| Now, we all get excited after being trained on ITIL Service Management Framework. We are ready to go and start building up processes after processes with the intention to fix all our IT management nightmare within the next few days.
The next few days never came…..
Why is this happening? Everything seems right out of the text book and there are lots of success stories out there. Why did we fail?
Implementing anything new in any organization will often be met with overwhelming resistance no matter how beneficial is the solution. Put yourself not as the one to deliver the solution but the one who will be asked to accept the changes and comply with everything policies that are thrown on you. How would you feel? So, rule #1 is always to understand your organization’s culture, system and most importantly, the people in it.
ITIL Service Management containce guidance and best practices. If you attempt to cut everything from the reference book and paste them over what you are having now, you are destined to fail miserably. Every organizations are unique with their different set of cultures, people, process and business priorities, so Rule #2 – Do not try to read too much into the details of the framework. An understanding of the concept and how it can apply to your real life environment is more important than copying blindly everything from the book.
You can’t get overnight success and ITIL framework is not a quick fix to your problems. You must nurture the processes and the people operating at various part of the Service Lifecycle. It takes months just to get 1 process right. Rule #3 – Be patient and perservere. Do not try to implement everything you read from the book. Find out what is more pressing and implement it first. The rest of the processes will slowly but surely fold in and makes the picture complete for you over time.
I have applied ITIL Service Management methodology extensively in my previous and current work capacity. Both organizations face the same pressing problem – staff are continuously firefighting and customer satisfaction is close to ZERO. Customers are so used to IT incompetencies that they either find their own solutions outside or they just live with it. In both organizations, the root cause of continuous firefighting (instead of continual improvement) is rampant unmanaged changes made to the IT infrastructure. The IT dept is filled with wild and crazy engineers who treat the infrastructure like their private lab. They would experiment new tools and tweak the servers, hook up new devices, using the end-users as guinea pigs to test their new found skill. I have even had an incident where a technician was trying out lab examples (CISCO CCNA) on a production server! Wait a minute, it does not end here. Vendors are also using us as their big playground to experiment new ideas! Such unmanaged activities lead to unplanned downtime and it gets worse in an organization with IT sites in different timezone.
Personally, I feel that you need to stabilize the environment before moving forward. How else would you be able to move forward when you are constantly firefighting on problems that are caused by your own staff? Here comes Change Management to the rescue! Manage all your changes in the IT environment and I guarantee you that your firefighting activities will be cut down by more than 80%! In my current organization, the number of major incidents have dropped down to average of 0.5 unit per month (that’s about 6 per year!) This is achieved within 1 year of implementing, enforcing, improving on 1 single process – CHANGE MANAGEMENT!
More coming up on how I have achieved success through deliberate implementation of Change Management.
Stay tune…
PS: If you are going for your ITIL Service Management Foundation Examination, you may want check out this site that I have created: http://www.squidoo.com/pass-itilv3foundation. Useful for folks who want to pass ITIL v3 Foundation exam.
