Reflections of an ITSM Process Owner

Over the past year I have had the privilege of leading Software AG’s IT Department in the implementation of IT Service Management (“ITSM”) practices and procedures, according to the ITIL framework and the ISO20000 standard. In this series of articles, I’d like to share some of the insights I’ve gained regarding ITIL and ITSM and how they help make the IT function within a company, no matter what its size, more effective.

So, you think your IT department should adopt the ITIL framework and ITSM practices and procedures. You’ve done some ISO20000 courses, maybe got yourself certified in ITIL4 Foundation. You see the benefits such a structured approach to IT Service Management can bring and now you want to spread the gospel to your organization. You may even have a goal to get the organization ISO20000 certified. But then you start to think of the blockers to implementing ITSM and ITIL:

• Senior management may wonder what the return is on this investment.
• There’s bound to be push-back from IT staff who feel that they are already overburdened and don’t need the extra “bureaucracy”.
• There may be short-term productivity losses, such as: changes to IT systems will have to follow a change enablement process; service level agreements with the various business units will need to be established, documented, and monitored; incidents will need to follow a specific procedure, and, in some cases, a post-incident review will need to be conducted. Initially these things take time and resources, which are perceived to be, and often are in short supply in almost every IT department.

We were fortunate. Our CIO and his leadership team came on board fully experienced in ITIL and ITSM from previous positions. They saw that even though we were a fully functioning IT Department, there was much that could be improved. We immediately began the multi-year process of adopting the ITIL mindset and implementing ITSM practices. Nobody had to convince them it was necessary. But they now had the challenge to change the mindset of our IT Department and enable us to discover and internalize the benefits of these best practices.

One of the first things we did in our department was to arrange ITIL4 Foundation training and certification for all IT staff. If we were going to work according to ITIL we would all need to know how to speak ITIL, so there would be a common understanding of such terms as “service value chain” and “continual improvement”. In just over a year, we had more than 85% of our 250 IT staff members certified for ITIL4 Foundation.

While we were becoming familiar with ITIL4, all IT staff were challenged to go back and examine their processes and procedures for improvement opportunities. It soon became apparent that we were being given directives and delivering our services in alignment with ITIL4’s 7 Guiding Principles.

Focus on value: One of the basic tenants of ITIL4 is the co-creation of value. Whatever services we provide must bring value for both users and IT staff. Seems like a pretty basic idea but you’d be surprised how often it is overlooked. For us, emphasis was placed on improving the customer experience: guaranteeing time to first response to an incident or service request, deploying more self-services and automations, creating concise and easily accessible knowledgebase articles. Keeping the customer happy keeps us happy too.

Start where you are: As previously mentioned, we were a fully functioning IT Department before we started adopting ITIL and ITSM. Many of the processes that supported us did not need to be done over from scratch, just revised according to the ITIL way of thinking. This saved us a lot of time and resources and made the shift in mindset more palatable to our veteran staff.

Progress iteratively with feedback: Our first big step in ITSM from a user’s perspective was the introduction of Jira Service Management (“JSM”) as our new ticketing system. It’s huge. But we didn’t try to implement it all at once. We started implementing processes simply, one at a time, as Minimum Viable Products. We constantly requested feedback from users and IT staff, which we then evaluated and implemented where appropriate.

Collaborate and promote visibility: Early on in our ITSM program our IT Department reorganized into teams of experts that could expedite issue handling. This could have caused a “silo” effect where teams work separately without knowing the “big picture”, but our IT teams worked together, sharing knowledge and experiences that created synergies. We accomplished this through multiple channels of communication: Teams, JSM, All-Hands Calls, SharePoint. To maintain a high profile with the business, we proactively reach out to and align with business units through our “IT as a Business Partner” program. We also run an aggressive communication program that keeps our users informed about the good work we do and how it benefits them.

Think and work holistically: Many IT processes and services are connected, and we must consider those connections to understand how one thing affects another. Our Change Enablement process lets us analyze proposed changes for their risk and impact on related services before they are implemented. And if incidents occur because of changes, we can link them to those changes in our root cause analysis.

Keep it simple and practical: In keeping with “Focus on value” above, we also try to keep our processes simple, without too many steps or complexities. Those processes still must “deliver the goods” but if they can create their value and still be easily understood, then we achieve our objectives and keep the process maintenance easy.

Optimize and automate: And if we are already keeping things simple, we should ultimately look for ways to automate processes. To jumpstart this endeavour, we announced the “Automation Initiative” in which a team of specialists would assist any IT team with automating their processes and tasks. Employees have also benefited from this effort and since January 2024, 13.8% of all service requests were fulfilled by self-service.

In this article I’ve tried to show some examples of how frameworks like ITIL4 are not just theory – they can be practically applied. And in doing so, you get a more structured and measurable approach to improving your service management, that delivers value for both service consumers and service providers.

Previous Articles:

February 6, 2024

January 8, 2024

Michael Sonne Jakob Jellbauer Sven Kreiter Radoslav Danchev Hafedh Ghamgui Andreas Bünau Thorsten Philipp Stuart Wright (DPSM)?