A hammer is only as useful as the person wielding it. I
have a friend, who by his own admission would be unable to nail two boards
together without hitting his fingers more times than the nail. He understands
this and gets help when this is required.
In a similar way, we have applications (tools)
which we believe (or are told) may no longer suit our needs. The common
misconception here is that the tool is impeding us from improving on service
delivery. As a result we go out looking for an application to help us make
improvements. The trouble here is that much like the hammer we have not
necessarily addressed the question of whether or not we will use a new tool any
better.
Don’t paint a rusty car to make improvements. If you
think that a new tool is going to magically fix any service delivery woes overnight
you may be disappointed. New paint never fixed an engine.
Think about what you are doing today first. Starting with
an assessment of what you do today will allow you to not only understand
current state but position you to make some further service improvements. This
will help you down the line should you still decide to pursue a new application
to help facilitate service delivery. In some cases this self-assessment will
make it very clear if spending money on a new tool will be even worth your
effort.
Your initial assessment should include the following
areas for consideration:
Get a
sense of the current landscape
Determine the current existing services, processes and
infrastructure that make up the area you are looking to cover. Whether you are
looking for an IT tool or if it’s HR, take into consideration all the areas
that this tool will impact. Part of this investigation may outline that there
more (external to your department) stakeholders that once originally considered.
Gaze
into the future
Gather an outline of the future state of the environment.
Make sure to include not only what is currently required for providing service
but also what may be improved in regards to service delivery
Plan
of attack
Build out a roadmap to determine how you are going to get
where you want to go. At a high level this should include what you are looking
to accomplish and when. You should also consider what steps will need to be
taken to get you from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’. This playbook will also keep you
on target as far as meeting your objectives
Having this baseline information will allow you to be positioned
to verbalize to potential sponsors the value add of making changes, the risks
or impacts associated of not making changes as well as outlining that current
processes or activities have reached a point where they can no longer make
significant improvements without changing to a new tool.
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Labels: Continual Service Improvement, ITIL, ITSM, ITSM Tools, Service Delivery