I keep six honest serving men, they taught me all I knew. Their names are What and Why and When and How.
Introduction
In a previous post I looked at my “why” and “what” of best practice around the Axelos qualifications and exams. In this article I will take you through the “where”, “when”, “who” & “how” I have used this best practice guidance in my day-to-day work over the last twenty years. This is partly to demonstrate the usefulness of the best practice guidance, but also as a counterpoint to a trend that I have noticed towards saying these qualifications only provide the theory. To this I say, that without theory, then what does one apply
The When
I first became aware of ITIL and Prince2 in the early 2000’s. Both were in their second iterations. ITIL was originally function based before becoming more process-centric in version two. Version three shifted to being service based and in the latest version it has become much more value based. Now ITIL has reached the stage where the most important thing is adding value to the customer. I hope to show how my application of best practice adds value. For a complete history of ITIL and how the approach by the authors changed in more detail is this link here and a graphic here. Similarly you can find a concise history of Prince2 here. As stated in the previous blog I passed my first ITIL foundation way back in 2005. I kept the ITIL up to date by doing the two ITIL v2 Senior Manager exams in 2007. I went on to do Prince2 2009 version and the bridge exam to become an ITIL Expert in 2016. I have now updated these to latest versions this year and added the additional exams to become a ITIL Strategic leader and ProPath Project Expert and Programme Leader. I used the ITIL processes at a German bank for ten years and then I went on to use Managing Successful Programmes and Prince2 during two programmes in two different contracts. This post will cover the ITIL part of my career, and third post will cover the MSP & Prince2 application.
The Where, Who & How of ITIL
Working for a large German bank in 2000, I ran an application support team before I was moved in a restructuring to an ITIL implementation project. I found this amusing at the time as I did not have ITIL qualifications. I addressed the lack of qualifications by booking and paying for the ITIL foundation myself, on the proviso that if I passed the Bank would refund me and then pay for the Senior Manager course exam.
Not only did I pass the foundation, but I also got a distinction in one of senior managers’ ITIL exams. This was at a time where Axelos required me to write five essays per exam on each of the processes in the Service Support and Service Delivery best practice guides (fortunately that is not the case anymore!) This was quite achievement for me with my dyslexia and spidery writing. Here then are two lessons; 1. if you want to gain a qualification; if you can make a good case for it then you can often get your employer to contribute to the cost, 2. If you know you can get someone else to pay for it if you pass, you are much more incentivised to do what you need to!
The ITIL project was challenging as it met some resistance in the initial areas of first and second level support in which we applied it to. This is quite natural of course with any organisational change but the key to overcoming this was to engage all the stakeholders and stress that ITIL is a best practice that we adapt to our situation and not a rigid set of rules. It does however provide a common language around requests, incidents, and problems.
Using this common language reduced the time to resolve issues and increased collaboration between teams. This new, more positive attitude encouraged the contributions to a knowledge management system that increased the efficiency. Initially by enabling the first level support to be able to increase their first calls closure rate. This also had a secondary impact of increasing the cooperation between the second level application support teams. All of these improvements meant quicker turnaround times for our users and thus happier customers which was our goal. These kind of visible, quick-wins are an important part of change management – they help breed positivity and make other (often bigger) changes much easier because you’ve now created some buy in.
I then moved to running the Service Desk and first level support for roughly eight thousand users. This where I started to apply my ITIL Best Practice knowledge in real detail, focusing on the function of a Service Desk, first and second level support. The most demanding customers were the trading floors, of which there were three, Treasury, Notes & Coins, and the largest; the 500 plus Investment bankers. To give you an idea of how demanding these traders were, the service level agreement was based on a requirement for an initial phone response of less than three rings, then a desk visit in under fifteen minutes and a resolution in less than an hour. With tough demands like these, it was vitally important that we applied the Service Request and Incident Management processes of ITIL religiously.
Our initial problem was segregating the request fulfilment from the incidents. If you are not already aware, service requests are orders for standard services from a service catalogue whereas incidents are events that result in interruption of one or more services. I used these concepts from ITIL and developed and implemented a service catalogue and a web based front end integrated with HP OpenView to smooth the request fulfilment process. We could monitor the performance via user satisfaction surveys which indicated that the resulting reduced turnaround times led to increased customer satisfaction. We could also use the feedback to improve and refine the service over time, improving quality of service still further.
Another issue on the trading floor that needed addressing was the turnaround of incidents. Here there was a conflict between the need of the service desk to insist on traders recording a ticket and the traders wish to use the speedier “Hey Joe” technique. I searched for a way to flexibly capture incidents on the fly, and it was a trip to a restaurant that provided inspiration. I implemented a system of handhelds, based on restaurant point of sale devices. The second level support that carried these recorded the “Hey Joe” incidents This satisfied both sides of the equation, resulting in speedier incident turnaround times and higher quality of incident recording.
The organisations service asset & configuration management also needed improving. We had one tool to order equipment, another to build it when it arrived on site, a third to manage the network and finally a premises tool to govern the locations of the users. As you can imagine these four tools got out of sync quickly, as users move sites and departments. Furthermore, the billing for each department was inaccurate. Our objective was to ensure the integrity of all the configuration items by establishing and maintaining an accurate and complete configuration management system (CMS).
I applied the Service Asset & Configuration Management process and developed a tool to reconcile all four databases and provide information for corrections. It also had a web-based presentation layer bringing all the information together in a single view. Thus, we developed a Single Point Of Truth (SPOT). This resulted in each department having accurate configuration management data and led to vastly reduced bills. Part of this was because I had identified that vendor supplying the equipment was not reducing the support change when equipment was out of warranty or scrapped. Millions were saved from the IT Department budget, and thus from cross charging to the business departments. The business department heads, as you might think, were very appreciative.
Conclusion
These are just some examples from one engagement, and I think that it illustrates that ITIL can be very effective if applied appropriately. There are some key themes here; They are that :
- TIL guidance can be adapted to support the most challenging business environments & organizational strategies
- ITIL guidance on achieving effectiveness & efficiency in the delivery & support of services to ensure value for the customer, the users & the service provider.
- ITIL guidance serves to protect investments and provide the necessary basis for measurement, learning and improvement
In order to create robust service management environments that suit the needs of the stakeholders, one needs to ensure that the bigger picture is seen and how they all can benefit from the changes. Quicker service request and incident processes are frequently simple quick wins with a lot of visibility. Beyond that, data fidelity and having a single point of truth for configuration management is a large task but the savings will be potentially massive and the value will continue to accrue over time.
I hope reading this helps you and maybe even inspires you to take some action, whatever that might be. If you’ve enjoyed the article, please show it some appreciation and if you have any questions for me or potential engagements, please feel free reach out!
To find out more about our expert consulting services either:
- Complete the contact form
- Contact via Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/company/pdca-consulting
- Call +49 172 579 4719
- Scan the QR Code for later
