Begin the Beguine

Guidance On Your Initial Implementation of ITIL?

After responding to a question in a LinkedIn post, about how to start implementing ITIL, I was reminded of how many times, when speaking at conferences, teaching, or consulting about ITIL, over the past 19 years; I’ve been asked by IT practitioners, “Where or how do I begin to implement ITIL?” ?

That triggered a memory of an old song, “Begin the Beguine”, by Cole Porter from 1935. The beguine is a West Indian dance, like a foxtrot, from the French,?béguin?meaning ‘infatuation’.

“When they begin the beguine; It brings back the sound of music so tender,”

When you decide to use ITIL as one of many IT centric and non-IT centric best-practices or standards, to do the work of IT Service Management (ITSM), you begin what seems to be a never-ending dance. You live and breathe it as you do the dance.

I like to portray ITSM as running IT as a business unit that supports the business; no different than the way Human Resources, Finance, or Legal supports the business at large by providing services to all other biz units.

It is ITIL’s nature not to provide a ‘start button’, because it is a non-prescriptive, technology agnostic, vendor neutral, best practice, guidance; consisting of best practices; and it is not a standard.

Nowhere in ITIL does it say you must implement it at all, implement all of it, that you must implement any part of it, nor always start ? here. You chose to use it and if you do so, then you choose what to use in it, based on what best meets the needs of the organization, business, your customers and your customer’s customers; whom you serve by providing them IT solutions.

There are a few that say you don’t ‘implement’ ITIL, others say you Adopt/Adapt/Align it, and still others state that Alignment is being reactive rather than proactive; therefore, it is not conducive to partnering with the business. I can assure you that ITIL has the practices you need to be both proactive, reactive, and to also form partnerships.

I add Attune to the mix, because making ITIL part of the IT culture is required for it and the IT organization to best support and perform ITSM. Remember the saying that 'culture eats strategy for breakfast'?

Adopt/Adapt/Align/Attune.

> Adopt it as one of many IT-centric and non-centric best practices and standards you choose to use

> Adapt it by choosing what in ITIL will help your particular business

> Align it by initial implementation and continual improvement

> Attune it by making it part of the culture

?Attunement is?the ability to be aware of and respond to another person's emotions, moods, and inner world.?It's also the process of forming relationships through reactiveness to another person. Attunement can help people feel close and connected throughout their lives. Attunement can also demonstrate empathy.

Some believe that implementing an ITSM suite will implement ITIL. It will accelerate implementation but that is not the best way to achieve alignment or attunement. There is no silver bullet. If you automate a bad process, it will get there faster! The organization's culture needs to be ready to embrace and properly use the tool.

Instead of jumping into a tool, first identify which products & services are critical to the business, discover which value streams are necessary to provision those, via the Service Value Chain, to make evident which practices you need to use in the SVC activities that the value streams traverse. Then use that information to help you identify requirements needed to select an ITSM suite, which will in turn help you best configure the tool. This is in part what the Optimize and Automate guiding principle is about.

In concert with the above, my advice is to not treat ITIL as a program or project, except to initialize it at the very beginning.

So, how do you begin the beguine with ITIL? A generic approach that I use in all such assignments follows. This method uses parts of the best of both Iv3 and Iv4. Start Where You Are!

?"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”

– From a Chinese proverb

One way to begin implementing ITIL is to use the Four Dimensions and the Continual Improvement component of the Service Value System to focus on improving IT strategies and supporting tactics, plus use the Improve activity of the Service Value Chain, that requires the use of the Continual Improvement Practice.

Note that the SVC is an operating model inside the SVS value model. Another component of the SVS that comes to play here is the Guiding Principles!

Use the Continual Improvement Model across all of those elements; to build your capabilities and competencies, to make iterative and incremental improvements thereafter. In other words, use ITIL to implement ITIL.

In fact, if you don’t have Continual Improvement operating in your organization, that may be the first ITIL practice to consider to ‘implement’. To do that though, improving the Change Enablement practice may need to precede or at the same time doing so with the Continual Improvement Practice. However, in improving Change, you may discover Change may not be your weakest link, instead Deployment &/or Release may need attention.

Here is the Iv3 and Iv4 Continual Improvement Model (with a summary note I’ve added about “momentum”) that we would use to manage improvements that include “bug fixes” and enhancements.

The Continual Improvement Model integrates the SVS components, and the SVC activities as abstractly illustrated below:

With all of the above in mind, in a collaborative and holistic way, triangulate to form a baseline for improvements from three perspectives, to then create a road map to dance from where you are now, and Then Progress Iteratively with Feedback!

1. Focus on value by understanding what is the vision and how it cascades down to objectives, that are driving biz outcomes, that require IT outputs?
2. What are we currently doing well to enable progress?
3. What are we currently doing inadequately that makes it difficult to make progress?

One of my consulting gigs was a two-week assignment for an international company. The deliverable was to provide a roadmap to how the business would make their IT help desk a world class function.

In a maturity assessment for a software provider, a priority for them in their many opportunities for improvement was Service Continuity.?

(1)? Focus on value to understand what the vision, purpose, missions, strategies, tactics, objectives, and corresponding portfolios, that are necessary for the business to accomplish day-to-day "outcomes" for their products & services using our IT "outputs" or IT products & services.

That allows for co-creation of value for business providing their external customers with quality products and services. Determine if the goal is to be world-class, best-in-class, best-in-industry, a center-of-excellence, or get to some other level of performance, such as to improve governance, lower costs, &/or reduce risks?

As the ITSM Doppler figure below shows, to make improvements with the most enduring and sustainable impact; you need to Think and Work Holistically by using “systems” thinking.

Portfolios represent the collections of assets that management has committed, to support the business strategies, that in turn drives the IT strategies that drives IT operationally; that are put in place as value streams across the SVC activities using practices.

For maximum value, impact, and return-on-investment of IT to the business, we cannot focus only on implementation and improvement of ITIL practices. Using systems thinking, we need to have a holistic view to discover what business products and services are critical to and a priority for the business, then decompose those down to the enabling IT products and services, then further break down those to the practice level.

When I was working with a pharmaceutical company, who was a manufacturer of a unique brain cancer medication, that had to ship product daily; because if patients of their business customers skipped a dose, an adverse reaction that may be life-threatening could occur. Their critical internal business products and services were supply chain, manufacturing, and shipping. All IT products and services enabling those macro areas of the business were a priority for IT to deliver and support.

(2) What are we currently doing well to enable progress? Do we have ways to measure performance? Have we validated the measures? Are we currently measuring the right things? Are we consistently achieving the targets? Do we need new measures to better understand what is happening to form a baseline? We need to have the data, information, and knowledge to form a baseline and decide how to Start Where You Are!

(3) What are we currently doing poorly that makes it difficult to make progress or prevents progress? Where are the performance gaps? Which of those are creating pain points or are the weakest links?

? Throughout all three of the three macro areas of triangulation, use data, information, and knowledge from:

o?? academic, industry, and scientific research

o?? analyses of reports and surveys

o?? assessments of products/services, practices/processes and organizational/management/cultural maturity

o?? audit results

o?? benchmarks

o?? focus groups, user groups, & interviews

o?? other relevant and related industry standards and best practices

o?? results from risk assessments

o?? value stream analyses

To better understand those datapoints, use any of the many methods, models, techniques, and tools presented in ITIL to identify improvement opportunities, in particular:

·????? Agile

·????? Balanced Scorecard

·????? DevOps

·????? Lean

·????? OODA

·????? PESTLE

·????? Porter’s Five Forces

·????? SWOT

·????? Theory of Constraints

·????? Toyota Kata

What do the feedback mechanisms tell us? Where are the performance gaps? Apply the Theory of Constraints to find the weakest link as one of your first improvement opportunities to ‘implement’ ITIL, to get to Where We want To Be.

When you look at the 127 possibilities created by the seven performance gaps illustrated in the Performance Gaps figure below, to assess just one service offering; it is easier to see how much of a challenge it is to manage the quality of all products and services in the service catalog that are provisioned by value streams across the SVC activities, that are using any combination of the 34 ITIL practices enabling them.

To provision IT outputs at the highest level of governance, at the lowest cost, at the lowest risk, in the shortest time to market; for the maximum level of customer satisfaction; takes a lot of effort.

Investigating improvement opportunities is an iterative, never-ending effort that takes time, money, and doing the homework; with patience, perseverance, and persistence mixed in, to be a success for any ITSM quality initiative. Just as you do with products/services, you envision, strategize, and design top down; then transition, operate and report bottom up; as shown in the following Gap analysis model. In both directions, progress iteratively with feedback and collaborate with stakeholders from all levels.

? Collaborate with the business to agree on which IT practice (or dependent collection of), we think will help the business and at what capability level? You don’t need to adopt and adapt them all. Which of those are highest priority for the business? Just as it is with incidents, Priority = Urgency plus Impact.

The Service Desk customer just wanted that function and processes used improved to begin their program.

I recommend on your first improvement to start with one to three related practices, for one or two products or services critical to the business. That will help build your capabilities, competencies, and confidence to perform Continual Improvement.

Example combinations are the Service Desk paired with Incident and Service Request management; or Change, Deployment, and Release; or just Problem, or only Service Configuration.

For a software company that I worked with, the initial focus was on one practice, Service Continuity.

? Map the Current State of each current practice in a value v. maturity grid to begin the dance with a beat called a baseline

For the service desk, I used current daily operations reports, time motion studies, and interviews to create a baseline. I benchmarked current performance against the Help Desk Institute’s Member Practices Survey to reach consensus on improvement targets.

For the SW organization, the continuity baseline was their existing reports on the current level of performance, and the targets were based on what was the best level of backup for each product/service in each of the three tiers; based on the six recovery options with and associated timeframes described in ITILv3’s Service Design, that come from continuity best practices.

“All we need is a drummer; For people who only need a beat, yeah”

- “Dance to the Music”, 1965, written and performed by Sly and the Family Stone

? In addition to the current datapoints, map the capability/maturity targets for the Future State of current and new practices on the Value<>Capability grid.

Looking at the example practices in the grid, it is easy to see that a high priority practice improvement is needed for Change Enablement. With any practice, to go from L2 to L5; you must incrementally go thru L3 then thru L4. You would Progress Iteratively with Feedback to reach the desired target level. A sweet spot for most practices would be V3,L3. All practices should probably perform at L2 to start, but not all need to initially be at L5.

This is the Capability (maturity) model from ITIL?4 to help better understand the maturity levels. Detailed information may be found in each of the Practice Guides.

? Create a road map with business improvement plans to trigger IT improvement plans, to reach a practice’s capability/maturity targets. Then create and get approval for supporting programs, and projects! The road map may be a Gantt chart, Pert chart, Project plan, a simple SOW, an Excel spreadsheet, or a Word table. I've found in using all of these methods, to remember that 'less is more'.

The time horizon for the service desk was one year to achieve their goals, which when I followed up, they were progressing and met their goals on time, on target, and on budget.

The SW company road map included improvements to Service Continuity on their tier 1 products & services in the first year; then improving tier 2 in year two, then improving continuity of tier 3 in year three.

“Come on and ease on down, ease on down the road. Pick your left foot up, When your right foot's down, Come on legs keep movin', Don't you lose no ground”

– “Ease On Down The Road”, 1988, Written by Charles Emanuel Smalls, performed by Stephanie Mills.

? Review/Repeat/Rinse, no less than annually; use the Continual Improvement Register (CIR) to trigger the Continual Improvement Model (CIM) to keep the momentum going.

As you dance thru the steps in the CIM, also on an annual basis, include how to improve, the way you do improvements. Proactively budget for planned improvements the following year and add another line item for a possible emergency improvement the business may need the next year.

All Improvement requests should be logged/registered in the CIR. That does not mean they are automatically approved. It simply provides feedback from stakeholders on what the organization thinks needs improvement and in concert with Change and COBIT governance, creates an audit trail on the decisions made.

Maintaining a CIR allows the requests to be visibile, identified, prioritized, better understood, and to reach consensus on what actions are needed; even if the action is to wait or to reject (but never delete) the idea submitted.

Look at the CIR as a kanban board that helps with cooperation, communication, reaching consensus, and managing real-time workflow; to facilitate Progressing Iteratively with Feedback and to encourage Collaboration and Promoting Visibility!

This is a CIR template in Excel that I put in place for just the ITIL courses in a training organization that may be easily modified to meet your needs in any area. Per ITIL you may have any number of CIRs.

Effectively, by following the above guidance, you’ve now initiated your first implementation of ITIL, using the Four Dimensions, the Guiding Principles, the Service Value System, the Service Value Chain, and the Continual Improvement Model. Below is a compilation diagram I created of the three major ITIL?4 architecture models for ease of reference.

You are now on your way to begin the beguine with ITIL!

“Oh, what a feeling; When we're dancing on the ceiling”

– “Dancing on the Ceiling”, 1986, Written and performed by Lionel Richie

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