We had an interesting epiphany last week at a client site… if you’re a Director or Manager who’s trying to “sell” ITIL, you might find this to be very important.

It reminds me of the kid’s party game where the first kid whispers a secret to the next kid, who in turn whispers it to the next kid, and so on around the table, until the last kid tells the secret. You know how it works - the last kid’s “secret” is nothing at all like the first kid’s version. In fact, even if the secret makes no sense whatsoever, if it’s all gibberish, the kids repeat what they think they heard anyway.

Well, management is not that different (you already knew that, right?). It goes like this: the CEO tells the CIO “I want IT to be more efficient, to deliver more projects, faster, to be more reliable, cheaper. Go do it.”

The CIO looks around for ways to make it happen, and some bright manager suggests ITIL. Great idea - ITIL’s proven to help with those goals. So the CIO says, “Manager, go do that ITIL thing, here’s a few bucks.”

Manager then goes and “does” ITIL. Gets training, attends conferences, hires consultants, buys software, re-engineers processes, deals with change resistance and process adoption, all the fun stuff.

Then at some point, the CIO asks, “How’s it going?”, and the Manager says, “Great! We have this cool new tool; we have all these people trained; we have Process Managers enforcing new processes; it’s all good.”

And you know what happens next - CIO says “Ok, so how is this helping us to be more efficient, to deliver more projects, faster, to be more reliable, cheaper?”

(Manager does the ?Deer in Headlights look?). “But boss, that wasn’t the assignment…”

So here’s the epiphany that we should never lose sight of: the deliverables of your ITIL project or program may be things like the Manager delivered, but the Goal is always “to be more efficient, to deliver more projects, faster, to be more reliable, cheaper.” So as you plan, do, check and act, your focus should include “What does the CEO want, and how do we build, measure and prove that we’re delivering that?”

Also, check out our new White Paper on “Developing the Business Value for ITIL“.

Don’t get caught in the disconnect…

Scott

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