There are a plethora of really good frameworks or best
practices which can be leveraged for service management and you may already be
employing one or more of these to accomplish what your specific business needs
are. In the background, however, there is still a discussion that is going on
that sounds like this:
·
“We do this process really well, while this
other one, not so much.”
·
“We have
to do Change and Incident but not Problem.”
·
“Release and Configuration management are kinda part of Change, but not always”
How is this in fact impacting the way you are able to
deliver service through the processes which you are doing really well. Could these
missing components take our services to the next level?
Quite often these adhoc processes are not after thoughts,
which are how it may look from the outside in, in some cases there are formalized
process that are documented but not managed effectively.
It’s time to take a closer look at these and determine
whether the inputs and outputs are impacting your currently managed processes.
While yes, it is possible that you may not have a way to institute problem
management in the way that you would like right now but leveraging it in a way
that currently makes sense to your business today may help to reduce incidents.
This might give you the opportunity in the future where you can re-market it to
the right stakeholders proving out an ROI analysis that may enable you to formalize
the process further.
There is also the voice that says. “We tried putting in
configuration management in a few years back and it was an epic failure. I
don’t want to bring it up again.”
Just because something didn’t work then does not mean we can’t try it now. First we should look at
what went wrong when we attempted it last time. Learn from your (or others) mistakes. It is possible that our
current process has had time to mature since then. It is also possible that we
approached this process the wrong way or the timing for our organization wasn’t
appropriate, do we have any take-away items from then we can action?
Having inconsistent approaches to these less than
formalized processes can also cause confusion for those who may be inadvertently
associated with them. These need to be dealt with either by formalizing some piece
or deciding to shelf it until a time when it can be re-visited later. There should
be someone who owns them even if they are less mature.
Labels: Continual Service Improvement, Incident Management, Problem Management, Service Management