This is part 3 of my discussion with Pete Wilder, former Head of ITSM for the Asset Management division of a global investment bank (Part 1 discussed ITSM Education and Part 2 talked about Outsourcing).  In this installment, Pete talks about how an tool/ITIL/metrics implementation led to a cultural change in how IT provided services to the business…

 

Story Highlights:

·         Implementing ITIL Best Practices – where to start?  Reporting on Incident Management was harder than I thought.

·         The Town Hall – My opportunity to personally promote the ITSM tool implementation globally.

·         The Turning Point:  Our KPI Scorecard – Behavioral change!  Divisions positively battle it out for KPI supremacy.

·         Refining Metrics into Meaningful Key Performance Indicators – Aligning metrics with business need.

·         It’s More Than Just the Tool

·         A Note About Implementing ITIL – Momentum matters.

·         Culture, Culture, Culture!

·         Lessons Learned – How agile and user-friendly is your tool?

 

 

Implementing ITIL Best Practices – where to start?

 

I decided to implement ITIL.  Uhmm, where to start?  How do you go about evangelizing ITIL in a major organization?  Well, this is how it unfolded for me…

 

Senior Management wanted to know how we were doing from an Incident Management point of view.  Simple enough, right?

 

Yeah, right.  It was only when I started trying to produce Incident Management reports that I discovered problems like:

·         Analysts weren’t always logging incidents.

·         We had old-style Help Desks in Singapore, Zurich, London, and New York, and Sydney all with different ticketing systems.  Aggregating Incident Management data was a nightmare.

 

Without a single Incident Management tool, it was very difficult for us to measure, manage, and improve our performance.  Fortunately, the bank in its wisdom decided to implement an ITSM tool  across all divisions for Incident.

 

 

The Town Hall

 

I led the tool implementation for Incident & Change Management, in parallel, to 200 IT staff globally.  With parallel deployments, there was plenty of room for confusion.  To add another layer of complexity, the Change Management and Incident Management processes selected resided in different version of the tool!

 

I was asked to make a presentation about the tool implementation in a ‘Town Hall’ meeting, a global live video conference for the entire IT organization for the major hubs in London, New York, Zurich, Singapore and Sydney.  This was my chance to address everybody and give them a ‘heads up’ of what was coming down the line in the near future.  I had time to prepare my material and give a succinct presentation.  A couple of team members came up to me afterwards and congratulated me, which was nice!  It’s not often you get a pat on the back in IT.

 

 

The Turning Point:  Our KPI Scorecard

 

Again, senior management was looking for Incident Management reports.  Once the tool had been deployed to all locations, I was now in a position to start generating those reports from a single tool.  In hindsight, this was the turning point for us.  We started off with simple indicators like no. of incidents resolved/unresolved, no. of successful/unsuccessful changes by team, etc.

 

I aggregated the data to develop a 12-week rolling trend.   Picture a simple table with metrics on it, ranking each IT department against each other like sports teams on a leaderboard.  When I published the data, it got quite a bit of attention from the Team Leaders! 

 

The initial reaction from the TL’s was hostile and they resisted the data being published.  However, two things helped to ensure the initiative had staying power. 

1.    The initiative had the support of senior management. 

2.    Their performance on the scorecard would be included in their performance reviews!  

 

Instead of updating the ticketing system when it was convenient, the Team Leaders now had a meaningful reason to make sure that their staff was updating incident records every single time.  This is when the tool implementation and ITIL adoption resulted in an organization-wide behavioral change.

 

 

Refining Metrics into Meaningful Key Performance Indicators

 

Over time, I started to refine the data and produce meaningful KPI’s which helped us align with the business.  For example, instead of just keeping track of incident volumes, we started categorizing incidents based on Severity 1-3.  Therefore, we were able to show the business how well we were fixing their most important issues.  In addition, this data helped us deploy our continual service improvement forces more strategically.

 

For example, if the business was dissatisfied with the time in which we resolved Severity 1 incidents, they didn’t really care if we were meeting the formal SLA.  We would renegotiate the SLA and inject funding to meet their demands.

 

I was now able to measure our performance against the targets set by the Department Head.  Within a few weeks, IT colleagues were approaching me to find out more about how to improve their KPI’s.  What was this ITIL training all about?  Where could they get it?  Imagine the smile on my face!

 

 

It’s More Than Just the Tool

 

Did the tool deployment help us track incidents in a refined manner?  Yes.  Did it promote standardization in terms of how we provided IT services?  Yes.  But it ended up doing more than that. 

 

The KPI scoreboard created healthy competition by pitting department against department.  Furthermore, the tool drove our process development and maturity.  When configuring the tool we had the chance to define/redefine our processes.  In this way, the tool helped to drive optimal processes as well as the ethos and culture of our people.

 

 

Finally, People Knew Who I Was

 

When I started out, I was just a pest bothering infrastructure about best practices for Incident and Change Management.  The Team Leaders were busy guys with production issues to attend to.  But after the metrics leaderboard was produced, I became the go-to guy for ideas on how to improve their metrics, the hub for discussions around service improvement initiatives.

 

 

A Note About Implementing ITIL

 

When deploying ITIL, I think it’s important to deliver quick wins to demonstrate value.  With V3 there are more processes and boxes to fill with obvious headcount implications.  It’s a harder sell if you’re trying to get ITIL adopted from scratch.  With more mature organizations, there’s a good chance that many of the V3 processes already exist, just by different names.  What tends to be missing is a cohesive and overarching strategy to integrate the people, processes and tools into a seamless service, all while ensuring that there’s enough momentum created to convince the business to keep funding the initiative.

 

MJ:  Did you consult other methodologies/best practice frameworks in your role as Head of ITSM?

 

Pete:  As I’ve mentioned in Part 1, ITIL is not a panacea.  I believe that project management training such as Prince2/PMBOK and business process improvement training like Lean IT/Six Sigma/BPM have their part to play in providing IT services that are fit for purpose and fit for use. Having said all that, I cannot stress enough the importance of culture.

 

 

Culture, Culture, Culture!

 

The IT department’s people and their attitude towards customers are paramount to providing a quality IT service.  It’s perfectly possible to provide a quality IT service without formal IT processes in place provided the culture is right.  It might not be possible to measure it but the customer satisfaction would definitely be there.  On the other hand, if the culture isn’t customer-oriented, you can have world class processes and tools with metrics and KPIs coming out of your ears,  but the customer satisfaction ratings will still be low.

 

 

Lessons Learned

 

1.    When an end user makes a request and it has to be escalated, he/she will want to know the status of the request.  When you have an informal, internal, old-style Helpdesk, the need to stay informed is fulfilled when the end user walks over to Joe Helpdesk and gets a status update.  However, this need was not addressed when we moved to the outsourced, global service desk.  Next time, I’ll make sure that I implement the SharePoint solution that I created sooner, which helped end users peek into our ITSM tool and find out the status of their request.

2.    I wish that we had a SAAS tool with a great GUI when we were selecting our tool.  The tool we selected  was expensive and cumbersome to update, especially when it came to defining/changing processes.  With SAAS-type ITSM tools, I don’t have to wait for a centralized IT engineer to update the tool; I can configure it myself.  The benefit of a good GUI means you can roll it out to end users and give them the option to create and track incidents/service requests (thereby promoting self-service).

3.    Without a doubt, in the future I’m going to take a bottom-up approach to the ITIL Adoption by involving the line teams/managers from the outset.  The Team Leaders were initially upset when I rolled out the KPI Scoreboard.  To avoid this, I will announce in advance the intention to gather metrics and publish reports alluding to their performance.  I want to ensure that I keep the same competitive but fun edge to the initiative.  Perhaps I’ll offer a monthly bottle of champagne to the best performing team.

 

 

Click here for Part 1:  Introduction & ITSM Education

Click here for Part 2:  Outsourcing

 

 

Pete Wilder is a certified ITIL V2 Manager (Red Badge) ITSM professional with extensive cross industry experience covering Financial Services, Construction, Utilities and the Public Sector.

Results oriented and client focused with a long proven track record of service delivery and client satisfaction.  He is currently seeking a challenging opportunity to demonstrate his passion for providing service excellence and customer delight.

 

Michael Jagdeo (SCM, ITIL v2/v3) has an extensive background as an ITSM/ITIL enthusiast.  He has worked on placements in Singapore, Dubai, London, and across North America.  As Director at B Wyze Solutions, he manages relationships with clients like Johnson & Johnson, Toyota, Maple Leaf Foods, and the Government of Ontario.  Follow him on Twitter!

Related Posts

• July 11, 2009: ITIL v3 Education, not Certification
• July 7, 2009: Implementing ITIL - Insight from Head of ITSM (Part 1: Education)
• July 7, 2009: Implementing ITIL - Insight from Head of ITSM (Part 2: Outsourcing)
• June 10, 2009: Maintaining Momentum for Your ITIL Program vs. The Service Catalog
• May 26, 2009: Interpreting ITSM Metrics Isn’t Always Straight Forward