Chapter 14
Ten Ways to Help ITIL Work for You
In This Chapter
Having a clear vision
Planning the changes
Getting key people on board
Training staff
Sometimes ITIL can seem a bit dry and theoretical. It isn’t! But working out how ITIL fits into your organisation (or your customer’s) takes a little bit of time and thought. Here are ten things that help your ITIL project run a little more smoothly.
Detailing Your Vision for ITIL
Just because you think ITIL is a good idea doesn’t mean everyone around you magically agrees. You must understand why you think it’s a good idea and be able to explain your reasoning to other people. So, don’t just pile into implementing ITIL the minute you get inspired. To be successful, the project must be well thought through and well implemented. So take a few moments to consider what you’re trying to achieve.
To help you to create a vision for your ITIL initiative, answer the following three questions:
What if we don’t do it? So, if you don’t implement ITIL now, what will happen, or what won’t happen? Will the provision of your IT services get worse? Will the cost of the services rise? Will your company fail to achieve its goals and targets? Make your responses specific and try to quantify things if you can.
What’s in it for the stakeholder? In order to get commitment for implementing ITIL, you need to persuade others that they can benefit. Who are the stakeholders – the people who have an interest in, or are affected by, what you’re doing – and what do they want? Find out who’ll be affected and get an understanding of their needs.
What’s in it for the business as a whole? Find out what the overall business goals and plans are, and emphasise how the implementation of ITIL helps support those goals.
Having a Plan
When you have a vision (see the previous section), you can then create a plan of how you’ll achieve that vision. ITIL isn’t just training or a nice-to-have. It’s a framework of processes, a set of ways of doing things. And if you do things properly, you can expect to improve your effectiveness and efficiency and improve the IT services that you provide to your customers.
When organisations adopt ITIL, this means they implement the ITIL processes in their organisations, usually as a project. So ask yourself, ‘Which ITIL processes do I need to achieve my vision?’ Now create a high-level project plan of how you’ll implement these.
Plans have a habit of not implementing themselves. You need to plan how to implement ITIL. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Implement ITIL as a project, and use an established project management methodology. PRINCE2® is a well-known project management methodology that can help you. For guidance, check out PRINCE2 For Dummies by Nick Graham (Wiley).
PRINCE2® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Cabinet Office.
Chapter 10 has more advice about implementing ITIL in your organisation.
Doing Your Homework: Building a Good Business Case
You’ll never get started with ITIL unless you get senior management to loosen the purse strings and give you the money. A good, compelling business case helps you gain support. (You need to include a description of your vision; see the earlier section ‘Detailing Your Vision for ITIL’).
A business case is a document that describes the reasons for and costs involved in a project or other initiative. Often its main purpose is to justify the expenditure on a project. The main section of a business case is a cost–benefit analysis – an analysis of the costs and benefits involved in the project.
Try to think of those occasions when things went wrong in the past. For example, the time the email service failed because someone had forgotten to mention the change they made before they went on holiday. Remember for how long the system was down. You should be able to calculate what this cost in terms of lost business revenue. By including this in the business case, you show both the tangible and intangible savings that can be made, and thus gain support and funding for your ITIL project.
Involving People
In my experience, some IT people have a habit of keeping things quiet – ‘If I tell people what I’m doing, they may not like it, or they may want me to change it.’ Also, some IT departments out there are cocooned in their own little worlds, believing that only they know best. I believe the opposite is true.
You’re bound to face opposition when implementing processes, because you’re telling people how to do their jobs. But if you inform and involve people from the start, you minimise the fuss.
Don’t wait until people come up and ask you what this ITIL stuff is all about. People who don’t feel involved are less likely to commit to your project and support it. You’re more likely to succeed if everyone has a chance to have their say.
Getting the Right People Involved
Yes, you must involve people, but is everyone equal? Well yes – but some are more equal than others! You may be tempted to involve only those you think will support you. Or you may involve only those who are most affected. But you must get a good mix of people involved. You need senior management commitment as well as the involvement of those who’ll be using your processes.
Just to get you started, think about the following potential stakeholder groups:
Customers and the business: You provide IT services that help your customers do what your customers do. They know if you’re doing a good job. If your organisation is a commercial provider (providing IT services in exchange for money) then you have a main customer contact who provides feedback. If you’re an internal IT provider (providing IT services to other parts of the same company) then it can sometimes be more complicated. Each department manager or business unit manager is a customer, and managers may have different needs and different opinions. You also have access to the users who are on the front line.
IT management: These are the people who will provide the money and the resources needed to implement ITIL. Find out what their aims and goals are, and see whether you can link your vision to their needs.
The rest of IT: These are the staff who are going to adopt the ITIL processes – you hope! Skip to the previous section, ‘Involving People’, to see how to get staff onside.
Communicating
You may think communicating is an easy thing. It is – when you communicate properly. Just sending the odd email or popping something on the notice board isn’t communicating. Communication is a two-way thing. To truly communicate with someone, you must send a message and receive a reply – even if it’s simply a nod or a grunt.
If you don’t communicate properly, you may be seen as deliberately excluding people.
Mind you, it’s also very easy to overdo it. You know what it’s like when your boss continually sends you emails enthusiastically telling you about something that will happen in six months, when you’re struggling to cope with today’s workload. So the trick here is to mix up the format and methods of communication. Try a mix of emails, Internet and social networking sites, team meetings and workshops and training. Oh, and by the way – keep it interesting.
Documenting
A process is a way of working, and in some people’s minds that means you don’t need to write it down – ‘I know what I’m doing’. But when people follow the same procedure time and again they achieve consistency and accuracy, so sharing procedures by documenting them is critical to the success of your ITIL project.
The simple act of writing gets you thinking. Here are some advantages of documenting processes:
It shows that you take the process seriously.
It makes sure you really understand the process yourself.
It ensures you understand what you are asking other people to do.
Others can check the documentation and tell or whether you’ve got the process right.
Training
Surely all you have to do is read the procedure and do as it says, right? Wrong. A common mistake is assuming that you don’t need to train staff to carry out a process. When you implement the ITIL processes, staff won’t follow your procedures unless they’re trained in how to use them. Documentation (see the last section) is great, but you can’t pop a procedure in front of people and expect them to get on with it without explanation.
Don’t underestimate the power of training. Staff feel valued if you bother to invest in training them. Plus, in training, you have the opportunity to tell staff why you think the new process is a good idea and what the benefits are for all concerned.
While I’m talking about training your staff to use your processes, I can’t miss the opportunity to say something about ITIL training. Appendix A tells you all about the ITIL qualification scheme, and a suitable qualification exists for everyone. If you’re serious about implementing ITIL in your organisation, nothing is better than getting an independent person to tell your staff about ITIL. Sending all your IT staff on an ITIL foundation course, or at least a one-day overview, gives everyone the same understanding of ITIL. It also demonstrates your commitment.
As a final point on training, do think about timing. It you train staff too long before you implement the processes, the training can seem irrelevant and people may forget their new knowledge by the time they need it. On the other hand, leaving it too late means that staff are trying to use your new processes without adequate help and support. It’s a tricky balance to strike. Give it some thought.
Being Pragmatic
ITIL is guidance; it’s not prescriptive. There are a few basic rules such as sticking to the basic process flows, but overall you need to use your common sense. Not every organisation can employ lots of staff, but every organisation can adopt processes to make better use of what they’ve got. The clever bit is making it work for you.
Do you have to implement all the ITIL processes? Well, eventually, I hope. The real power of ITIL comes from having all the processes working together. But you must be pragmatic – Rome wasn’t built in a day. The best approach is to have a vision that you eventually implement all the processes, but break this into a number of projects and concentrate initially on the processes that give your organisation most benefit. ITIL has a lot of processes but they don’t have to be all singing and dancing. Some are very simple and straightforward.
Adopt ITIL but adapt it to suit your organisation. So adopt the basic process flow relatively unchanged then decide how each activity is performed.
There is a danger that staff will see ITIL as needless and unnecessary bureaucracy. Decide what is fixed and what can be flexible. After you’ve implemented a process you mustn’t believe this is it and it will never change. Tell the staff that they can change things. The best processes are the ones that are adapted and nurtured by those who use them. So be prepared to change – as long as you can still achieve your vision.
Chapter 10 has more advice about implementing ITIL in your organisation.
Persevering When Something Doesn’t Go as Planned
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again. Unfortunately some service management projects fail. This is sometimes blamed on ITIL. You will encounter problems, and not everything will go as planned. But if you have a clear vision in mind and use your common sense, you’ll achieve your aims and improve your IT services and the way you manage them.