When to Apply ITIL?

This is a real question. As was pointed out to me, companies don't just all of a sudden decide they need to save money and then recognize that ITIL can help them do it. To answer this question, let me go back to my first experience in this space. In a previous engagment, we needed to do something differently. Our processes were out of control, we didn't have a handle on our service levels or the costs for our services. I was tired of getting paged at 9 AM on Sunday mornings. Something HAD TO CHANGE! We didn't decide to do ITIL. At that point in time we didn't have the guidance of ITIL best practices to guide us. We simply knew we HAD to get control. We went down a lot of dead ends but eventually got there. This is important. I fired a customer of mine one time because their interest was in "doing ITIL" not meeting business needs. It became apparent to me that I was being used to help a newly minted ITIL Master director make a name for themselves in the company by latching on to the hot topic of the day. When I pointed out that their objectives were off-target and were driving the wrong behavior, they pushed back. It was obvious I was spinning my wheels so I gave notice and politely excused myself from the contract. Two project managers within the program subsequently left.

So, to answer the question, where do you start...you start with what you want to accomplish as an IT organization in enabling the business. This sets the stage, then, for all activities that must follow. If what the business needs requires us to look at Service Level Management, Capacity, and Incident, then our job is to devise a program, based on the customer needs (Six Sigma calls the initial elements CTQ's - Critical To Quality - which are translated into business, functional and non-functional requirements), that identifies those tasks within the three functional areas that will achieve the objectives. It is important to understand, however, that one cannot address any one functional area in total isolation. If you are going to address incident management, you need to look at certain elements of Service Level, Problem, Change, Configuration management as well.