Shut up and drive!

ITSM is a complicated beast. There are multiple disciplines all interlinked and a general lack of understanding from those outside the industry as to what it is and why they should care.


The big issue is that ITSM practitioners very often feed into this confusion by using too much jargon and too many promises of service excellence without articulating just how it will happen.

As ITSM consultants we need to do a better job of understanding the viewpoint of our customers. For example, if I am paying the bill I don’t want to necessarily be promised “Service Excellence”. Service Excellence sounds expensive and do I need excellence or is there an option to offer superior or right-sized levels of service? If I’m purchasing a car for example, do I want to but the fastest car on the market or do I need to balance my wants with my needs and my available budget?

We also need to do a better job of not over-complicating what IT Service Management is. The first conversation should not be about configuration items or integration between the incident management process and the service catalogue although you better be able to explain these concepts if the customer is interested.

Back to my car analogy; I don’t really care about every component and how they work but I do care that when I need the car to work, it starts, operates safely and can facilitate me getting from point A to point B in an efficient manner. I also like to know that if I have an issue that I have a trustworthy mechanic available to restore the service and hopefully spot issues before they occur through regular maintenance.

If ITSM practitioners can concisely describe the concept of managing IT services in business terms then I think the industry will be recognized as an enabler rather than a misunderstood expense.

Use metrics to improve service not punish the delivery team

To improve service delivery, you must measure it but before you start there are a few things you should think about.


If you just use metrics for Service Level Agreement Management to ensure vendors are delivering agreed-to levels of service you are missing out on an opportunity to make your organization more competitive and reduce business risks.
Firstly define what measurements are important to your organization.  Are you trying to improve service quality,  the cost or value of service?  Whatever you decide you should measure these factors consistently and make sure you report on measures consistently.  This consistency will ensure that the audience sees the metrics as legitimate.

Ensure those resources being measured understand why and the goal of the measurement. Primarily use metrics to improve service not punish the delivery team and make certain that the delivery team understands that this is what's happening.  Without this you will not get their buy in and probably find that if they have control over the measurements there will be a lack of consistency that we already noted needs to be in place.
Ensure the audience of metrics understands what is presented, how the metrics support the goal of the organization and that the metrics are presented in context to the goals.

Increase morale with the good news stories from metrics.  There's bound to be some so make sure that the good press gets out there.

Capture metrics in as few places as possible as they happen.  The fewer places used to capture metrics in your processes, the more consistent they will be.

Utilize real time metrics for better and faster business decisions.  Do metrics show a pattern?  Do metrics show a change in business environment?
Use metrics to control costs by looking at factors like, are your most expensive services producing their share of revenue?

Build a continuous improvement culture from your metrics.  Use trending to identify areas of improvement.  Value metrics can help make governance decisions.  Use your metrics to set metric based goals.  Set future goals on improvement of current metrics.

Use metrics to control change.  Implement change when it makes sense to do so and ensure changes stabilize before additional changes are made.

Be aware of “cause and effect”.  Measurements can cause unwanted behaviour.  I once had a client who wanted to improve their service desk's "Resolve on first call" metric.  They did this by spending much more time on each call and the net result was dropped calls.  Sure, the percentage of calls answered that were resolved without the need for a callback increased but customer satisfaction dropped through the floor and caused the user community to bypass the service desk altogether.

Be willing to refine measurements as more information becomes available or the situation changes.

Understand how the metric related to either revenue or cost.  If a service is 5% less stable does that cost you $10 or $10,000?

Record metrics so they can be presented at different levels of abstraction.  The same metrics should be able to be presented at a team level, department level and corporate wide.

If you follow these tips you can really use your service metrics for service improvement.

For more information on service metrics contact tony@tonydenford.com.

Everyone can innovate, so why aren't they?

At a recent engagement I was told that the team I was about to lead was VERY seasoned.  I thought this was great.  An opportunity to leverage their combined expertise to build a world class ITSM practice for this client.

What I found though was not a team eager to innovate and impress their customer.  I found a team that were paralyzed by fear.  They were being held back by two things.  The first was a fear of making a decision without prior management approval, the second was the fear of any type of change.

It's easy to see that years of mismanagement or micro-management was the cause of these two issues but how do you get them out of this cycle and even better, to a place where they innovate?

The first step is to set a direction, let them know what your overall vision is for the team and then empower them to make working level decisions based on their knowledge of that vision.  If they are the slightest bit intelligent, they should be able to make decisions to direct you all towards a single goal.  Yes they will occasionally make mistakes but don't threaten to splatter their blood on the walls if they do.  Instead either clarify the goal or direction or, if necessary, change it!  As long as you clearly set some direction they will follow it and if they don't you have an HR issue to deal with.

The second step is to give them the time to innovate.  The team I inherited were told they could ONLY work on something if the request came from an approved client.  The result of this was periods of padding the time spent on approved work to cover time spent waiting for more approved work.  This is a great example of someone taking something they read in an ITIL book and applying it without the filter of common sense.  Yes everything they work on should be recorded but it should also be realistic.  If there are points of inefficiency in your process, how are you going to find them if the numbers have been changed to show 100% utilization of all resources?

If there is any downtime, find some way of using it to innovate.  Allow the team to look for continuous improvement opportunities.  If there is absolutely no downtime then you need to build some innovation time into the work flow.  Without it, the current situation will never get any better and if your business picks up you will not have the resources to cope.

If you're leaving the innovation to management, you are wasting a huge amount of capacity that the team possesses.  Letting everyone know what the team is trying to achieve and not only enable but expect the team to innovate will not only provide results, it will increase engagement, morale and ultimately customer satisfaction.

For more information on building effective ITSM teams, contact tony@tonydenford.com.

IT Service Management in the Cloud

When most CIOs start to think about their cloud strategy, the thought of "losing control" of their IT environment is usually the first big concern.  Most are not comfortable with handing over control of the services they deliver, primarily because they don't have a clear understanding of what services they deliver and therefore cannot look for the right opportunities to use the cloud as an advantage.

This makes a good IT Service Management strategy ever more important.  Instead of the older ITIL V2 methods which manage specific assets, you need to be focused more than ever on IT Service delivery whether that service is managed in-house or some mysterious location in the cloud.

Before moving your infrastructure to the cloud and realizing the potential savings of doing so you really need to have your IT service management in place and running smoothly.

A mature ITSM practice will have a good understanding of what services are being provided, exactly how they perform, how much it costs to deliver the service and, most importantly, exactly what is required to deliver the service with the quality expected by your customers.

Knowing how much the services cost and what is required for them to be considered of value to the business puts organizations in an excellent position to move parts of their platform to the cloud.  Vendors you deal with for any cloud solution can then be held accountable for ensuring the service delivery by your own internal IT Service Management team.

Your ITSM team should know how to measure the delivery, how to ensure costs are in line with expectations and that the vendors are capable of delivering consistently or held accountable when they don't.

So the operational role of IT is changing from managing all the nuts and bolts required to support your business to managing the vendors and support processes required to ensure consistent service excellence.

For more information on how Tony Denford can help your organisation manage it's IT Service Management practice, contact tony@tonydenford.com.

How do you measure the value of your services?

There's more than one way to measure value.  The obvious one is dollars and cents but the value of the service should always be measured in terms that are important to the business that drives it.  For example,  if you have a social media service offering, the business may want to measure it's value in terms of number of followers or engagement of the audience.

These things will ultimately affect the revenue bought in to your organization but it's very difficult to equate especially in the early days of a campaign.  Over time however, you'll be able to demonstrate the correlation between what you're measuring and it's affect on revenue.

So measure what the business sees value in and what is easy to measure.  By this I mean don't try to measure some obscure thing that you don't have the data readily available for.  If the cost to measure a specific value outweighs the benefits then you better be dissuading the executives and coming up with an alternative, easy to obtain, measurement.

If you're truly measuring something of value to the business then your reporting tasks will be much easier.  You'll be able to focus your continuous improvement initiatives on items that matter to your consumers and demonstrate the value your services bring.

For more information on measuring the value of your services contact tony@tonydenford.com.

Focus your IT goal on Service Delivery

Your IT department should be focusing on delivering the quality IT services to their business partners that allow them to service and provide value to the end customers efficiently. All too often the focus of IT is delivering projects on-time and on-budget. This of course is important and can affect the value that your business partners perceive but should not be the only goal of IT. One thing that should be kept in mind is the total cost of ownership of your IT solutions to the businesses challenges. Often more than 90% of the total cost of any solution is during its operation, this should really be the focus of any good IT service provider.

For more information on IT Service Delivery email tony@tonydenford.com