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Putting the Service in IT Service Management

Many people understandably think about ITIL as a process framework. When you describe good practices for 25+ processes and capabilities it seems a no brainer. Yet when you look at the books, their names, and their objectives, it becomes clear that processes are an important means (COBIT calls them one of seven enablers), but that the desired end is delivering services.The entire concept of service in ITIL is embedded in thinking end-to-end; how service teams facilitate outcomes for customers and manage costs and risks on their behalf.

When I teach ITIL courses, I emphasize the idea that services describe not in fact what we do in IT, but what the customer gets. How do our hardware, software, people, processes, etc. produce valuable results for customers and enable them to perform better, faster, or more cost-effectively? The entire construct of information technology is predicated on the CSI model, or how the technology enables the use and processing of information to automate and otherwise facilitate business processes.

If the goal is services (and therefore outcomes for customers), the how-to is the Service Lifecycle. WAAAAAAYYYY too many people consider ITSM consistent with the operational and support process around Incident, Problem, Change, and Configuration Management. In order to set the table for success in those operational processes, we have to be able to manage the service first. Here is a brief summary of how the Service Lifecycle notion really supports the cultural transformation from technology provision to service and outcome enablement.

Service Strategy – there are many things we’d like to do, but simply cannot. Why? Not enough money, time, people, etc. In short, we are always facing some type of constraints. Therefore, given all of the things we could do, what things will we commit to do, and who decides? Service Strategy outlines a transparent way to make strategic decisions in the face of uncertainty and limitations.

 Service Design – how do we understand customer requirements for a service (utility and warrant you), and how do we in turn build/buy/integrate a service to meet the requirements. The Service Design processes enable us to essentially take a piece of paper (a Service Charter, and Approved Change Request, etc.) and transform it into a new or updated service.

Service Transition – my usual flip statement about Service Transition is how to take a new or changed service from development successfully into production without “blowing stuff up.” Sadly, the industry data continues to finger transition practices as a primary reason for production incidents. In the highly dynamic and Agile world we are working in today, change is normal and a fundamental source of competitive advantage in business. Our ability to streamline transition practices and build compelling and highly reliable models is critical to supporting highly iterative business needs.

Service Operation serves essentially as a party host. Deliver services to customers according to our agreed levels and support them as needed. In order to actually be able to operate services, we have to be able to visualize them (typically through a CMS), monitor them, and be able to coordinate support for them across a number of technical/functional teams. The service lifecycle emphasizes early engagement with operations teams during design, transition ( and even strategy) to ensure we don’t get over our skis when establishing service targets that will be incorporated into SLAs.

CSI emphasizes the need for accountable owners and the intentional and ongoing use of metrics and measures to drive ongoing, consistent improvement in the performance of processes and services. CSI supports process and service owners (and managers) in the proactive seeking of improvements in all practices across the lifecycle, and drives the execution of the 7 step improvement process to execute improvement projects and drive iterative improvement in practices.

 While each service lifecycle stage clearly uses processes to carry out many of their activities, the bigger value proposition is how the service lifecycle itself visualizes how we manage constrained resources to optimize service value delivered for customers. In this blog we will explore many processes, but you will see me tend to tie these back to bigger picture questions that hopefully answer the “so what” question for you. If we follow these practices, so what? Stay tuned!

Categorize this!

Several ITIL processes include a categorization activity, most prominently Incident and Problem Management. Categorization capabilities in most of the major tool families are widely misunderstood, and because of that, organizations lose some of their most valuable data. (more…)

Crossing the Chasm – Projects, Operations, and Best Practices

Deep Creek has worked with customers for many years to help them better align IT services to business needs. This has drawn us to provide training and mentoring support in lots of different best practice areas, from governance, to quality management, to project management, to service management, and so on. When ITIL restructured itself in V3 to a service lifecycle approach, I was hopeful that this would begin to address the yawning cultural gaps I see in many organizations between development/design teams and operations/support teams. It seems to have gotten sufficiently bad now that people who develop applications don’t even perceive themselves to be in IT at all; that term is reserved for operations teams, with a definite negative tone.

(more…)

Free ITIL Lessons Learned Webinar Coming Soon

Lessons Learned from 200 ITIL Implementations over 20 Years

Don’t miss our upcoming free ITIL webinar on “Lessons Learned: Best Practices in Implementing ITIL Best Practices.” Deep Creek Founder and President Patrick von Schlag will review many of the most critical issues organizations face in implementing ITIL and how to overcome them.

Register for the Webinar

 

Filling the ITIL void

As many of you know, I’ve been intimately involved with ITIL practice for more than 10 years.  I am launching this Lessons Learned, user-consortium-driven blog to document good practices based on the ITIL and other frameworks.

My hope is that this will be a great place to get facts and support for making ITIL work in your organization.  Your moderator does not claim omniscience, and so I hope that each of you will share your own wisdom as well.

This is a great place to ask questions, share success stories and get the support and tools you need to make ITIL work in your organization.

Blocking and tackling — establishing a culture of CSI

The more I read, and the older I get, the more focused I become on results. At the end of the day, people care about outcomes, and are less picky about the path we take to achieve them.

Many of the success stories about ITIL are really success stories about the culture of CSI. You’ll see a common thread among them.

  • Establish clarity around goals and objectives first…do tools later (perhaps MUCH later)
  • Get quick wins to build momentum
  • Focus as much on the organizational change as on the tools
  • Be willing to win a little at a time to win a lot in the long run.
  • Get better every day…not every 6-month review

As I counsel my clients, resist the temptation for large-scale CMMI Level 1 – 3 moonshots and focus on establish real commitment to CSI.

Do you have established processes, including written policies, procedures, and process owners?
If not, what are the 2-3 most important things to get started?

  • Clear goals and objectives
  • Accountable, empowered owners
  • Reliable Metrics

Don’t try to implement all the processes at once. Focus on processes and services that will optimize the value and help you achieve quick wins…Incident, Change, and Request Fulfillment come to mind as great places to start.

BTW, RF is consistently underrated (maybe because it doesn’t make any vendors rich)…spending time making “routine service requests” really routine, for you and your users, is enormously beneficial.

Start small to win big!

PM and ITIL

I have been thinking about Carol’s and IT Skeptic’s comments about PM (and have read the thread he pointed me to, and an awful lot more) and I still think this comes down to a simpler notion. We have a yawning, enormous gap in most IT organizations between Design and Operations, in many cases cast in stone through outsourcing deals to different entities with no aligned targets or shared accountability. This creates the hot potato issue with which so many of us are familiar, and which really drives my interest in service transition, and particularly in placing Early Life Support (ELS) firmly in the hands of Release and Deployment Management. It is in fact the job of PM to manage the SUCCESSFUL transition of their project deliverables (which we’ll assume to be a new or changed service) into the live environment, and to support it until

1) The service is accepted by the customer AND
2) The service is meeting its designated service levels (this implies successful event mgmt, operational monitoring and reporting, and other operational readiness capabilities that really should be flushed out more as part of testing and validation activities).

Project Management (and Software Development Lifecycle Mgmt, but that’s another article) need to be able to coordinate service design and transition activities, and I would liken it to the approach ITIL takes with functions. PM necessarily coordinates across all the activities in service design and transition…based on the scope of their project. Process team leads perform activities across multiple projects in support of process goals and objectives (which should map to project goals around, for example, functional and non-functional (or warranty!) requirements).

The actual ITIL books don’t in fact describe exactly how to run projects (and rightfully leave this for the complementary guidance), but like a similar discussion currently on one of the LinkedIn threads about how ITIL leaves appropriate space for governance models (can anyone say CObIT), it really does so for PM as well, leaving flexibility needed to encompass large programs and small projects alike, while still providing a core set of building blocks needed to build a good service.

I’d like to hear from all of you…where do you see the big gaps, and what are your recommendations for addressing them? If you were writing ITIL 4.0, what would you add/remove/change to improve the efficacy of the guidance?

Engagement

If you look at the descriptions of Critical Success Factors associated with ITSM adoptions, the first one on almost any list is Management Commitment.

Sounds good…until you try to figure out exactly what that means…

Management Commitment is more than just the willingness to train people, or buy software, or even have big Communications strategies about how important ITIL is…it’s the willingness to BE committed. The best way to actually measure this is willingness to sign up for roles like process and service owners. In order to ask for accountability from IT teams and to employ meaningful governance and oversight of Service Management, the senior managers (with enough authority to enforce commitments) must be willing to commit themselves as well. IT staff notice when senior teams make real commitments, and will align their efforts accordingly.

I recently watched a short promotional video from one of the major ITSM vendors (I’ll protect the guilty, but you can find it quickly if you look). It depicts a CIO describing the value of Business Service Management, and includes a roundtable with his senior IT staff. Ironically, the copy from the video is more typical than ever.

“I think we should tell the IT staff about the commitments I made on their behalf, so they know what I need them to do.”

Can’t get buy-in that way!

If you want IT organizations to commit to Service Management, IT leadership has to commit itself to processes like Service Level Management, which prevent “free lunch” behaviors and encourage the business to work cooperatively with its customers to evaluate evolving requirements against achievable targets. This involves listening to both clients and IT teams, and working to establish collaboration that focuses on the business value of the outcome, not only “do more with less.”

CIOs need to focus on business outcomes, and then work closely with their teams to support the optimal level of service to meet those needs, balancing cost/value. Taking specific service ownership of a key business service (perhaps, say, an online marketplace critical to sales growth) and taking specific accountability for service outcomes related to that service will raise the game a great deal, and drive the interest in metrics, continual service improvement, and ultimately business results. Once a CIO signs up for the most mission-critical one him- or herself, it’s a lot easier to get other senior managers to sign up for other services, and really establish cross-functional “service views” of the world.

Management Commitment is good talk, but, most of the time, talk is cheap. If you want to see results, demand real commitment, and real action. It will help you dramatically improve your results!

ITIL implies choices

A mistake many people make trying to use ITIL guidance is expecting it to be explicitly prescriptive (in other words, a step by step procedural how-to). That’s not what it’s intended to do. ITIL at its most useful describes a way of thinking about the work we do (from the point of view of our customers and how, or whether, our services are delivering the optimal value). At each level of detail, legitimate people will raise questions. For example, given the notion of Service Portfolio Management, the strategic decision to build an organizational capability prefaces the arrival of actual customers with explicit Service Level Requirements. Seldom is the real world quite so neat. For that matter, processes we associate with managing transition activities are often supporting strategic planning and prioritization of effort, processes we associate with operation are often providing explicit design and architecture support, and so on. In short, even ideas like the Service Lifecycle are nice models, but that’s what they are – models, and not even simple linear ones.

So what?

Service Management guidance provides a good jumping off point for thinking about implementing processes, services, and considering underpinning tools. In particular, it allows us to begin to define the key activities (and then it’s on us to describe more explicit procedures and work instructions), roles and responsibilities (which then need to be mapped to actual people and governance), and metrics (which then need to be turned into actual measurements with actual feedback, reporting, and oversight). Most of the time the academic arguments that find their way into discussion boards (is a reboot a change?) can be answered for a particular organization based on usefulness (Are we tracking reboot events? Are we logging incidents for which the reboot is a workaround? Are we tracking reboots as part of a change/release implementation? Are we tracking reboots for standard MTBF maintenance activities?)

The answer of course is clear – it depends on organizational need. Remember, the tools (and processes, and guidance) are supposed to work for you, not the other way around!

ITIL implementation — the big picture

I’m currently helping to support a large scale introduction of the ITIL processes (at least some of them) to a large military organization. While there is a lot of focus on the blocking and tacking around processes, supporting tools, and the like, it never seems to amaze me how every one of these adoptions are really exercises in managing organizational change. Perhaps the most important role on your ITSM team is the role of the Communications Manager, because they have to really drive both the client organization and the project team through Kotter’s 8 steps to Organizational Change,

The fundamental reality of life is that people resist change for survival reasons. I know how to survive today. If you change something, I might not know how to survive tomorrow. So I resist. If change is forced upon me, I will adapt, lessening the pain (by not complying) where possible.

In an organizational context, this is a recipe for disaster. If you wish to be successful in your project, you must be successful in creating buy-in and real commitment from the customer. This is very simply a game of WIIFM (What’s In It for Me?). For every stakeholder, you MUST understand the WIIFM, and communicate (again, and again, and again) and get buy-in to that to gain the trust and commitment of that stakeholder. Many times, this isn’t a process issue, or a tool issue, but a political one. What are they winning? What are they perceived to be losing? How do we maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of the change (sound familiar?)