Realising an ITIL aligned Service Desk
With hundreds of Software vendors offering ITIL Compliant Service Desks, and each promising 'out of the box' solutions, organisations very quickly find themselves in a feature vs. cost discussion, releasing Requests to Tender based on functional requirements and progressing to proof of technologies. The best approach to realising an ITIL aligned service desk is to start with a business process workshop not a product demonstration.
In my role at Pirean I speak to many organisations who are looking to implement their first Service Desk or replace an existing implementation with something that aligns better to their organisation and industry best practice. With hundreds of Software vendors offering ITIL Compliant Service Desks, and each promising 'out of the box' solutions, organisations very quickly find themselves in a feature vs. cost discussion, releasing Requests to Tender based on functional requirements and progressing to proof of technologies.
At the end of the process the organisation has selected a technology platform, but is little further forward in terms of IT Service Management. My advice to each organisation is always to take a step back; you can't buy a solution off the shelf.
Implementing a Service Desk is not a technology problem. People often refer to ITIL being the integration of People, Process and Technology, and it is important to recognise that the people and the process come first. In my experience each response to the tender typically confirms that all of the features requested are available 'out of the box' or with 'minimum configuration', but the truth is that decisions taken in these scenarios tend to revolve around who provided the best demonstration, or simply the look and feel of the product. In many cases the successful vendors demo would have had many hours of configuration and tuning, and does not realistically reflect what the customer will experience with the box-fresh product.
The best approach to realising an ITIL aligned service desk is to start with a business process workshop not a product demonstration.
Pirean’s approach has always been to start by focusing on the business, not the technology. Whether they recognise it or not, every organisation has a basic Incident management process - at the end of the day they are up and running as a business. It’s hard to find a company that does not have some semblance of a problem management process: the root cause of an outage is usually found eventually and rectified. When systems need patching the changes are planned, even if it’s just an e-mail exchange or phone call to the end user, demonstrating some representative change management process.
Once there is a clear understanding of where the organisations processes are today, the discussions on where they want to be can begin and the key milestones of the journey can be defined.
What organisations typically don't have is an efficient set of processes, by which I mean integrated processes that allow incidents to be logged, passed to support teams efficiently, resolved within acceptable SLAs, and where appropriate problems raised and passed to subject matter experts for root cause analysis. Equally as important, they do not demonstrate processes that are measurable and can be accounted for. Change management typically does not have formally defined approvers for specific systems, and the impact assessment of a change is typically based on information in someone’s head rather than clearly documented relationships between components and business services. Incidents or problems often result in a minor change implementation in order to resolve them, and those changes are often done without sufficient consideration - typically configurations drift away from the 'known' and potential future incidents occur as a result.
The best approach to realising an ITIL aligned service desk is to start with a business process workshop not a product demonstration. The goal of the workshop is to define the business priorities, understand drivers for change and to capture detailed functional requirements for the future service desk function from a business and process transformation perspective as well as a technology standpoint.
Workshop attendees should include an experienced solution architect, an ITIL subject matter expert, representatives of the existing service desk, representatives of the key support teams, and critically the senior management with accountability for service availability and performance. The workshop should start by presenting an honest representation of how the organisations support model functions today, using real incidents where possible, and accepting that in many cases the real world is different from any documented process. Once there is a clear understanding of where the organisations processes are today, the discussions on where they want to be can begin and the key milestones of the journey can be defined.
One of the most common reasons that cause projects of this nature to fail is the organisation attempting to do everything in one big bang approach. Another reality is, that beyond building the underlying structure - a CMDB, some rules and a knowledge base perhaps - the engineering of the processes in the Service Desk engine must be implemented in a measured way. Service Desk software must not be allowed to re-engineer the organisation it supports.
The workshop will guide the programme by focusing on clear deliverables and agreed timescales, starting with a global approach that will demonstrate real value to the business and provide the foundation on which bring the organisation along with project as the key ‘functional’ component of the solution. One definition of a truly successful ITIL aligned service management solution is that it empowers the IT service organisation to reengineer and enhance service delivery and business services delivered – by leveraging the organisations strengths and communal expertise almost by osmosis. To help that happen, significant time should be dedicated to the User experience where self-service, accessible knowledge bases and pre-approved change requests can all reduce the load on the organisations support teams and are conducive to improved service availability and customer satisfaction. It’s also important to ensure that the business can accurately monitor and report on the services provided.
It is only when the goals are clearly defined that the requirements of the delivery platform can be accurately assessed in the context of the organisations objectives.
It’s often said that ITIL is a journey, and many organisations set out on what turns out to be a very time consuming quest - you can deliver real value and drive real business change - but as with any journey you need to ensure you travel with an experienced guide.
For more information please contact Pirean
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