Who should implement itil

I've seen too many executives try and implement ITIL out of the book without knowing that it must be purpose-built to address the problems in your unique organization, to be modified to take advantage of other frameworks like agile or lean, and that's almost a guarantee of failure," Case says.

Case suggests making sure that every department first understands the business strategy and the use cases involved in IT decision making so that they can more effectively focus on improving outcomes and aligning IT with the larger goals of the business, with or without ITIL. If you're going to focus on outcomes and results from the business level, you have to provide that information to make sure business and IT are aligned," Case says.

What's your rationale behind implementing ITIL? What are the specific areas where change is needed? Many organizations turn to ITIL because their IT departments have been strictly focused on technology acquisition and integration without understanding the larger value of these solutions.

Customers don't care if a server fails or the network or an application is down, they just care if the technology works so they can get the results they want. You have to think about your networks, your applications, your servers, your people, your processes - everything - as an end-to-end value stream," Case says. Continual service improvement CSI involves understanding where an organization wants to be at a governance level, from a customer service standpoint and from an operational viewpoint, says case.

To determine the best way to get there, you first have to understand three things: existing competencies, existing capabilities and what processes support those, he says. Aligning existing competencies and capabilities with your business goals and strategy is one thing, but you have to be able to say, 'Did we get there? Instead of trying to implement a sudden, across-the-board change, it's better to spend some time on a careful implementation strategy, Case says. Rolling out ITIL to parts of your IT organization where it can make the greatest impact first will make it easier to expand organically.

This is all about people, processes and technology, so you have to see where you can make the biggest impact and start there.

You need to have a deep and broad understanding of your organization and the typical rate of change within it - it takes a lot of coordination and education. This is as much about culture change and behavioral change as it is about technology, so if you can, start small - with maybe one person at a time - and then move up the chain to addressing teams, then larger departments and finally the entire organization," Case says.

If you've introduced a new tracking, monitoring or service management technology tool, you probably already know that you need to test it to make sure it's working as needed. But don't stop there, says Case. But when such knowledge is made transparent through a system that is easy to peruse, go through and glean information from, employees and users know exactly who they need to go to for what. This clarity just makes things easier on all fronts.

The saved time of course goes straight into productivity, and cumulatively, the costs controlled by ITIL will add up. The biggest benefit of implementing ITIL early in your organization is that when you scale, your infrastructure and systems will not suffer. And if dependability on hardware and systems is significant, the probability of descending into utter chaos becomes high.

Alternately, an ITIL-aligned service desk would have taken care of a such a transition with ease, eliminating redundancy, strengthening central processes, and improving resource utilization remarkably.

Of course, the peace of mind that comes with that is a bonus. Every organization wants its internal ops to be as squeaky clean, proactive and fast as possible. Which is why an ITIL implementation can take you away from primitive software and hardware management practices that are typical of organizations stagnant and stationary in thought and execution.

And all of this because of basically not keeping their house in order. An ITIL implementation makes sure that past mistakes are learnt from, performance indicators are paid attention to, and the cost of achieving such service quality is justified.

It is important to review the organization's process documentation to gain an overall understanding the various aspects of the process. The areas that should be covered in the documentation are as follows:. After reviewing the documentation to gain a complete understanding of the defined process or processes, the assessment team will perform interviews of the key players who are accountable and responsible for the process.

The interviews will also include those resources carrying out the activities of the process and stakeholders that either use the process or are the recipients of the process outputs.

These interviews can be one-on-one, or in a group setting. The goal is to understand each stakeholder's perspective and gain insight into their views about how the process or processes work, where they see issues, how they view process compliance, and the benefits they think are being realized from the processes. One would think that everyone's understanding should line up with the documented process and procedures, but that is not generally the case, and this gives the assessor insight into the areas that need improvement.

At the most basic level, the assessment report will provide an overview of the scope of the project and the type of assessment performed and the methodology and model used during the assessment. It will then outline the areas that are done well, and the areas where there are gaps, that if filled, can help the organization reach the next level in terms of both its maturity and capability.

It also provides details about the new processes that should be implemented, improvements recommended for current processes, and how the governance and culture of the organization might change to better align with its defined vision mission and strategy. Success can mean different things to different stakeholders, so prior to acting upon the recommendations in the assessment report and implementing an improvement or a new process, it is imperative to define exactly what will constitute success.

The goals and objectives should be agreed upon and documented. For each goal and objective, measurable targets should be defined, and measurements should be put in place for each one of the objectives. Monitoring and reporting will provide the answer to whether or not you have reached the targets, and thus, whether or not you have achieved success. The successes should be celebrated and shared with the organization. The more value that's shown, the easier it will be to get additional funding for further improvement.

One of the most important outputs of the assessment that should be in the report is "quick wins. The reason that quick wins are important is that they very rapidly show the benefit of instituting the best practices and they give relevance to the effort. They instill a sense of confidence to both the team and the other stakeholders. They also have the potential of changing the perception of those that have not bought into the initiative.

Some additional benefits of quick wins include:. The last item is very important and is worth repeating. Once implemented, quick wins and the benefits realized should be shared with the whole organization. This is a success that should be included in the newsletter.

Monitoring and assessment of an organization's processes to seek out gaps and areas that can be improved should be an ongoing activity. The best scenario is to appoint a Continual Service Improvement Manager who has the responsibility of ensuring that IT is continually aligned with the needs of the business.

Having an ongoing Continual Improvement initiative that focuses on improvement across all aspects of the IT organization will provide the visibility needed to ensure IT remains proactively aligned so that the business can achieve its goals and objectives.

In addition, assessments should be carried out on a scheduled basis. They are not one-time activities. The organization should continually be evaluated to ensure the organization remains focused on improving its maturity and capabilities. There are many ways that organizations decide on the areas to focus, and how they are going to go about improving their processes.

Regardless of the way an organization decides to start is really secondary to the fact is that they are looking at improving the way that IT supports the business. With extensive experience in the information technology field, Mr. Caruso's practice offers IT service management, IT governance, and project management instruction and consulting.

His background encompasses both technical and leadership roles in application development, infrastructure, service desk, and operations across many industries. Enterprise IT Management. ITIL is a set of five "core guides" that contain the best practices for each phase of the Service Lifecycle. Why might an organization look to ITIL? Defining the Project Scope Begin by defining a reasonable scope for the project.

Change Management The purpose of this process is to manage changes to the IT environment. Pain Points Another approach that is fairly straightforward is to focus where you are having the most issues.

Process Assessment The last way to be covered, and the recommended approach, is to perform a formal evaluation called a process assessment. Process Only—The scope of a process-only assessment would focus strictly on the maturity and capability of a defined set of the IT processes.

People, Process, and Technology—In this scenario, the process assessment would still be carried out, and along with that, the people, or functions required to carry out the activities of the process would also be assessed for efficiency and effectiveness. Finally, the underlying technology would be assessed to understand if it is able to support the objectives of the process es. Full Assessment—The full assessment includes all of the activities of a people, process, and technology assessment, but goes further and would also include an assessment of the vision, mission, goals, and objectives of the organization along with its strategy and culture.

Let's briefly touch on a few: The Capability Maturity Model Integrated CMMI — This is a well-known and widely using Maturity model that is used to help an organization understand what process improvement is needed.