Practitioner Radio Episode 29 - Justifying Service & Process Improvement

Troy - great points that you bring up. Let me offer some other thoughts (or approaches) to consider as organizations build out a business case and where an organization could expect to gain from pursuing ITSM through ITIL.

There are 4 basic types of work that an IT organization performs: Customer or business supporting projects, Infrastructure projects (internal technology or service delivery process improvements), minor enhancements or service requests, and unplanned work (dealing with the instability of the operational environment that generate incidents or or result from poor or inadequate planning of the run books that result in difficulties (inefficiencies) for IT operational management).

The big issue for most organizations is that the ratio of unplanned work to the other three types of work (primarily where the customer is getting value from IT) is badly skewed. It is not uncommon that that ratio is on an order of something like 60/40, 70/30 or something higher. I would suggest that your readers look at their own budget ratio and see where there is leverage potential.

So one of the key efficiencies or results that organizations get from pursuing the capabilities delivered through an ITSM initiative is to begin to shift the Keep the Lights On (KTLO) to Project ratio - in other words going from 70/30 to 60/40 or lower. By doing that IT budget dollars can be freed up to do more customer projects or needed infrastructure projects and spend less budget dollars on KTLO. The idea is to eliminate the typical churn that most IT shops experience that truly doesn’t add value for the business.

Some examples of how you do this are:
> Reducing the number of incidents experienced by users by eliminating them through effective Problem Management or managing more effectively the change risk (generates change related incidents) through Change Management

> More efficient incident processing, through Incident Models, self help and automation reducing the mean time to restore of incidents and thus freeing up front line and 2nd and 3rd tier resources to do other work

> Having sufficient technology resource capacity sufficient to adequately meet transactional demand so as to not to propagate capacity based incidents

> Engaging Operations early in the development cycle to improve the quality of the Service Design Package (including the Run Book) through better Design and Release and Deployment processes and improving the IT Operations management capability (efficiency and effectiveness)

> Effective technology instrumentation and messaging management through Event Management that will either prevent incidents from occurring or reducing their MTTR

On the project side of the house, efficiency and communications are the key. Organizations find that improving the manner in which they engage with the business and manage the flow of projects through the “IT Factory” creates even greater capacity to do more work. Examples of improvements include:

> Improved communications and engagement with the customer to better understand current and forecast potential business projects resulting in better requirements definition and decreased need for service rework

> Improved flow of service requests requiring less manual intervention to assure that service requests are delivered per SLA

> Improved prioritization of both customer and Infrastructure projects to improve the overall value of what is delivered from the “IT Factory”

> Improved management of projects released into the Factory to assure that resources are available when needed and as needed so that projects are delivered per customers expectations

> Improved management of release and deployment activities to assure that the business and operations is engaged throughout the design, development, testing and deployment activities to assure a seamless transition of new or enhanced services to an operational state. This is critical as the perceived value of IT will be related to how well services are deployed and how effective they are as they are made available. This point is also tightly integrated with the points above about reducing the time spent on KTLO activities

> And of course one of the critical outgrowths of ITSM is the continuing evolution of a quality or continual improvement mindset. Continuing to ratchet up the bar to improve service or process performance (improving the project work capability) and identifying and fixing errors (reducing the KTLO drain) is vital to the long term health of ITSM

Jack Probst | September 30, 2013 at 8:29pm