Lately I’ve been teaching ITIL v3 Foundations Boot Camps

Lately I’ve been teaching ITIL v3 Foundations Boot Camps. One theme has occurred again and again in the comments and questions from participants, “Where and how do you start?” My advice is to start with the people. Both the people who work in IT and the people in the larger business have to be considered when planning for the organizational changes that an ITIL implementation can bring. Although ITIL is focused on transforming how Information Technology is delivered, sustained and perceived within the larger business context, the framework clearly assumes that changes will be required on both sides of the relationship.

While books and experts are often quoted saying that ITIL cannot be implemented piecemeal, it is fairly clear that sweeping organizational change cannot be accomplished in an instant. The key to understanding the assertion is in the interrelatedness of the five ITIL domains. Within each domain and across all the domains an output of one process is a necessary input to another.

Businesses considering an ITIL implementation are most often well established and unable and unwilling to suspend operations to completely change their organization and ways of doing business over night. Thus, the move toward an IT Service Management mindset most often starts with Continual Service Improvement (CSI). At the most basic level, ITIL provides a shared vocabulary and set of assumptions to help IT and business collaborate on improving processes and IT support of them.

CSI is the ITIL domain that concerns itself with transforming the way in which business interacts with its Information Technology assets and resources. This is where the people come in. People are what makes processes live. In order to effectively transform an organization, you have to win the cooperation of the people who will ultimately do the work. In order to move people out of their comfort zones, it is imperative that the introduction of Continual Service Improvement be done in a way that makes the benefits of CSI to both the business and the individual clear.
People envision the work, set the value of work and actually do the work of business both inside and outside IT. ITIL stresses the importance of clear and unambiguous accountability for processes, i.e., ownership. Empowering people to own business processes and be instrumental in the success of business initiatives that depend on them, makes the benefits of Continual Service Improvement clear. The establishment of accountability and ownership arguably lead to process documentation if for no other reason than having justification for actions and an audit trail. Documentation of current practices, or how business gets done, become the jumping off point for CSI. A CSI implementation can begin with very small incremental improvements, providing a series of small “wins” which may increase acceptance of the CSI concept and demonstrate the value of increased process rigor. Although ITIL is focused on transforming Information Technology, the concept of process ownership and accountability is equally applicable to non-IT business concerns, and the value of good documentation as a business case for planned, controlled change applies enterprise wide.

Rhané Thomas
Senior Consultant
Public Sector Consultants, Inc
1124 15th Street, Suite A
Sacramento, CA 95814
(916)715-9661
rhane@psc-inc.biz