Article : Establishing or assessing an ITSM Program

While browsing today on some ITSM topics, I reached this nicely articulated post by Troy DuMoulin from Pink Elephant, on the “Health Check of ITSM Programs“. In addition to an insight on why some projects fail, it also visually represents the building blocks of an ITSM Program. Some text from the post below:

The following lessons learned from failed projects can help us open our minds to managing risks and planning to succeed rather than become yet another statistic

• IT Service Management/ITIL projects are actually transformation programs requiring significant shifts in behavior and cultural change across multiple groups.
• Process documentation is not worth the paper it is printed on without the ability and will to enforce its use.
• An IT Service Management tool alone will never enforce new behaviors or best practices.
• Most organizations fail at their initial process improvement efforts by focusing on the technology or tool elements of the project and underestimating the effort required to address the softer people and governance issues brought by the transformation effort.
• Most projects reveal clear, early warning signs that the project is at risk but these signs are missed, ignored or not managed.

Worth a read, and use as a reminder!

Change Management FAQs – back to the basics

Its always nice and refreshing to go read the basics of processes every once in a while… The benefit it does to me personally is that
1. It makes me feel good that I still remember the basics
2. Over a period of time various flavors of implementation tend to take one away from the core, and refreshing the memory can be like cleaning off the dust at times!

Here is one link that has some very basics of Change Management and interesting links to read through! This article from SeachCIO has 4 FAQs for IT and Organizational Change Management

• How are organizational change management and IT change management different?
• Where does ITIL change management fit in?
• What are some examples of change management models?
• What types of change management software and tools are available today?

Two personally interesting and important links that this page has are

1. McKinsey 7-S Framework

2. PinkVerify V3 toolset. The link has both ITIL V3 and V3 aligned tools mapped by processes. Click here to go through the complete list.

Building and maintaining ROI – Article by Stephen Hirsch from SAP

Was reading through an interesting article by Stephen Hirsch from SAP Education… he in this article talks about building and maintaining ROI through performance management. What I like about this article is that it does not talk about typical performance management of an application or a system, but is talking about a whole cycle of organizational change management to ensuring that the organization achieves what it set itself up for through this change.

The phases that Stephen has stressed on are

• Change Management
• Assessment, Strategy and Development
• Knowledge Transfer
• Operations
• Performance Management

My view on this

Knowledge transfer and Performance Management would be two very very important steps that would prove instrumental in the success of a project/organizational change!

Like Stephen also mentioned in the article that most users would rely on quicker methods to gain information and not the large documents or LMS modules post implementation, there is a requirement for consistent and crisp information flow and availability of that simple information to do the job well!!!

What is mentioned as performance management in this article is something that I percieve as process adoption… and without well built checks (not controls as yet) one would not know how well the organization is doing! Do going back to the Strategy and Development phase, one of the key things is to identify

1. How do we know we are successful?
2. What do we measure to substantiate the achievement of goals?
3. What would be the error correction or process adoption plans in case of things not going as expected?

You can read the detailed article here (Requires registration).

Image source : End-user Performance : Building and Maintaining ROI article from SAP