CHAPTER 8. Implementing the Process
Regardless of how well you advertise your configuration management plans and how many people get involved with the selection of the configuration management tools, nothing will seem real until you start to deploy the process. Exactly at this point the organization will begin to understand that configuration management will truly happen, and anyone with unresolved issues will come forward to get them resolved.
The best way to handle unforeseen issues is through the careful planning you’ve done in the first part of this book. But the best plans will be helpful only if you execute them well. This involves getting the right people on board, communicating effectively, empowering people with good instructions, training the complete team, and then measuring the effectiveness of the entire process. Staffing is a necessary prerequisite for all other activities, and communication should be ongoing throughout your implementation. The other tasks can be accomplished in parallel to some extent. This arrangement is depicted in Figure 8.1 as the visual outline for this chapter. This chapter will help you to implement the process and prepare to resolve some of those issues.
Figure 8.1 There are several steps to consider when implementing the configuration management process.
Staffing for Configuration Management
In order to implement a process, you must have people who will execute that process. In some organizations configuration management will simply be another duty assigned to an already overworked staff. In other organizations, you will be faced with staffing a configuration management team from the ground up, hiring people to fill all of the roles you’ve defined. In either case, staffing the team is critical because regardless of how good the tool is or how completely the processes are defined, the people will have to do the job. The effectiveness of your configuration management program can never be better than the effectiveness of your staff.
Begin staffing by asking how many people you will need. Roles are described in great detail in Chapter 12, “Building a Configuration Management Team,” but for now simply realize there will be a variety of roles to be filled. For very small organizations, perhaps all roles could be accomplished by a single highly-skilled person. In a very large organization, you might need multiple people to fill each defined role, and perhaps even some leadership or management roles to organize the staff. Figure 8.2 depicts the difference between a small configuration management organization and a large one.
Figure 8.2 There are key differences in staffing a large team or a small team.
You can estimate how many people will be needed by looking at your process documents, understanding the responsibilities of each role, and making estimates of the time required for each responsibility. Remember that nobody actually has eight hours of every day available because there will be obligatory meetings, mandatory HR tasks, email and phone messages, and all the other things that can steal people’s time. For dedicated personnel, you can assume six or seven hours of each day will be spent doing the things you’ve identified in the process. If you’re using staff with duties outside of configuration management, adjust accordingly.
After you know how many people you are seeking, it’s time to calculate what the skill level of the people should be. The general rule is that the fewer people you have, the greater their skill must be. If you have a large team, 1 or 2 experts can provide enough knowledge to fuel 10 or 12 less-skilled team members. In a 2- or 3-person team, however, there is no room for a weaker link—everyone must have a good, overall knowledge of configuration management and be able to make decisions that are in the best interest of the organization.
Be especially careful in hiring to distinguish people who can get things started and people who can keep things going. The mindset needed to define processes, select new tools, and implement the service will not be the same as the mindset of someone who can audit for data accuracy, follow the process attentively, and make day-to-day decisions about the configuration management service. Both “big picture” people and detail-oriented people are important, and neither should be neglected in your staffing. People who are good at implementing configuration management generally are not as good at the day-to-day management of configuration data.
Finding people with experience in configuration management is obviously ideal, but hiring people with more general skills is also a possibility. You should look for people who have experience in a wide variety of information technology (IT) roles because they will best understand the far-reaching uses of configuration data. You should find people who pay close attention to detail and have experience in large data management activities, such as IT asset management or inventory efforts. People with a process bias are helpful because they can define the value of the process and help make incremental improvements even as they are executing the process. Again, if you are planning a large staff, you will have opportunities to find people with only one of these skills; but if you’re hiring a small team, you need to find people who blend several of these attributes.
I’ve found that mixes of experience are also helpful on a team. Teams staffed with only experienced people will have too many opinions on key issues and tend to not come to consensus as quickly, whereas teams without any experienced members will need too much direction and “hand holding” to be effective. A team with one or two key leaders that have extensive experience and several other team members with new, fresh ideas is generally best. Like so many other areas, seek diversity in building your team so that strengths and weaknesses can be balanced out. Not just experience, but a wide range of experiences is helpful.
Be sure to consider that newly hired staff will need some time to get acquainted with the culture of your organization and the general responsibilities of their jobs, so don’t plan on immediate productivity if you have to get people from outside your organization.
Communicating the Process to the IT Organization
In order to successfully roll out the configuration management process, you need the cooperation of the IT community. The configuration management service touches so many different aspects of IT that it would be impossible to implement it without broad support from across all parts of the IT organization. Change managers must agree to update the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) at the end of every change. Service desk agents must be willing to determine the failing component in light of configuration data. Capacity planners should define plans for specific configuration items (CIs). IT finance managers should consider the cost of services by analyzing the CIs used in the service. Literally every part of the IT group is impacted by the introduction of the configuration management process.
Note that I’m not talking here about communicating to the entire organization. An overall communication plan is described in Chapter 11, “Communication and Enterprise Roll Out,” but communication to the IT organization needs to be accomplished first. Without getting the buy-in from IT, the rest of the communication will be seriously undermined, so be sure to treat the IT organization as a separate communication effort. In cases where a new organization or new staff is added, you need to be especially careful to define the boundaries and avoid any hint of stepping on others’ territories. You want to form a strong partnership at the outset so that the storms and lulls natural to every project won’t shake the communication foundation you’re trying to build.
For your communication with the IT organization, you want to prepare several things. As a standard project deliverable, you probably already have design or architecture documents detailing the tools to be deployed. Use those, plus the procedure documents and the requirement documents as raw materials to put together an IT-oriented marketing presentation. Depending on the starting point of your audience, sell the benefits of configuration management in general, and specifically for the various parts of your IT organization. Experience shows that IT people in general like projects that promise improvements to efficiency and accuracy of their work. But IT people also want to understand the service completely, so be prepared to talk in depth about the process, the tools, and the overall service to be offered. Remember that your goal is not just to educate your peers, but to make them advocates for you as they interface throughout the wider organization later.
Deliver your message anywhere you can find IT people gathered together. Perhaps you can get 15 minutes on the agenda of the CIOs staff meeting. Maybe 10 minutes at the end of a Change Advisory Board (CAB) meeting. For larger IT shops, you might get need to bring your presentation to each director and ask permission to go to each of their various department meetings. Use internal web sites or collaboration team rooms to post your presentation, complete with speaker’s notes, so people can understand configuration management at their own pace. The more ways you can get the message broadcast to the IT organization, the easier will be your communication chore later when you address groups outside of IT. A sample communications plan for addressing IT is included as Table 8.1.
Table 8.1 Sample IT Communications Matrix
Creating and Documenting Work Procedures
When you are communicating to the IT organization, you will undoubtedly get many questions. Some of them you will have anticipated in your communication plan, but many of them will be brand new and will represent specific details you haven’t thought of yet. Use those questions as a basis to understand where your process work needs more detail. Rather than being frustrated that everyone can’t understand the elegant plan in your mind, use this opportunity to really think deeply about how configuration management will be integrated within your IT organization.
Conversely, some of the things that you communicate to the IT organization will be perfectly clear and will generate no questions. You don’t want to waste effort by documenting additional work procedures in those areas. If people already have a general understanding of what they need to accomplish, you’ll only annoy them by detailing exactly how they must accomplish that work.
Tie any needed additional work instructions into the overall process and procedure framework, which you began in Chapter 4, “Customizing the Configuration Management Process.” You can either choose to update those documents directly, or you can create new work instruction documents and simply reference them in the appropriate places in the procedure documents. For example, suppose you discover a need for a more detailed work instruction on exactly how to compare the CMDB version of a CI to the same item in your inventory discovery tool. The instruction would include how to log on to each system, how to extract relevant data into a spreadsheet, how to compare the items, and what to do with any discrepancies found. That could be significant content to add to the procedure documents, so you might decide to put this into its own document and simply make a note in the procedure document indicating where the specific steps can be found.
Either way, be sure the work instructions are detailed enough to answer the questions raised by the IT organization, and that they help enhance the process rather than obscuring it. Ideally, the work instructions should be a set of specific steps that help people know how to use tools to accomplish the processes. Chapter 4 advised you to make the procedures independent of the tools, but you need to be more specific in instructions. Good instructions describe functions of the tools and how to accomplish those functions. Don’t simply duplicate the text of a tool’s user guide, however. For example, your configuration management tool user’s guide will most likely already tell someone how to run the import tool to pull in new data. Your work instruction should provide more detail about where to find the source data, what the naming convention of log files should be, and how to check for and handle errors in the import. None of these details could possibly be covered by the user’s guide.
This work instruction step is the final time you will engage with the process architects, so use this time well. Be sure to clarify cross-organizational boundaries, especially when subcontractor, consultants, or outsourcing partners are involved in the process. It is especially important to provide clear instructions on relationships and how they will be handled as changes occur in the environment. Think about retired CIs and how you will clear them out of the database, if that is desirable. Use the entire IT organization to help you drive down to the lowest possible level of detail. Although this might seem excessive at first, it is literally impossible to put too much detailed thought into the work instructions. Anything that could be a question for any current or future person involved in the service should be considered and documented. Obviously, you’ll want to schedule plenty of time for this activity in your overall project plan.
Building Training Materials
After all work instructions are documented clearly, you should have a mountain of data from which you build training materials. This is a good thing, because one of the primary rules in building training is to never create anything new. Everything in your training package should be able to be derived from the information and documentation you’ve already amassed. Certainly you will want to train people on the scope, granularity, and span to be expected in the configuration data. You’ll want to use the process documents and work instructions specifically to teach people how to effectively do the configuration management job. Some general background on the requirements will be necessary, and of course you’ll want to train people to use the tools that you’ve selected. All of this information should be part of the overall training package.
Training materials should be organized by the audience you intend to train. Sponsors and interested stakeholders should receive general training highlighting how the requirements are satisfied and the benefits of configuration management for the organization. People who need to use related processes such as change management, incident management, and problem management should be trained in how to obtain and leverage the information they need to make their processes more effective. People responsible for working directly with the CIs, such as network administrators or desktop support teams, should be taught the importance of the data and how to maintain the data through their day-to-day interactions. Each group down the line should have specific training materials prepared so that they have the knowledge to fully participate in the configuration management service.
This isn’t to say, however, that each group must have completely different materials. Training materials normally take the form of a set of specific scenarios that walk through the various aspects of the service, from updating the configuration management plan through the entire process to dealing with CMDB audits. Each scenario needs to be described in great detail, including any applicable work instructions. After that is accomplished, you can present the full scenario with all pieces to someone who needs to execute that scenario regularly. You can reuse most of the material but take out the detailed work instructions for someone who just needs a good understanding of the process. Then you can take out even more material but still present the same scenario as part of a general overview training session. As shown in Figure 8.3, the same material is used at different levels for different audiences.
Figure 8.3 The same training material can be used for multiple audiences.
And just as the audiences are diverse, so are the training methods. Some groups can be trained by presenting a simple set of slides in a teleconference. Others might need a longer, face-to-face session. Perhaps some will benefit from an organized classroom session where they can have the tools in front of them and work through practical exercises. Others might be able to use self-paced online modules to understand the material best. Be creative in determining which materials will have the most benefit to your organization, and remember that while there is a big push for education at implementation time, there will be an ongoing need to train new employees as they come into your organization or change to new roles.
The materials you prepare should be built in such a way that they can be easily maintained. As processes change or new releases of the tool are built, you can update existing education rather than starting over. As the organization matures in its knowledge and use of configuration management, you may want to add new education topics to cover more advanced issues. As lessons are learned and corrected, new information should be gathered in the education materials to benefit the entire organization.
In many ways, educating users and deploying the process are synonymous. In essence, you’re telling people about a new way of behaving and showing them what you expect from them. Be sure to be organized in your delivery of education to all of your various groups. Plan for all the normal business contingencies which dictate that not everyone will be able to attend your planned sessions or complete a self-study in a timely manner. Keep accurate logs of who has been educated and what version of the education they receive. It will be important to understand what gaps are left after the initial education roll out is completed so that you can fill those gaps as needed.
Many organizations find it useful to certify people in the key configuration management roles. This involves creating a set of criteria and measuring whether the person meets the criteria to adequately perform the role. This can be as simple as a test administered after education is finished, or as complex as having someone experienced in the role follow the new trainee around for several days and observe them doing the job. In addition, you might use external certifications, such as ITIL Practitioner or a Six Sigma certification. For roles such as the quality manager, it is a very good idea to ensure the person is comfortable with the role before the deployment team just expects they will do it well. This could be a formal certification effort, or you might simply talk with the person to determine whether they know the job.
Understanding and Improving Process Compliance
This brings us to the whole question of whether the process implementation is successful. Because the process deployment is the first visible sign that configuration management is taken seriously, you should be prepared to evaluate the deployment. Poor perceptions of the quality of the deployment will result in lower expectations of the overall configuration management process. Lower expectations cause people to try less to follow the process, which will ultimately result in the failure of your configuration management service. The good news is that you can avoid this cycle. Table 8.2 summarizes different ways you can demonstrate your configuration management process.
Table 8.2 Methods of Assessing Process Effectiveness
But how do you know whether the process deployment has been successful? One way is to certify people in the key roles and assume certified people will make the overall effort successful. Another way is to evaluate your education efforts by asking all participants to complete an end of course survey. When well designed, a survey can indicate both the understanding of your teams and their confidence that the new process will work in the real world. We’ve all seen too many IT projects that looked good on paper but failed because the teams needed to implement them didn’t understand the importance or the relevance to their daily duties. Surveys can tap into the psyche of the organization and be an accurate predictor of that phenomenon while there is still time to correct it. Thus surveys can help to evaluate how well the process is working, either directly after implementation or later when the process has been running for a while.
Process implementation is also the perfect time to build in measurements that will allow you to know how faithfully the processes are being followed. Some organizations might go so far as to tie the measurements to the compensation of the key people involved in executing the process. Experience shows the measurements instituted at the same time as new procedures are far more effective than those added later. Process compliance measurements typically will cover the entire spectrum of process activities defined in Chapter 4. You might want to calculate, for example, the number of proposed changes to the scope and granularity across a given span, as this can be an indirect way to validate that your people are thinking deeply about the value of the data. You could also measure CIs captured from one area to those captured in a parallel area. For example, if your organization has multiple data centers where servers are managed, is the number of CIs discovered and documented from each of those centers proportional to the relative size of the centers? This can be a good indication of how well the configuration identification procedures are being followed.
You probably already have measurements defined around the control points in the process, but early implementation is a good time to use these measurements as assessments rather than controls. That is, you should take a measurement, such as the number of change records without adequate configuration information, as an opportunity to speak at department meetings and reinforce training. Make it clear the expectation is that these inadequacies will decrease very quickly, and anyone not understanding the control point should ask for additional training. Measuring should never be about punishment but about improving the process and the systems that support it.
In addition to process measurements, you can also assess the impact of the process deployment by doing occasional compliance checks. Simply pick a piece of the process that you want to focus on, and track a set of executions across that part of the process. For example, because data audits are so important in the early stages, have a quality assurance person shadow the auditors while they conduct a data audit. Talk with the auditors about how they choose the scope of the audit, watch them as they send out audit notifications, work with them as the audit results come back, help them compare the results against expectations, and generally follow the whole course of the audit. This is an excellent way to assess how well the process is being followed. This same technique can be used in every aspect of your implemented process and should continue to be used occasionally well after implementation.
As mentioned earlier, the implementation of the process is the time that configuration management will become real to your organization. Issues beyond those described in this chapter will most likely arise. By focusing on the overall goals of your configuration management service and by being as flexible as possible, you should be able to resolve these issues and move forward to a successful implementation.