We've Got Our Definition - What's Yours? Defining, Documenting and Aligning to IT Best Practices Your Way
A likely scenario may have been meeting with your boss one morning, fresh from a business trip to an analyst or vendor event where they've learned about the lasted industry buzz. Your boss has just tasked you with starting a best practices and IT improvement initiative, asked you to listen to a vendor or consultant pitch, or even worse, piloting or implementing some technology that will make everything better.
By now, you've probably seen or heard about the numerous IT operations best practice recommendation frameworks (ITIL, CoBiT, MOF, ITUP/PRM-IT, eTOM, etc.). You may have even considered some of the industry standards with their more rigid guidelines that must be followed (BS 15000, ISO 20000, etc). Nearly every vendor and IT consulting shop now has their version or alignment story. Chances are you're dazed, confused and lost in a sea of acronyms. How will you make sense of it all? What actually works? What's easy to implement? How do I start?
You can Have it Your Way!
First, really figure out what it all means. How do you define IT Service Management (ITSM)? What does this mean to you? To your boss? To your organization? Do you come from a mainframe environment? Distributed or Client-Server? Server, Application or Network Operations/Support or Development? Are there things that just feel "right" based on your background or the background of your organization? If you've got that sixth sense feeling about doing something one way or another, go with your gut.
Don't let the barrage of messages and acronyms confuse the end state which is enabling the business to meet its goals and objectives (read control costs and make money) through smart ITSM. Create your own definitions and messages that fit best to your environment and objectives. Use your own language, acronyms and phrases. If you have a "Solution's Center" instead of a "Service/Help Desk", call it that.
What is the Business Saying?
You should spend considerable time (if not obvious already) understanding what's really important to the business. What are the water cooler conversations those outside of IT are having about IT? Does IT get blamed for delays in rolling out new services, applications, features? Do releases regularly fail once deployed into production? Is the business or your customers your test, QA and monitoring systems? Do all levels of IT effectively communicate with the business or customer? Where are the pain points?
Use what you learn here to help identify the focus areas for your best practices or IT improvement initiative (release management, change management, service level management, etc.). It doesn't make a lot of sense to work in an area first that isn't going to help improve what you do for the business.
Look and Listen Inside Before Going Outside - Chances are You're Doing it Already
Are network or system administrators using their favorite scripts to do software configuration tasks? Are groups using their own code or configuration versioning tool (CVS)? Are there multiple bug or defect tracking tools, spreadsheets or databases? Are they using an internal change request process or tool? Is the help desk tracking repetitive issues and asking why they continue to happen?
Look, listen and capture what you see people doing in the course of a normal day/week/month. What common activities and tasks are happening? What are the one-offs? What fires arise that need to be "immediately" addressed? What's the end result from these activities? Software deployments, back-ups, change requests, trouble tickets? What's being posted on Intranets, discussed in staff meetings, etc.? These activities and deliverables (reports, charts, analysis, etc.) are sources of capturing what people may already be doing in your organization related to IT processes and practices.
Spend as much time as you can with ALL of the design, build, operate/support groups to see what they are doing today. Look for similarities in processes, activities, tools, deliverables, roles, etc. Group these together where possible noting the group, function or person you saw doing them. These will likely roll up into a handful of process or activity areas.
KISS Approach to Alignment
Now comes the fun part. Take the KISS approach here and focus on alignment. Take what you've found already happening across your organization and align it to best practice recommendations.
A great starting point here that covers a ton of ground is the IBM Tivoli Unified Process (ITUP) tool. What's nice about the ITUP tool is that they've given you a great place to start. They've added in the alignment of the process and activity with the people and technology (tool) components. Using the ITUP scenarios, work products and roles may help you to think about alignment from a different perspective based on what you found happening across your organization. Don't forget to use what you've learned about what's important to the business. You may have to do some translation here between business speak and IT speak. This is where ITUP and its PRM-IT background go above and beyond most of the best practice frameworks such as ITIL.
Hopefully everything you've found aligns into an existing best practice. It doesn't have to be perfect, complete or even align at all, what's important is to capture that you are doing something within a best practice area. This gives you a starting point for your continuous improvement initiatives. Those things you do above and beyond an established best practice framework may be your organization’s intellectual property - the stuff that makes you unique.
Consider taking this approach to help you uncover and document the IT operations activities you're probably already doing today but don't call ITIL, CoBiT, MOF, etc. You can use this to show how what you're doing aligns with any of the best practice frameworks talked about today and assure your boss that the organization isn't as chaotic as it may seem. Creating your continuous improvement plans (based on the needs of the business) should be much simpler now knowing that the process may not be as daunting as it first seemed.
Doug McClure
Principle Architect, BSM/ITSM, IBM Tivoli Netcool Advanced Architecture Group
BSM/ITSM Blog: http://dougmcclure.net
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