The Forum - 05/08/2008 (Plain Text Version)
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ITIL® Strategy Needs to be Strategically Planned
By Ron Hovland, New Horizons
Principals employ or hire agents to act on their behalf towards some specific objectives. Agents may be employees, consultants, advisors or service providers. Agents act on behalf of principals who provide objectives, resources (or funds), and constraints for agents to act on. They provide adequate sponsorship and support for agents to succeed on their behalf. Agents act in the interest of their principals… - ITIL® v3 Service Strategy, 2.4.2 I was recently asked to present an overview of ITIL® v3 to a group of C-Level people at a small, but growing company. This company is a third-party provider of several IT services. They provide these services to companies that range in size from what are often referred to as “Mom and Pop” shops to Fortune 500. My audience included the President of the company as well as (almost) every director of every major division within the company. In short, my audience consisted of the decision-makers and power brokers. And I was tickled. These people were willing to arrange their schedules to free up several hours to hear about ITIL® and Service Management. I often find that CIOs of many companies can’t find that kind of time away from the office, and here, I had all of the business leaders gathered in one room. After introducing myself and my topic and presenting a brief overview of the Service Lifecycle, I began to drill a bit deeper into Service Strategy, the area of ITIL® that I felt they would care most about from some of their introductory remarks. They were very polite and asked several questions, but finally one of the directors said to me, “OK. I think we all get it. What’s your next step? After all, you are trying to sell us something aren’t you? You are here to try and sell us your processes, right”? Wrong. I was there to simply help them understand what ITIL® was all about. As our conversation continued, I learned that this group of people didn’t care whether their IT Department practiced ITIL® or not. They just expected that any issues that came up would be dealt with successfully in some way. They certainly approved of the idea of process, but they assumed that IT already had it. I knew that the IT division did indeed have processes in place, but I had also been told that there were a number of big issues and concerns that their current structure didn’t seem to handle well. I asked:
I stated that if they could answer “yes” to any of the above questions, perhaps ITIL® might be of interest to them and not just to IT. They agreed, and then one asked, “If you aren’t here to sell us your processes, how do we actually begin to do this?” I actually hear that quite a bit. This ITIL® stuff sounds good, but how do you really get going? I answered, “By using ITIL® as your guide.” While it is true that ITIL® is all about Service Management, we can use the ITIL® Lifecycle phases and processes to actually roll out ITIL® itself. We oftentimes forget this. The company in this story learned that customers were dissatisfied with support. After a quick assessment, they decided to reorganize their client support team. I asked what customers were complaining about, but there seemed to be no specifics. Still, they knew they needed to act on it and came up with a plan that they hoped would help. Let’s back up just a bit: Why are our customers displeased? What do we need to do to solve the issue(s)?
“Calculating the economic value of a service can sometimes be straightforward in financial terms. In other instances, however, it is harder to quantify the value although it may still be possible to qualify it. Value is defined not only strictly in terms of the customer’s business outcomes: it is also highly dependent on customer’s perceptions…” As the service provider gains better understanding of customer expectations for services, they can rethink and, if necessary, redesign the service. Sometimes that means changing the service itself; other times however, it will mean modifying how the service is delivered and managed (i.e., processes and functions that are in place or should be in place). A service provider has to routinely ask these questions (Service Strategy, 3.1.2) again and again:
Good answers to these questions will guide the strategy we have in place and the strategy we will need to have for the future. Our strategy needs to incorporate the processes we currently have in place that support our business and our customers—and that guarantee the customer value. The strategy also needs to incorporate new processes (and changed processes) that will provide new value and that will help us keep our competitive edge. In his opening remarks, the manager who had organized the presentation told the directors that this ITIL® framework could help them. He realized that reactively making changes to the client support team might help, but he also knew that it might not achieve its intended effect or provide a long-term solution. A little work with the CSI models and a few of the Service Strategy tenets would have helped set the table, and he wanted his Director group to understand that. From his perspective, they had been reactive too often. Another tenet of ITIL® that we should keep in mind (Service Strategy, 2.4.4.2) regarding Feedback and Learning says:
The manager who asked these principals to attend my presentation had a clear goal. As an agent working on their behalf, he wanted them to know that his division was not interested in strictly being reactive, strictly limiting their methods to current process, strictly doing business as usual. He had discovered a framework that would serve them well, and he wanted them to know it. What he was saying to his leadership team: “As we need to change and grow, as we need to react and flex, as we need to meet your objectives and our customer needs, we’re going to set the table beforehand each time—strategically.” A good beginning.
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