ITIL Implementation Experiences
1. Additional criteria to be used for choosing a ITIL product vendor
2. In depth analysis of implementation issues and ways of overcoming them(Starting with Incident of course!)
Keep watching...and posting your comments.
Links to this post Labels: General
Foremost challenge is in getting this off the ground: implementing the process, to get to budget, cost and account for IT. Ventana Research estimates that 75% firms have poor(70%) or no(5%) visibility of IT costs. (IDG ran a webinar on this recently)
Root cause is: lack of some kind of awareness (of benefits of this best practice). Following are possible flavours of poor awareness:
a. IT is not aware of benefits of FMITS: This is usually the case with orgs where there is no visibility at all. IT Managers don’t realize how they can influence consumption of resources using this process - very likely that in these firms managing capacity and service levels is challenging too.
b. Finance is not aware of how implementing FMITS can help. The onus lies with IT of course! Root cause: IT Managers didn’t/couldn't communicate these benefits - not well enough to influence a change in accounting and budgeting practices. Usual objection/reason for resistance from finance (especially in large organizations) is: just the awareness of the costs of IT alone is not a good enough reason to make changes in accounting practices. This is not entirely unreasonable.
Remedy: IT Managers who understand specific benefits to their own organization and articulate them in a compelling way can bring this alignment. The effectiveness of communication is a function of understanding one's own environment and building a case for change.
Links to this post Labels: Process
While implementing ITIL, use of either hard or soft factors alone will make the implementation fail, well this is the experience. A balance of both is the key.
Soft Approach: "sell at every stage" not just to the senior management, but to the people implementing as well. Frequent, persistent and well targeted communication (perhaps of case studies) proving how new processes will work well by making people buy-in. This will reinforce motivation of people who are already sold and help convince others who weren't convinced earlier.
Only when this is done, using hard factors is appropriate. Suggested approach (in a nutshell):
Plan: A policy to direct people on what are the goals that ought to be achieved, what objectives to be met, what amounts to going against the policy and what punitive action will that attract.
A periodic process, procedure and activity training till an ability to establish that people have necessary knowledge and experience to implement the same. Later it can be on an extended schedule.
Check: Use of metrics that indicate compliance with policy and performance of the process, indicate whether implementation is going in right direction.
Act: Rewarding desired and punishing undesired behavior. Providing counselling to help those who are not compliant providing reinforcement for those who are.
Links to this post Labels: People
Pink Elephant has laid foundation for evaluating tool vendors for implementing ITIL processes. But as is well know all the big boys (IBM, HP, BMC and CA) are already compliant…so the question is 'which one would you choose?'
Choose one that passes more specific criteria built on parameters like: Customizability, user-friendliness, reputation of the integration partner and their prior record, post implementation support etc.
These additional criteria is not comprehensive though.
Links to this post Labels: Tools
Faced with consistent breach of SLA's by Incident Management team, one root causes one can't ignore is 'goal orientation' of the incident staff. Incident manager needs to guard against the risk of scope creep in resolving incidents.
Analogy of Fist Aid
Incident Management is akin to first aid in medical conditions. Conducting an in depth diagnosis as to what happened and why it happened is inappropriate in the situation, instead providing quick remedy to arrest bleeding from open wounds if any or provide pain relief is. This is what paramedics do, they don’t try to see deeper than that and which is an appropriate reaction.
Working on incidents, the tendency of untrained staff is to look deeper and try find causes for incidents. This tendency if left unaddressed, can result in persistent inability to meet SLA's.
It is Incident manager's responsibility to ensure an appropriate response - just to provide work around.
How to do this?
Clear articulation of goals of incident management, reiterating these goals, performance appraisal based on measured contribution towards achieving process goals
and in leading the team in right direction and ensuring the process goals are met consistently.
When these boundaries are clearly drawn, providing resolution within agreed service levels is not difficult anymore.
While evaluating Change Requests, Change Manager uses information in CMDB to understand dependencies and assess risks involved in making changes. For explaining this, I found the analogy with air traffic control effective.
Air Traffic Controller (ATC) uses a screen (perhaps the technology changed now - but thats not the point) to see which aircraft is where -- in and around the airport, talks to the pilots and other ground crew and then decides which aircraft is going to land first and which one is going to wait. The decisions he make are high impact -a wrong decision can have disastrous consequences.
Now, the radar and communication tools he uses are akin to CMDB which give not just a list of CI's but also how they are related to each other. Should there be an error in functioning of the radar system and representation of aircrafts' positions on the radar screen, the decisions by ATC are likely to be faulty and can result in loss of human lives. Similarly any error in CMDB can mislead Change Manager resulting in incidents if not disasters.
The key to effective Change Management is accurate and up to date CMDB the way proper functioning of radar and other communication equipment is for safe and effective air traffic control.
Links to this post Labels: Process
