How to Fix IT Service Management (ITSM) Practices
This article can help organizations apply the proper thought process to course-correct their IT Service Management Practices
These days, all companies have a sizeable digital footprint and technical landscape. In some form or fashion, organizations likely have resources dedicated to “keeping the lights on”, mitigating risk, or being ready to put out fires by fixing issues rather than buying replacements. So with the ever-growing push to make all things digital, there are a couple of certain things. The first is that you will spend money on technology and the second being you will spend money to maintain it. With those two constants in mind, where can you focus resources to reduce costs or increase productivity? Also, how are you going to prioritize, document, and prevent issues in the future? This is why IT Service Management exists. IT Service Management serves the purpose to ensure people, technology, and processes are in place to help a business achieve its goals. Businesses exist for one of two reasons: they either set out to make money, or to fulfill a specific mission, typically a passion project. Knowing these are one of two goals a company can achieve, how can your organization contribute and how does IT Service Management help? All of these roads lead to reducing costs and increasing productivity to become operationally excellent.
Starting a new Service Management practice can be completely different from course-correcting a stale or failing one. For this article's purpose, we will focus on the latter.
Using ITIL 4, a proven and global framework for delivering IT Services, we will focus course correction around the Continual Improvement Model. The 7 steps to ITIL 4 Continual Improvement are:
What is the vision?
Where are we now?
Where do we want to be?
How do we get there?
Take action
Did we get there?
How do we keep the momentum going?
Below, you will find recommendations and thought processes for each step on how to fix IT Service Management practices.
What is the vision?
Casting a vision and communicating it is critical to digital maturity in business. Think of medieval war times as an example. Imagine for a moment you lead an army and your enemy is sending 100-foot soldiers toward you. If you have 100 soldiers you could dispatch to fend off the enemy, but 50 of them are off-picking flowers in a field because they didn’t know there was a war, you might get run over. As simple as it may seem, communication of the most current “end-goal” must be stated downwards throughout your organization.
So, what is a vision? A vision is a defined aspiration of what an organization would like to become in the future. This could be something relevant to your customers or market, or even becoming operationally more efficient to better serve the organization in support of your customers. However, your vision must describe what problems the organization will solve, how consumers will interact with your products and services, and what your people, process, partners, and technology structure will resemble.
If I am an executive IT leader, I may take into account what the CEO has cast for our business and make sure my vision roles up to theirs. For example, if the CEO and the business want to reduce overall expense by 5% by end of Q4 but my vision is to increase NPS scores by deploying new, relevant technology, I might miss the mark because new technology doesn’t always have hard return-on-investment numbers associated with it. That said, the best place to start with creating a vision is to know what is within your limits up and downstream and to be practical.
To formally document and deploy my visions, I work laterally in the organization to get buy-in and then bring in people leaders and contributors below me in the organization to make them a part of the vision. A part of leading that is extremely important is rallying the team, inspiring, and ensuring your vision is something your people want to work towards. Sharing a common goal, having a dedicated community, and rallying peers that will work for you, not against you, is crucial for your success.
Where are we now?
Once you have a vision in mind, the next step is to assess where your organization is currently. For this step, I like to run maturity assessments against key business processes and document value streams. Though this is a critical step, why take the time to do assessments and document all these value streams? Simply stated, you have to create a baseline to measure your progress during the continuous improvement venture.
If you cannot measure against improvement initiatives, you will never be able to quantify your return on investment in resources spent attempting to achieve your vision. For example, if you want to increase your NPS score by 5% in the next two quarters and there is no baseline or current state data, it would be rather difficult to know a percentage of improvement. But again, this all ties back into the reason that businesses exist. Most often, your organization is in pursuit of making money, so if your improvement initiatives are costing you money without achieving a specific business goal or vision, then likely you will miss the mark and not receive future funding, or even get future budget rejected and have to deal with legacy technology, processes, and talent with no way out to become more efficient. If you cannot be more efficient to reduce costs, increase productivity, scale with technology, or becoming more relevant in the eyes of your customer/market, are you worth the investment?
Where do we want to be?
Understanding your current state can assist with where you want to be because you will already have some technical or process gaps in mind, however, focus on the ideal setting that contributes to your vision. This is a step centered around casting your vision and setting appropriate objectives and key results. I like to use the cascading goals model to ensure that through each layer of an organization, everyone’s goals work together, up and down-stream, to contribute to the achievement of my vision and goals.
Let us say for a moment that we have an understanding of our current state processes for incident management. We cast a vision in IT to provide elevated support to our internal customers that service our external customers, documented a value stream and know our lead time, and measure it against our value-add time to document our process efficiency. If our process efficiency is 56%, we may analyze the value stream and see the potential to reduce waste from our process to achieve 65% rather quickly. In turn, we create goals and strategies to Increase our Incident Management process efficiency by 9% within the next two quarters. This is not only a tangible goal with data to support how we got here, but also something quantified, and measurable, that gives us room to operate within our vision.
How do we get there?
Let us continue with our goal “Increase our Incident Management process efficiency by 9% within the next two quarters”. When we work with “How do we get there”, what we are asking for is a plan. A mature thought process here is to run projects within IT’s program that our initial vision would fall under. That way, we can operate with pre-allocated funding and resources to make necessary improvements. We also want to create a project plan and forecast scope, schedule, and costs.
Thinking back to our value stream activity, we can analyze the value stream to identify bottlenecks and waste in the process. Our vision may be to “provide elevated support to our internal customers that service our external customers” so we would want to continue determining what bottlenecks or waste would be in pursuit of that vision. Likely time to first touch an incident, or follow up after proposing a solution, but either way, make sure you are in alignment with the vision and goals, otherwise, any improvement you make outside of that scope, though it might be a great improvement, may have you missing your goal, blowing your budget, and failing the overall objective.
At the end of the day, for determining how to get there, there is nothing else like a solid project plan with a detailed work breakdown structure.
Take action
You have a vision, goals, understanding of the current state, and a plan of how to achieve your improvements. Now comes the time to roll up the sleeves and get the job done. In this step, continue to iterate through your project, continue to meet deadlines for project milestones, and keep communicating your progress with stakeholders. Be your own cheerleader, keep the business in the loop, and ensure scope, schedule, and costs are within your boundaries.
Did we get there?
Remember that baseline we created in the “Where are we now?” step? Yes, that part was important, and here is why.
We have to measure, using the same analytics and methods that we created our baseline with, to understand if there was any improvement. We need to know at this point if we hit the mark, or missed it. If we hit it, awesome! If not, why? Why did our actions fail and what went wrong? Was it a bad plan, did we not execute it, or what was the limiting factor? We have to run post-mortem cycles around our efforts to understand why we either exceeded our goals or if we failed, how can we prevent failure in the future. We also need to communicate to stakeholders and the business our findings, especially if we used funding from the IT portfolio to run these initiatives. This can be a great move to protect yourself by ensuring the teams why you were successful or not, what your limiting factors were, and what you will do next time to prevent history from repeating itself, if necessary.
How do we keep the momentum going?
Keep the cycles going and keep your “foot on the gas”. Continuously iterate through these cycles in pursuit of your vision. Also, do not feel the need to keep your vision static. Business and goals change all the time so call an audible when necessary. The important thing is that you and your team continuously improve, progress iteratively with feedback, and optimize.
