Implementing the ITIL framework

Over the years, most IT shops have focused their energies inward and concentrated on resolving technical issues.

Today's business environment demands that IT be more attentive to customer requests by delivering quality solutions and aligning with the business objectives--in other words, to focus on service management.

When your clients turn to you for help in improving their IT service management, suggest that they implement Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices. I'll explain how to do it and some of the steps my company has used to implement the ITIL framework.

Assess
ITIL best practices cover five service support processes:

• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Change Management
• Configuration Management
• Release Management

ITIL also includes five service delivery processes:

• Capacity Management
• Financial Management
• Availability Management
• Service Level Management
• IT Service Continuity Management

Begin your implementation by benchmarking the activities of the IT organization to determine how well it's performing. The Office of Government Commerce (OGC), which owns ITIL, provides online resources that you can use to assess the IT organization and a worksheet that you can download from their Web site. You'll answer sets of questions for each of the processes. For example, the evaluation for Incident Management includes questions like, "Is the business need for a Service Desk clearly identified and understood?" and "Does the Service Desk provide a status update to the customer on the closure of incidents?"

Take the test and score the results. When my organization went through the assessment, we expected our results to be much worse than they were. (I think there's a normal tendency to predict that you're not performing as well as best practice guidelines or you would not be going through an exercise like this.) What we found was that we were doing more things consistently with best practices than we realized. For example, our financial management process was well on its way to being optimized, mainly due to how we were able use a product/service model to determine the costs of the individual services we provide to our clients.

Determine goals
After you know where the organization stands, ask your client to what extent they want to implement ITIL best practices. You can use a Process Maturity Framework (PMF) to score the results from the assessment and determine what level the organization will attempt to attain. Scores range from zero to five; zero indicates "absence" and five indicates "optimization."

As a consultant, this is where your input is extremely valuable. Your client may think that optimization should be the organization's goal, but you may have to explain that it is too lofty because of the high cost. When my organization began its pursuit of ITIL, we decided that we would strive for processes that were defined and in control, which scores a three on the PMF. That way, we could take advantage of the ITIL best practices at a reasonable cost to the organization and our IT clients.

Identify gaps
Once your client has settled on an appropriate organizational goal, it's time to determine the gap between how the organization is performing and the best practice target that they've selected. Analyze the results of the assessment and explain to your client's management team where the gaps exist and how large those gaps are. Continue to seek their approval for the work that you're doing on their behalf, because without the IT management team's acceptance, the staff will never buy in to any changes that you might suggest. At my company, our CIO sends regular e-mail messages to all the IT staff reminding them of the benefits that we hope to achieve from our pursuit of ITIL, along with updates of our project plan progress.

Choose the process
After you've performed the gap analysis, it will become obvious which processes will be more difficult to improve. Most organizations choose not to improve all ten processes simultaneously.

Determining which process or processes to begin with is sometimes a difficult decision, but this is where your experience as a consultant can really pay off. Your client will expect you to offer advice about which process can most easily be brought to the defined, controlled state.

If your client's Incident Management process hasn't reached a controlled state, or a three on the PMF scale, I recommend starting there. The goal of Incident Management is to restore normal operation as quickly as possible to clients. Therefore, Incident Management is a foundation process on which many of the others will depend. Problem Management, Configuration Management, and Change Management may be the next processes for you to consider. In my company's case, we determined that we could move our Incident Management process to a more controlled state with little effort due to its state of process maturity, so it was one of the first processes we set out to improve.