We’ve talked a lot in the last year about ITIL practice areas, ‘real world’ ITIL business problems and ITIL implementation challenges.  Now my question to all of you ITIL professionals out there is, are you ready to rock and roll?

 We’re experiencing incredible growth here at Evergreen and we’re actively recruiting all types of ITIL, ITSM, ServiceCenter and AssetCenter professionals.  We’re looking for:

• Senior ServiceCenter Solutions Architect
• ServiceCenter Consultant
• AssetCenter Consultant
• ITIL Consultant
• Project Manager
• IT Software Sales Consultant, SE
• IT Software Sales Consultant, SW
• Director of Professional Services

If you’re interested you can check out all of our new positions at:

http://www.evergreensys.com/company/careers/openings/

 As an HP Software ‘Gold’ partner, we’re developing our staff towards increasing capabilities in HP’s comprehensive suite of BTO (Business Technology Optimization) products that include all of the legacy Peregrine ServiceCenter and AssetCenter products, as well as the powerful legacy Mercury applications.

We know that good ITIL professionals are sought after right now, so sometimes candidates ask me, “Why should I work for Evergreen?”  This is what I tell them:

• We have an open and honest environment where we share the truth with our employees.  We hold an all hands “Town Hall” meeting every quarter to share our progress and challenges. Employees can ask any question — and get a straight answer.
• We have a culture of collaboration where we foster teamwork and deliver excellence. Our technical staff shares their knowledge and works together to meet tough challenges. 
• Our professionals focus on excellence and press the envelope to improve results for our clients. For proof you can just look at our website and the kinds of “real” research our team delivers.
• You can work on your career, doing what you like and growing your skills.  We’ll make sure your skills stay current, by maintaining your certifications at the latest levels.
• You can have a work/life balance at Evergreen. Travel is part of life in consulting, but we constantly strive to balance the needs of clients with what is best for our team so you can do what you enjoy and still have a life.
• We have excellent compensation and benefits.

I encourage you to check us out more on our web site ( http://www.evergreensys.com ) and if you think your skils match our requirements email us at careers@evergreensys.com

I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Don

We’ve been talking about change lifecycle management lately, so I thought it might be interesting to dissect the components of Change.

Key improvements in Change Management can be found in four phases – planning, approval, execution and review.  Most organizations tend to spend all their time in execution but there are valuable opportunities for improvement in other areas that are often overlooked.

In the area of Change Management planning, typical improvements come from:

• raising the bar for change approval (saying no to changes that are not justified).
• empowering those requesting the change to plan it.
• matching level of effort in change planning with the materiality of the proposed change.
• clarifying and communicating expectations related to change submission completion and lead times.

Most potential for gain in the Change Management Approval area will be uncovered by discussing the Change Approval process with those handling the IT Change Approval process.  Typical improvements come from:

• streamlining and routing approval processes based on risk and materiality.
• reducing approval activities by screening out unqualified requests.
• reducing time required by standardizing and improving the quality of the requests.
• planning work more efficiently by raising compliance with submission lead time standards.

Execution changes most often involve improving efficiencies by breaking down organization, process and communication barriers around ‘silos’ in IT. Typical improvements come from streamlining and reducing complexity by grouping similar workflows and reducing them to a manageable number. For example, all server upgrades are ‘essentially’ the same, yet many organizations have completely different workflows for each type of server platform.

Executing via common workflows makes the work of IT less customized and more replicable. Gains in efficiency, simplicity, accuracy and service quality are common, along with reductions in cost and risk. These improvements come from

• filtering approval processes based on the risk and materiality of the proposed change.
• reducing approval activities by screening out unqualified change requests.
• reducing work time required by standardizing and improving the quality of the requests.
• planning work more efficiently by getting staff to comply with change submission lead time standards.

The most potential for gain in the area of Change Management Review is usually uncovered by discussing the Change Review process with those performing the review work. For most organizations, effective change review is the most neglected change activity.

Changes that do not fail, but don’t perform well for some reason or other are rarely reviewed. Changes that fail during execution or illustrate themselves as software failures are obvious and should be considered separately. More subtle changes need to be examined separately and root causes examined. Changes that cause serious failures, often evidenced by unplanned downtime or worse, usually do receive in-depth analysis. These often result in major systematic course corrections, but only after the fact, when high costs have been incurred. Red flags should go up for changes that fail during initial execution, but more subtle changes should be investigated thoroughly as well. Many IT organizations operate reactively and thus ignore these more subtle changes, spending the majority of their time on reactive analysis.

Typical improvements come from better change review activities that reduce the number of failures and also reduce the number of changes that fail in execution, thereby reducing the number of ‘near’ failures.

Analysis of the findings in Change Management from the perspectives of basic re-engineering of key, high-volume workflows and key improvement points in each of the four phases of the Change Management lifecycle should point out clear opportunities for business value improvement. These include improvements in service quality, efficiency, accuracy and agility, and reductions in risks and costs.

Register for Evergreen Systems’ Change Management Webinar: Take Change Management from Firefighting to Fire Prevention.

- Don

We hear a lot of talk these days about KPAs and ITIL process areas. KPAs (Key Process Areas) are used to help develop and measure the benchmarked standards of ITIL and are a good way of measuring your organization’s ‘maturity’ level within an ITIL process area (such as Configuration Management

KPAs apply to a repeatable maturity level. In the Infrastructure Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a repeatable maturity level means that the most important processes have been introduced and the effective structure of the IT process in question is predictable, and the provision of its IT-related services is repeatable.

So what about KPAs associated with Configuration Management? The main purpose of Configuration Management is to establish and maintain the integrity of products that are subject to or part of IT services. Configuration Management involves the identification of the relevant hardware and software components that need to be put under configuration control. Changes to the configuration are evaluated with respect to the service level agreement and with respect to possible risks for the integrity of the configuration.

A Configuration Management plan covers the Configuration Management activities to be performed, the schedule of the activities, the assigned responsibilities, the resources required (including staff, tools and computer facilities) and the CM requirements and activities to be performed by the service delivery group and other related groups

With all these things in mind, you may be able to develop and benchmark your Configuration Management KPAs using the following questions. Remember that each question has three possible answers of (1) consistently (2) inconsistently (3) never. Which category your answers fall into will quickly steer your assessment of configuration management maturity as either consistent (repeatable), inconsistent or having no organized approach

Try your hand at some of these questions and see how your organization ranks against best practices.

Keep up the good work until next time.

Also, Don’t forget to register for Evergreen’s change management webinar: Take Change Management from Firefighting to Fire Prevention

Don

• Is a Configuration Management plan prepared for each service according to a documented procedure?
• Is a documented and approved Configuration Management plan used as the basis for performing the Configuration Management activities?
• Is a Configuration Management library system established as a repository for the configuration base lines?
• Are the products to be placed under Configuration Management identified?
• Are action items for all configuration items/units initiated, recorded, reviewed, approved, and tracked to closure according to a documented procedure?
• Are action items for all configuration items/units initiated, recorded, reviewed, approved, and tracked to closure according to a documented procedure, by an automated process or toolset?

So you’ve thought things through now and you think you’re ready to begin working on a CMDB. Whether your motives are centralized change management control, the need for a standard set of configuration items or just improved change governance – you know the organization needs it.

The next question is where to start. As the white rabbit told Alice in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ – “I’ve always found it’s helpful to start at the beginning.”

So start at the beginning - by developing a strategy, one that surveys the industry, defines the critical elements of your CMDB and tailors the process to meet the needs and IT ‘maturity’ of your organization. Who knows, you might even want to develop a ‘model’ that could provide a roadmap towards your desired ‘end state’?

So here are a few ideas about how to ‘start at the beginning’ by developing your CMDB Strategy:

• Review current ITIL Change and Configuration Management ‘best practice’ thinking.
• Review ‘whitepapers’ written by some of the sectors’ leading CMDB software and solution vendors. Just remember that some of the white papers are written by vendors that may have an agenda.
• Review the functional attributes critical to the implementation of a CMDB and evaluate them against the ‘fit’ with your business.

Attributes that you may want to consider include:

• Reconciliation (the ability to rationalize one or more instances of a CI that is discovered and determine that they are the same item and that their relationships are identified are accurate.)
• Federation (which enables multiple data sources to be brought together to represent a coalesced view of a defined level of data.)
• Mapping and Visualization (which provides the ability to illustrate logically and physically the hierarchical and peer-to-peer relationships between CIs.)
• Synchronization (which provides the ability to update the CMDB with approved changes).

Next time we’ll discuss benchmarking your organization against industry best practices. Until then, remember, start at the beginning…

Don

Also, don’t forget to register for Evergreen’s change management webinar and learn how to Take Change Management from Firefighting to Fire Prevention

Are you trying to build a business case for a CMDB? Download Evergreen’s newest white paper on the subject: “The Business Case for Change and Configuration Management and the CMDB”.

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ITIL introduced the CMDB several years ago yet many are confused about its purpose. Do you think you know what a CMDB really is, as well as it’s purposes, components and applications? Test your CMDB knowledge against these five very common misconceptions about the CMDB.

The common misconceptions detailed here include:

• A CMDB is just a database
• A CMDB enables ITIL
• CMDB is just a part of Change Management
• My Asset Management system is the same as a CMDB
• Federation is the key to CMDB

1. A CMDB is a database
   A CMDB, despite the name, is not (just) a database. It is an analysis tool that happens to use an internal database to maintain configuration state and snapshots. A unique feature is that the database is populated by auto-discovery instead of business transactions.
2. A CMDB enables ITIL
   This can be a confusing phrase. A CMDB is a trusted source of configuration or structural information. Controlling the ITIL workflows and collecting process metrics is managed by a separate workflow, forms and dashboard tool.
3. CMDB is part of Change Management
   Change Management uses the CMDB analysis and report capability to identify rogue changes, simulate the impact of proposed changes and confirm releases. CMDB is an important tool for automating the Change Management process. A CMDB implements the ITIL Configuration Management process.
4. My Asset Management system is the same as a CMDB
   Asset management is a database and set of processes to acquire and track equipment and software to perform financial and custodial duties such as ownership, location, license utilization, lease terms, disposal. Asset management is not concerned with configuration structure and mapping relationships. But an Asset Management system and process is both a good idea on its own, and an important prerequisite to development of a CMDB.
5. Federation is the key to CMDBFederation is fiction. It is a term to hide the fact that no vendor wants (or is able) to solve the overall data integration problem across the disparate and standards-free world of IT tools. A CMDB does not have to federated to be effective as long as the Configuration Items (CIs) follow consistent naming rules. Later it may be useful to integrate selected attributes about CIs from other systems, such as application monitoring, security, and asset management.

Want to know more about how to develop your own CMDB? Download our comprehensive white paper on nine steps to developing an effective CMDB.

Also, don’t forget to register for Evergreen’s change management webinar and learn how to Take Change Management from Firefighting to Fire Prevention

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