Where Do I Start with ITIL?
As I travel the globe talking to people about IT Service Management, I get a common question about practical ITIL rollouts. The question usually goes something like this, “I like what I hear about ITIL, but it’s all so overwhelming. Where do I start?”
Admittedly, ITIL is daunting to the uninitiated. To the typical IT organization, taking on ITIL can be stressful. There is so much detail to the definitions and it will undoubtedly require changes to behaviors and to the organization itself. To make matters even more confusing, we have a new version of ITIL (ITIL v3) that convolutes plans for operational refinement.
There is hope, however. Like any ambitious journey, success is rooted in the planning stages. A good plan will always smooth the inevitable bumps in the road. Any good plan will be pragmatic about progress. You cannot approach ITIL by trying to attack every process simultaneously. If you are too aggressive, you will fail, and probably in catastrophic fashion. You need to tackle ITIL one step at a time when you are just beginning.
“OK”, you might think to yourself, “but which step should be that first step?” Individual cases will vary, but in almost every case, I recommend beginning with Incident Management. I believe religiously that Configuration and Change Management form the basic core of every function we perform in IT, so why do I recommend Incident Management?
Theoretically, it makes sense to begin with Configuration Management, hopefully in conjunction with Change Management, but theory and reality rarely match. Real-world conditions dictate a different approach. Reality tells us Incident Management is usually the best starting point.
Incident Management is the most fundamental of all services provided by IT to the business. It is the job of keeping all other services running as smoothly as possible. As such, it is the oldest practice in all of IT. Anyone who has lived in IT Operations knows this. We may not have called it Incident Management in the past, but that’s what it is.
Every IT organization already has many of the technology elements in place and they are already performing most of the tasks in the process. They just need to be more effectively defined, aligned, sequenced, augmented, and executed. Since much of the work is already done, Incident Management represents the “low hanging fruit” of ITIL.
It also offers a fabulous set of easily measured metrics to use as a gauge for progress. Most notable among these is MTTR (mean time to resolution). MTTR is the average time between the occurrence of the incident (something broke) and its final resolution (something is fixed). Typical service desk software is good at capturing this metric. Every IT organization has some type of service desk software for its operation. If yours cannot deliver MTTR statistics, replace it.
By measuring MTTR, you can track quality advancements in the Incident Management process. With each incremental step, you should see incremental improvement. In the early stages, these incremental gains will probably be quite impressive because the starting basis is relatively poor. It’s a bit like a fitness program. If a couch potato embarks upon an exercise regiment, he will lose more weight in the early days than in the later days.
It is critical that MTTR is measured BEFORE any changes are made. You need a baseline from which to measure your progress. If the couch potato doesn’t get on the scale as the first step of his fitness program, he will never be able to understand how much weight he lost during the program.
As you progress through your Incident Management fitness program, you will be able to demonstrate the productivity gains with your MTTR and other metrics. This gives you some great ammunition to justify additional process improvement expansion. It is yet another reason why I like Incident Management as a starting point for ITIL deployment. It offers a relatively easy proof point for the value of process refinement. Some people believe ITIL is just another management fad, but numbers do not lie. The results of MTTR tracking through the incremental enhancements, is objective and dispels these myths. No reasonable executive will argue against such objective proof.
Improvement is not easy. In the earliest stages, it will be downright painful. Like our previously sedentary couch potato, we must be prepared to work through the pain, so we can see genuine results. No pain, no gain!