Choking on ITIL? - A Menu for Success

Choking on ITIL? A Menu for Success ...

Food for thought

"Frankly, I'm desperate - I'm choking" is a phrase I've become familiar with over the years. Faced with a daily diet of conflicting business priorities, resistant staff and increasing pressure to reduce costs, many IT Directors and Service Managers bear a striking resemblance these days to someone asked to suck an elephant up a straw. In an attempt to wet the appetite, an ITIL menu is rolled out. However, grasping at ITIL as a saviour for all ills without comprehensive forethought, analysis and planning is folly.

What's the dish of the day?

Chef's special starter offers how ITIL can enable your organisation to adapt rapidly to changing market conditions and service constraints lightly sautéed on a bed of crisp, green cost savings. The dish of the day tantalises the taste buds with how implementing ITIL can leverage maximum value from your strategic partnerships. For dessert Sir? Madam? Let me tempt you with our double cream, extra thick service continuity `n' high availability gateaux, lightly drizzled with consistency and robustness. "What's the house whine (sic)?" "A devilish, fruity little number preferred by most IT staff; Chateaux IT'IL Never Happen If We Resist Enough; 2002, 2003 or 2004 - a superb year for suppliers".

At worst, ITIL can prove to be an expensive set of processes and procedures nobody in your organisation follows. At best, it formalises common sense; adding value to your daily operations, internal and external relationships and, can fully flex in concert with your Corporate Strategy. But, only if you don't choke to death trying to stuff it all in at one sitting.

ITIL's exquisite beauty lies in its simplicity, flexibility and risk management emphasis. In all its implemented glory with internal processes dovetailing into your 3rd party supplier processes, everyone knows who's doing what and when. Indeed, research carried out on behalf of the ITSMF shows that of those questioned regarding the use and benefits of ITIL, 97% said their organisation had derived benefits; 70% of these describing these benefits as tangible and measurable.

Are you hungry for it?

You wouldn't spend your hard earned cash on a new, expensive car without researching the quality and having a test drive unless you had money to burn. However, it's surprising how organisations will begin implementing ITIL before researching some of the basics and asking a few simple questions such as; will it save us money? Will it add value to our activities or the value chain? Will it enable us to become more agile? Will it improve our customer service and perception?

It can be frustrating being a senior executive, wanting desperately to actually achieve something tangible for the organisation but feeling like a flea in a jar - jumping up and down but just hitting your head on the lid. Having previously witnessed the benefits and opportunities implementing ITIL or some of its components can bring, it's tempting to blindly assume that as it all worked perfectly well before it must work in your current organisation. Think before you jump.

What do you want or need to achieve within the context of your current organisation? What is it you think you'll achieve by implementing ITIL? Generally, the identification of perhaps 2 or 3 high level, key objectives is an excellent start. A maximum of three objectives focuses the mind. Any more than 3 and the bar may appear just too high to hurdle. Objectives could be:-

·Realise savings of at least 10% in next year's budget.
·Demonstrate a tangible improvement in delivery of services to our customers by 20% within one year.
·Pre-empt and mitigate risk thereby improving systems and infrastructure availability by 30% within one year.

Others may include:

·Improve two-way communications between the IT Department and the business
·Involve key business stakeholders in our decision making processes
·Ensure changes to our infrastructure don't create more problems.
·Improve and leverage maximum value from our 3rd party suppliers
·Create a more agile, process orientated IT Department
·Eliminate our blame culture
·Empower team members to take ownership and responsibility
·Create a culture of continuous improvement
·Create an achievement orientated team

Side salad or seasonal vegetables Sir?

Only the most naive senior executives these days fail to recognise the importance of creating an agile organisation. Able to flex and adapt to changing market conditions, technological innovations, fluctuating market share, profit margin and profitability. It's a tough, increasingly competitive world and if you don't take the initiative you can be sure someone else will. To survive and thrive in today's economy a core capability of successful organisations is agility.

Equally, keeping abreast of the organisations aims and objectives requires an agile IT Department. How agile are you? Do your customers have to wait 6 weeks or more for a new laptop? Do new employees arrive on their first day to find they're going to have to wait 3 days for a logon and email account? Does your overtime budget regularly take a hammering? Do you find yourself continually on the back foot having to explain systems downtime?

In encouraging the development of an agile IT Department one needs to firstly consider the individuals, their levels of change acceptance when implementing ITIL and personal loss which may be the resultant effect of the changes. Otherwise, no matter your expertise and knowledge, or that of your ITIL consultant, Service Manager or Implementation Project Manager, resistance will be high and the probability of success, in terms of gaining performance improvements and cost savings, will be low.

Heartburn

Be objective in assessing how much change the individuals within your team and organisation can tolerate. Research carried out by Buchanan, Claydon and Doyle (1999) found that over 60% of managers said people in their business were suffering from change fatigue. In a second study (2000) it was found that just under half of respondents claimed that the pace of change was causing middle management burnout as with each change, people have to spend time:

-learning new tasks,
-implementing new systems and procedures
-developing new knowledge
-using new skills and behaviours and,
-all the above under severe time pressure due to having the `day job' to
do as well.

The cheque please!

If you've already tried to implement ITIL and failed then you need a rescuer and a rescue plan. You need an expert with experience of success and failure. Simply sending a team member on a course in the hope they'll come back with sufficient knowledge and experience to face up to the task is unrealistic - Jenson Button didn't learn how to race just by reading the Highway Code and passing his driving test. Visit http://www.itilhelp.com Free Downloads section to access the Knowledge Box and Summary Menu for Success - these will help you assess your own or your change agent's level of experience and reflection and guide your implementation strategy.

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