily driven by the recommendations coming out in previous stage, but still are typically spread across:

·          Customizing standard processes for environment, where essential
·          Implementing initiatives (effort here will vary depending on the number and size of initiatives identified)
·          Developing /customizing /integrating IT Service Management tool with other applications, internal testing, bug fixing, UAT for service management tool
·          Rolling out customized tools modules in production environment
·          Developing  training material
·          Facilitating process reviews and feedback collection
·          Conducting trainings on new processes and tools 

Above listed activities are based on my experience and are indicative only. I believe that there is no single “ideal” set of activities that fits all Organizations, and the actual approach and set of activities will vary from organization to organization.
 
In my experience, most of the Organizations go through stage 1 and 2 to kick-start their ITSM implementation efforts. And once an Organization has good understanding of the current gaps and immediate priorities, it plans and goes ahead with “Implementation rollout”, as the next phase of Service Management adoption.

But do all organizations have to commit the same effort across the different stages and activities of ITSM implementation or does it vary depending on the some other factors (internal and external)?  In my next blog I will talk about some of these factors, which affect the magnitude of effort involved.