Call
them whatever you like; best practices, guidelines or frameworks, there are a
plethora of really good tools which can be used by themselves or in
conjunction with one another to enable service delivery in ways which will
allow your business to achieve it's goals. 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. The simple answer is that you are
already providing some level of service to your business with current processes
and activities. The question then becomes what more could you do from a service
delivery perspective. Could these missing components take our services to the
next level?
Quite
often the processes which are not as well managed as the others are limiting
the managed activities in ways which may not be clear to you at the moment.
Additionally you may not be able to see the missing components since you are
"too close" to the work.
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 be limited in the way that you "implement"
problem management in the way that you would like to right now, think
about what activities will improve your ability to reduce incidents
or emergency changes. Start small to achieve the ripple effect that will have
lasting effects down the line. This might give you the opportunity in the
future where you can re-market it to the right stakeholders when you are able
to substantiate your initial improvements with some statistics to back up your
claims.
There
is also the voice that says. “We tried putting in asset 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?
To
summarize, the key to success overall is to look at what your business needs to
achieve. Once you understand what they need you can look at where potential
gaps exist in your current method to deliver and support service to
understanding what they need will allow you to prioritize what areas you will
need to improve.
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Labels: Continual Service Improvement, CSI, ITIL, ITSM, Service Management
