Organizational Readiness

We believe that these questions only touch the surface of the rigor that an organization must pursue in evaluating its competence (and commitment) to drive internal improvement. Our “Programmed Solution” deals with each stage of the intervention in detail. But, before we examine the solution, let’s make certain the organization is ready for our approach.

In our experience we have boiled the essence of organizational readiness down to three essential organizational characteristics that must be in place:

1. Organizational Value Structure
a. Knowing what’s important
b. Patience to see it through
c. Commitment to improvement
d. Culture of action
e. The value of leadership is recognized

2. Culture of Accountability
a. Culture supports ownership and personal responsibility
b. Infrastructure provides means to measure and report progress
c. Success and failures are important and dealt with appropriately
d. Goals and tasks to achieve them are aligned

3. Compelling Need
a. The pain of the status quo must exceed the pain of making the change
b. Willingness to sacrifice to achieve it (going to heaven)

Enlightened Management

We've taken this journey through ITSM objectives to highlight a critical element necessary to successful ITSM implementations. There is no substitute for an enlightened project or program manager who truly understands the objectives of ITSM, its tactical and strategic value to the organization and its contribution to the technical operations architecture. We have seen far too many initiatives fail because the key project leadership didn't "get it." The shame of this reality is there is absolutely no excuse for allowing an ITSM project fail because the wrong people were driven by the wrong incentives to implement "something" that was not clearly defined, not supported at the right level of the organization and improperly staffed.

You've heard it countless times before: "The project was a dismal failure because there was no project management." Well, what goes wrong with project management? Perhaps surprisingly, it's not always just the project manager who is at fault, if at all. All too often a project is launched prematurely before the vision, objectives and deliverables are clear. This means the project manager is not able to "pilot the ship” because there's no star by which to navigate!

How, then, does an organization identify this star? How does the organization know it’s attaching all its hopes and resources on the right star? The answers to these questions lie in even more questions that will help clarify an understanding of the organization.
· What business is the organization in? What are the core competencies of the organization?
· What is the compelling reason, the event or situation that is driving the need for change?
· Considering the core competencies, is this compelling reason something that should be dealt with by the organization? Does it made sense to deal with this internally?
· If it does make sense for our organization to tackle, which group or groups should take it on? Do we have the internal skills, expertise and available personnel to lead and participate in the program?
· How can that compelling reason be expressed in business, revenue, customer, or business success?
· How can that compelling reason be expressed in a unit of measure that is meaningful to the business?
· Who would be the leader, key stakeholders and executive sponsor of the initiative?
· How will we manage governance of the intervention? What will go into our communication plan? How often will we communicate?
· What are the goals and objectives of the intervention? How will we measure success?
· How much is this going to cost? When will we realize the benefits?

Wrapping ITSM Objectives

Objectives 7-8
"Hiddent Factories" are those countless, debilitating cycles of waste that exist in all processes. IT Service Management best practices, by clearly defining roles and responsibilities within an appropriately architected process strucuture, eliminates this waste. ITSM also looks at technology and automation from a systems, holistic view to be certain that:
a.) the appropriate technology is in place to achieve process objectives and
b.) the technology capabilities are maximized for the organization as a whole.

ITSM stipulates a People, Process and Technology view of the infrastructure. It leverages a balance of skills, tasks and automation to achieve a customer service objective.

Finally, ITSM, by emphasizing definition of customer objectives and a means to measure them. Through developing KPI's to monitor IT's performance against those objectives, ITSM provides the basis for the IT manager to quantify how IT contributes to the bottom line of the business.

ITSM Principles

Objectives 4-6
Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) principles give the IT manager the guidanceto define and ultimately control the processes that underly IT functions. Processes, though, require people to exectute and technology or tools to automate. Process without people trained and responsiblefor the processes will be ineffective and will eventually fail. People executing processes without technology or tools to automate will also fail, particularly in an environmental complexity that prohibitsthe manual execution of processes.

ITSM seeks to standardize and stabilize the infrastructure. The principles underlying Configuration Management provide the controls to standardize the infrastructure. The proactive aspect of Problem Management lends the stability that is so vital to an efficiently managed infrastructure.

When all the processes identified by the ITSM framework come together, are properly measured, aligned with the business drivers, executed by trained personnel and automated through tools that exploit their abilityto manage the complexity and account for the interdependencies, you have the foundations to deliver IT services efficiently and effectively.