Category: ITSM

Blog post – The ITIL 4 Journey – One Year In

Axelos was nice enough to ask me to write an ITIL 4 blog post a little while ago on the Managing Professional certificate. I was happy to do it; you can read a little more about what we came up with at https://www.axelos.com/news/blogs/december-2019/itil-4-mp-transition-a-transformed-framework

It’s been a couple of months since I worked with them on this post, and I’ve had a chance to reflect a bit on what we’ve learned in this first year of ITIL 4, and as part of this ongoing transition. A few lessons seem to keep coming up again and again, and I thought I’d share them with you.

1. Value Stream Mapping is a game changer for IT organizational practices. While many people and organizations have leveraged LEAN practices for years, there is unique value to using it in the context of IT service delivery. Most compellingly, it gets IT organizations thinking cross-functionally and, even more importantly, across many different ITIL practice areas. I have been a long term proponent of “working backwards” from the customer and desired outcomes to how and what we do to help facilitate service value creation. Most of my customers struggle with cross-functional alignment and, when they have been able to operate successfully in a cross-functional model, do so in the context of a process or two, like incident management or change management. ITIL 4 emphasizes and demonstrates that many practices contribute to each and every service value chain, and that organizations must look at how (and how much) practice support they require to deliver the desired business outcomes.
2. This focus on value is reinforced by the emphasis on Customer Journeys as part of the Driving Stakeholder Value guidance. Very few people in an enterprise actually understand the entire journey that a customer takes to co-creating value, and in most instances confuse success at a particular touchpoint with success in facilitating an excellent customer experience. So much of IT culture has traditionally been reactive (‘no news is good news”) that we often accept a lack of active complaints as a substitute for real validation of an excellent customer experience. Modern social media culture has taught us the compelling value of engagement with stakeholders through the entire journey, and that customer feedback is the shortest path to compelling improvements.
3. The emphasis on high-velocity IT is critical, but only if it is velocity to value, not just velocity to more “stuff.” IT organizations continue at times to confuse features with benefits, and speed to market with use and value conversion. If organizations adopt Agile practices such as value-based prioritization of backlogs and teams focusing on delivering the highest value solutions first, all the time, they will avoid this challenge. However, sometimes organizations find themselves trapped by the desire for “low-hanging fruit;’ many times the fruit may be low-hanging, but low value too. Also critical is that the customer is driving the prioritization, and is accountable for optimizing the value delivery for the business.

There are countless new areas of guidance in ITIL 4 that will help you during your digital transformation journey. If you haven’t explored some of the new ITIL Specialist and ITIL Strategist programs, I encourage you to take a look. If you haven’t read the new ITIL books, they go far beyond traditional ITIL practice guidance to help you improve customer value and optimizing organizational resources. Take a look and reach out to us if we can help you on your journey.

In the ITIL guidance, Capacity Management is broken down into three related sub-processes. In this blog we will look at the three subprocesses and how they help us have better visibility into customer needs.
The first of the subprocesses is Component Capacity Management. For this subprocess we could easily substitute the word Utilization, for the purpose of this subprocess is to maximize the effective utilization of the components we have. Whether we’re discussing disk space, bandwidth, processors, memory allocations, or any other use of our physical and virtual components, the goal is to extract the most value we can from the components that we have. All of the capacity management processes have a financial management link, so here clearly the goal is to be able to defer expenditures until needed, and to balance the cost of provisioning to the resource requirements.
The second of the subprocesses is Service Capacity Management. For this subprocess we could substitute the phrase “End-to-end Performance.” The purpose here is to ensure that services have the right level of end-to end throughput and response time to meet customer requirements. Again, the goal is “enough,” enough performance to meet the need without gold-plating or what in the Lean world we would call “overprocessing,” or over-delivery (and overspending) relative to the business need.
The third subprocess is Business Capacity Management. Here would could substitute the phrase “future planning,” and there is a straight line between business capacity management and budget planning. Here we look at both the existing component and service capacity needs AND the future ones; next week, next month, next year, what is happening based on the business plan and what are the implications for the capacity plan. In short, everything in capacity management is demand-driven. Business Processes drive business activity drive consumption of service. As business use increases (demand), provisioning must scale to support it (supply). This of course has implications for budgeting and spending patterns, with the rule of thumb that we wish to plan for what is needed, and defer expenditures until the need is realized. These could be for new services, or changes in the use patterns of existing services.
Techniques used in Capacity Management include application sizing, simulation or analytical modeling, and the use of a tactical capacity plan to maintain visibility across your services. Half the point of having a process defined like this is to establish this as a focus area, where the Capacity Manager can look across technical/functional disciplines to ensure that capacity provisioning is optimized over time.
How well does your organization do capacity management? Is the focus too technical, looking at the component level in detail but perhaps missing the end-to-end? Do you have the right interactions with your business customers to get a decent forecast of future needs and patterns of use so that your planning and budgeting is properly aligned? Do you have alignment with the members of your team looking at new technologies and their implications for capacity and service improvement?

Many organizations are working to adopt ITIL practices and improve the quality of services they provide to their customers. Yet many organization, especially larger ones with a broad array of potential areas of opportunity, struggle to identify the key critical success factors that make ITIL adoptions successful. We’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds of different companies to “get past talking” and begin to make meaningful adoptions that drive real results, both in improved efficiencies and effectiveness. In this white paper we will talk through three of the most critical we’ve see in our consulting and mentoring experiences.

CSF #1 – Management Commitment (and how would one measure that?)

Literally every publication that talks about successful ITSM adoption begins with the need for “Management Commitment.” Unfortunately, that’s often where it ends, too.  That begs some obvious questions. What is management commitment, and how would I know if I have it?

We have seen common traits in successful ITIL adoptions around demonstrable management commitment. Here are a few we see in the most successful ones.

Creation and Funding of a Formal ITSM Program – In most IT organizations, commitment is seen in investment and commitment of resources and time, and a willingness and commitment to effective measurement of the efficacy of the program.

Visible presence – Successful ITSM programs have highly visible executive Champions, who understand the value proposition and advocate for the program and for the achievement of the benefits. Unsuccessful programs often have executives with poor awareness of what ITIL is, but have a general “wish” to be perceived as using best practices. Phrases you might hear include things like “we want to be an ITIL organization.” These executives require substantial consulting and mentoring to understand and prioritize the benefits of an ITSM adoption, or they will go in circles.

Adoption of Owner roles –ITIL and other frameworks like COBIT emphasize the need for effective governance and management of processes, and clear alignment on services, service value, and service delivery. ITIL supports these through the establishment of Service and Process Owners, whose job is to work in cross-functional ways to support delivery of whole end-to-end services and ensure effective role alignment in coordinating process activities. An unambiguous sign of real progress in an ITSM Adoption is the definition of and assignment of these critical roles to appropriate (and often very senior) IT management.

Celebration of achievement milestones a.k.a. support for CSI  – Wise managers are well aware that ITSM adoption happens at different levels of maturity in different parts of the organization. Establishing good core practices and intensely focusing on continual improvement , what we often call the ‘Win a little to win a lot” attitude, is critical to keeping the team focused and engaged.

CSF #2 – Define Processes before Tooling

In many organizations that are challenged with their ITSM adoption, there wasn’t in fact much of a strategy, but there had been a substantial commitment: to purchasing one of the major integrated ITSM toolsets.

Our general commentary on tooling is pretty simple: virtually all of the major tool families do a good job with implementing supporting tooling for the core ITIL Service Operation and Transition processes. Unfortunately, even when organizations plan to adopt entire tooling families, individual module implementations tend to take a siloed approach, down to retrofitting poor customizations from previous tooling implementations that would be much better off discarded outright.

A better approach is to lead with the processes first. Establish your core processes (many templates are generally available that would get you 80-85% of the way to where you want to go), and then tailor these to fit your needs. A proper process document will establish your objectives, governance, activity workflow, metrics, roles and responsibilities, and a RACI matrix at a bare minimum. Once you’ve done your due diligence on the process, it becomes an easy activity to look at how to use the tooling to automate the process activities and to create reusable models. Remember that automation is neutral by design; it allows you to do things quickly and with fewer resources. If it’s automating the right activities, it will dramatically improve quality and productivity. Conversely, if we don’t have clarity on our processes and procedures first, it simply allows us to “do bad things fast.”

CSF #3 – High Quality Incident Management Information

Many organizations begin the ITIL journey unhappy with the state of their service desk and their incident management processes overall. In many cases, these issues begin with fundamental aspects of process immaturity: lack of clarity in role definitions, poor or no business awareness training, lack of proper process governance and oversight (or lack of a single process owner and/or process managers with responsibility across technical/functional silos), bad process compliance, and poor metrics definition. While virtually every organization has “incident management,” shockingly few really have a single enterprise process with meaningful end-to-end governance and management. This is especially troubling, because good quality incident data is fundamental to the success of many of our other core process areas: problem management, availability management, capacity management, SLM, change management, configuration management, and we could go on. So job one in any adoption is to ensure the quality of your incident data, and to do this, you must focus on establishing and stabilizing your incident management process. Do you

• Have consistent and appropriate practice for when incidents are detected and logged so the “clock” starts
• Have coherent categorization schema that produce effective assignment and searching as well as a rich source of effective and targeted reporting.
• Have rigorous rules for priority based on business impact and urgency with highly consistent scoring based on established procedures and work instructions
• Have defined incident models for the majority of “routine” incidents
• Have a knowledge base that is usable and effective to support first-level incident resolution
• Have clear rules for resolution of incidents and when the clock stops
• Have clear rules for closure, final categorization, and enforcement of incident resolution documentation

And one to grow on…Service Level Management

Not every organization with successful ITIL adoption activities has formalized Service Level Management. It is entirely possible to establish and improve other process areas without it.

However, the organizations that really get the big wins always do.

Why? It’s really very simple…it’s possible to have processes without services, but it’s very hard to deliver better outcomes for customers without a meaningful process to ensure alignment between IT services and the business workflow and outcomes they support. SLM establishes IT’s “reason for being;” ensuring that what we do delivers the right benefits for the business, and that we have a dynamic way to maintain awareness of business need changes (internally or externally driven) so that we can appropriately evolve services to meet the changing landscape. It ensures that we emphasize end-to-end service metrics and their contribution to business metrics (like revenue, profit, and mission achievement) over technology and raw uptime. It also provides a regular communications vehicle to more proactively identify improvements and potential issues. If you have spent a lot of time (and money) on ITSM adoption with limited buy-in from your business partners, this is almost certainly the “missing link” that will help you get your activities back on track.

 

Patrick von Schlag is President and Chief ITSM Consultant for Deep Creek Center, a service management consultancy and accredited training organization based in Highland, MD.