Happy holiday Friday. Thanks for coming back to read some more!

Although we appreciate Fridays in general here at Real World ITIL, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t look forward to the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, in particular. Somehow it feels like we’re making “progress” if we’ve made it this far through the year, doesn’t it?

Or is it really more like we feel that the “year is nearly half-over and our ITIL change leadership efforts arent going as fast as we’d like them to?”

Please join in welcoming Todd M. to our blog, who is checking out ITIL for the first time. Feel free to jump in with questions or comments, Todd. We’re talking about the practical implications of doing ITIL process implementations in the real world of corporate America - not just the theory of it. However, if you’d like to know more about ITIL definitions and theory, check out these websites:

The official website: http://www.ogc.gov.uk/index.asp?id=2261, or
The IT Service Management Forum (US): http://www.itsmf.com/

A special hello to Betsy L., too! Thanks for reading along with us.

This has been one of those weeks when Real World ITIL was more ‘real’ than usual, if you know what I mean.

Why so?

If you’ve been reading along for a while, you know that we’ve doing a lot of requirements gathering and process design work over the past few weeks in order to find a way to implement the first few bits of ITIL Configuration Management in this large IT shop. This project is the first step in what might become a multi-year effort to implement all 10 ITIL core processes.

(If you’re new to the blog, you might want to read my last few entries for some background info on our current project before reading further.)

Following the design effort, early this week we previewed a draft of a new workflow for IT Asset Management along with a supporting organizational design for some influential managers. Our intent in doing the preview was to get an early sense of the fitness of the design and also the organization’s tolerance for change.

We also wanted to help the managers continue to adopt the kind of ‘horizontal’ thinking that ITIL requires in contrast to the ’silo-based’ thinking they have held for many years previously. Furthermore, for planning purposes, we needed to know about how long it would take to gain executive buy-in to continue the implementation.

While we can’t reveal any details about the discussion, it is safe to say that the practical implications of restructuring the organization in order to implement process improvements were perceived as daunting. Daunting despite the fact that this project is really only a tiny step toward what an all-out ITIL transformation would require of the company.

Suffice to say that our team had to stop what we were doing to spend the rest of the week helping management understand the details of what the organizational change meant, why it had to be done that way, and what the specific impact of the change would be on their real world.

Some interesting questions arose out of this exercise:

• Who ‘owns’ ITIL in an organization? (think about this one carefully - it’s not an easy question, and the answer is not necessarily the obvious one: e.g., “the CIO owns it”.)
• Who should ‘own’ each of the individual processes?
• How will the various owners interact with each other? (think about this one, too - it’s a subtle issue about the spaces between the ITIL steps)
• Who will fix ‘broken’ process interfaces?
• How will IT work if only some of our processes have been transformed?
• And just what will happen if we only get partway through our workflow transformation and management withdraws its support?
• How are we going to sell these ideas to the senior management team, who all have other pressing things to worry about?

So, picture yourself standing in front of some VIPs, having just introduced some ideas that, small as the changes may be in relative terms, have nonetheless rocked the prevailing world. Now, because the VIPs are beginning to understand, they start asking you some of these questions.

How would you respond? These questions can’t be danced-around or brushed off.

My point is that, even if you are only trying to take one small, earnest step in the right direction toward process improvement using ITIL, the questions get very interesting, very quickly. Even small steps in an ITIL implementation can require major changes. We have to think not only about the core processes but also the spaces between and ‘around’ the processes.

So, in the early stages of implementation, this is what Real World ITIL really is. We who implement ITIL live questions like these on a daily basis. In the case of the present project, I feel confident that we’ll have good answers & do just fine on the implementation.

So, if you’re just starting out with ITIL as Todd is, realize that it’s more than just studying the theory and passing your Foundation certification exam. You have to have good responses to questions such as these, which responses represent ideas and plans that are rooted in business requirements, which are sensitive to the company’s culture, and that are also limited enough in scope that you can actually achieve them.

Do you agree? Have you had the same experience? Let’s hear from you!

We’ll reflect on some of the above questions in future blog entries. In the meantime, put your feet up & relax, will ya? It’s FRIDAY after all!

Have a good weekend, everyone!
Scott

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