IT services and processes are highly suited for optimization using a Lean Six Sigma approach. The inherent drive towards continuous optimization in ITIL and the excellent alignment principles of MOF are very well complemented by Lean Six projects*. The frequent misunderstanding of performance metrics and effective optimization in IT departments, coupled with the abundant management information handily collected by ticketing tools makes this area of the business a prime candidate for some black belt attention.
A practical example:
A certain mature and successful service provider supplies helpdesk services, system administration and infrastructure as a service to a customer, a large and professional organization. During the tender phase certain reporting standards and KPI's were agreed upon. The service is managed by these metrics, with the provider paying a malus fine whenever average performance falls below certain levels. These levels are defined and agreed in a separate service level agreement.
After a year it is clear that the services, on average, are provided at or above the agreed service levels, but that the occasional breaches in incident resolution time are a significant source of dissatisfaction for the customer. The service provider knows the traditional method to improve service in this area is to add resources to the team that resolves incidents, but this is expensive since the customer pays a fixed fee and the margin of the provider relies on resolving incidents cheaply.
At the customer's urging, the service provider brings in a team of Lean Six Sigma experts to see if there is a better way. The team knows very little about service management, but a lot about process optimization. The service provider watches with interest as the problem is defined, large amounts of data are requested and fed into spreadsheets and some over-caffeinated sessions ensue where one variable after another is scrutinised.
A few surprising truth emerge from the project. Instead of adding resources, the service provider is better served by re-architecting their incident management process to lower the time it takes to resolve incidents by a just few minutes each. Lowering the error rate of the resolver group turns out to be very important as well. Both of these findings are meticulously researched and presented to the supplier's management team.
It turns out that lowering the error rate and the process cycle time of the incident management process correlate very strongly to performing within agreed service levels, and to lower costs per incident. Adding resources to the pool actually turns out to have little effect on resolution time, and has a negative effect on the cost per incident. In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense to the service provider. After all, once there are enough resources to handle a regular workload, adding more people means that some of them will have little to do most of the time, and the team will be bigger, more complex and more costly.
Also, the project finds that the already low error rate of the service desk is a bottleneck. Errors engender a lot of confusion and necessitate double work, greatly increasing the time it takes to resolve the incident. The project digs into the factors that affect the error rate and find it can be lowered by creating more knowledge items for the service desk. These provide technical information and checklists to ensure incidents are resolved correctly.
By using Lean Six Sigma to optimise the service, specifically the all-important incident management process, the service provider gets far more than a happy customer. It matures beyond using a standard remedy for a common problem. Instead, the issue is managed by calmly considering the facts, gathering the relevant data and improving the aspects of the service which cause a bottleneck in the process flow. In this case, decreasing the time it takes to go through the process by a few minutes and unlocking more knowledge for employees turned out to be powerful solutions which would not have been found or implemented otherwise.
This example perfectly illustrates the value of 'Lean Six' for Service Management. Service levels are dependent upon many, often indirect variables. Customer satisfaction often has little to do with 'three nines' uptime, which needs to be taken for granted. Cookie-cutter solutions really are not good enough in the highly competitive IT industry.
An outside-in view is the hallmark of a successful Lean Six Sigma project. By targeting the customer's dearest wish (resolve all incidents on time), considering supplier-side constraints (cost per incident), crunching the data on actual performance instead of agreed performance levels this project found the way to deliver the desired result, every single time. This is the sweet fruit of applying management science to the IT department.
*: Jack Probst and Gary Case published an excellent whitepaper on integrating Six Sigma and ITIL to practice continual service improvement way back in '09: http://www.best-management-practice.com/gempdf/sixsigma_itil_csi_wp_july09.pdf
Showing posts with label ITIL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ITIL. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Fundamentals
It's commonly said by my IT Service Management compatriots that there are too few management benefits to be fully compliant to frameworks such as ITIL and COBIT. They're held to be much like the pirate code in Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean tetralogy, more like guidelines than actual rules, yarr.
The truth is, these frameworks are not enough, or rather, they are only a small part of what the IT department needs to deliver excellent results. The frameworks and good practices have been over-emphasized as a way to 'professionally' manage an IT department at the expense of general management practices which are much more urgently needed from a business perspective.
Running an IT department is like running any other business, or part thereof. The secret sauce of a great company or a great IT department is all in having good people and managing them well. That the good people in the IT department happen to be of the geek persuasion and tend to focus more on technology than process is no reason to throw management science out of the window and solely rely on IT industry inventions like ITIL.
Many IT departments and managers tend to fall on the spectrum between total ad-hoc troubleshooters and fairly compliant best practice fanatics, but the thoroughbred business manager is a rare find. A team of cherry-picked staff in the IT part of the business is even scarcer, and that is a crying shame.
The worst cases have an under-qualified team of admins report to the facilities manager. This is the IT management equivalent of stuffing your servers in a damp broom cupboard. No disrespect to the facilities guys who may be doing an excellent job managing the facilities, but IT services are rather dissimilar to their field of excellence.
The time when IT merely supported the business is long gone. IT is the business, in the the sense that there is no business to speak of when the IT is not perfectly in order. Gartner is very clear about it, business who don't get that they cannot afford incompetence in this area are playing a loser's game. If you give CEO's the choice between going without their headquarters, their car park or their IT infrastructure for a week, I guarantee they will not choose to be without the IT. The services delivered by the IT department or outsourcing partner fall squarely within the must-have category. This means that the management of these services can be left to Petered-out sysadmins as much as the corporate finance department can be left in the hands of anyone once certified in Excel 2003.
What the IT department needs is a good manager (a great manager if you can find one), a good team and an equal status to your finance and HR clubs, preferably in a tightly run shared service center with direct access to the executive team. That is no more or less than what your business needs these days. Only when those conditions are met the IT service management frameworks become useful good practices. There's always room on the wall for one more ISO certificate, but without good general management practices it won't do much good.
When advising my customers on IT strategy I draw upon some accessible management classics such as Jim Collin's Good to Great, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish and Daniel Pink's Drive to underpin my holistic IT management proposals in line with the views presented here. Have a gander.
The truth is, these frameworks are not enough, or rather, they are only a small part of what the IT department needs to deliver excellent results. The frameworks and good practices have been over-emphasized as a way to 'professionally' manage an IT department at the expense of general management practices which are much more urgently needed from a business perspective.
Running an IT department is like running any other business, or part thereof. The secret sauce of a great company or a great IT department is all in having good people and managing them well. That the good people in the IT department happen to be of the geek persuasion and tend to focus more on technology than process is no reason to throw management science out of the window and solely rely on IT industry inventions like ITIL.
Many IT departments and managers tend to fall on the spectrum between total ad-hoc troubleshooters and fairly compliant best practice fanatics, but the thoroughbred business manager is a rare find. A team of cherry-picked staff in the IT part of the business is even scarcer, and that is a crying shame.
The worst cases have an under-qualified team of admins report to the facilities manager. This is the IT management equivalent of stuffing your servers in a damp broom cupboard. No disrespect to the facilities guys who may be doing an excellent job managing the facilities, but IT services are rather dissimilar to their field of excellence.
The time when IT merely supported the business is long gone. IT is the business, in the the sense that there is no business to speak of when the IT is not perfectly in order. Gartner is very clear about it, business who don't get that they cannot afford incompetence in this area are playing a loser's game. If you give CEO's the choice between going without their headquarters, their car park or their IT infrastructure for a week, I guarantee they will not choose to be without the IT. The services delivered by the IT department or outsourcing partner fall squarely within the must-have category. This means that the management of these services can be left to Petered-out sysadmins as much as the corporate finance department can be left in the hands of anyone once certified in Excel 2003.
What the IT department needs is a good manager (a great manager if you can find one), a good team and an equal status to your finance and HR clubs, preferably in a tightly run shared service center with direct access to the executive team. That is no more or less than what your business needs these days. Only when those conditions are met the IT service management frameworks become useful good practices. There's always room on the wall for one more ISO certificate, but without good general management practices it won't do much good.
When advising my customers on IT strategy I draw upon some accessible management classics such as Jim Collin's Good to Great, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish and Daniel Pink's Drive to underpin my holistic IT management proposals in line with the views presented here. Have a gander.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Framework Sceptics
Once in a very great while one comes across a project or company so embroiled in paperwork that you come to suspect their managers of a fetish for red tape. However, most projects want to succeed and most companies want to make money, so it does not occur too often, and when it does the consequences for success and profit are easy to predict.
Amongst IT Service Management consultants its a bit of a sport to speak disparagingly of commonly used process frameworks like ITIL and BiSL, and project consultants in general like to make light a of full-blown PRINCE2 approach to projects. It would be very amusing for a physicist to essay the shortcomings of relativity, a composer to mock music theory or an accountant to say that the GAAP standard takes itself too seriously, but they don't tend to do that. These people realize that you don't have to involve Einstein's entire work every time you conduct an experiment with time and space, not all notes need be in a composition, and not all rules apply to all ledgers at all times. They go quietly about the business of being good at whatever they're good at.
Not the IT consultant. You're not a man to be reckoned with until you've stated that this or that framework is far too complex, never mind that you've never worked for an organization large or complex enough to utilize it. Project leaders are even worse. Depending on whom you ask, well over half or, according to some, more that three quarters of projects end in failure. Failure. Not on time, not within budget, and certainly not delivering the desired result. In my (albeit limited) experience, most projects suffer from a lack of preparation and an excess of unstructured work. I've yet to encounter the truly pointless progress report, the completely useless review meeting or the irrelevant risk register. Neither have I seen an IT department run so well that it cannot benefit from a little process optimization and a smidgeon more compliance to standards.
The criticism that a framework is too complex is irrelevant as long as it is not the stated purpose of that framework to be implemented down to the last detail. Scalability is at the heart of all frameworks I mentioned. The criticism that compliance comes at the price of agility and efficiency is a non-sequitur. It's true, but compliance is still worth the warranty it gives.
BP can tell you, they were not broken by over-compliance to a set of rules and regulations. One or two executives might even admit that a few more inspections and reviews would not have gone amiss. Similarly, I doubt a CIO was ever berated by his CFO for wasting money on process compliance. Rather a lot of them have had complaints about budget overruns on their projects, poor knowledge and asset management and opaque departments, I daresay. A little bit of common wisdom, also known as a best-practice based framework would not hurt to make sure the same comments don't come up during the next review.
Rather than proving the mastery of your trade by critiquing the work of others (which is used to great effect by many on a daily basis), contribute to the improvement of your tools and help to make the frameworks as slim and efficient as they can be. It's not like ITSM is an academic discipline (as opposed to, say, aerospace engineering).
Amongst IT Service Management consultants its a bit of a sport to speak disparagingly of commonly used process frameworks like ITIL and BiSL, and project consultants in general like to make light a of full-blown PRINCE2 approach to projects. It would be very amusing for a physicist to essay the shortcomings of relativity, a composer to mock music theory or an accountant to say that the GAAP standard takes itself too seriously, but they don't tend to do that. These people realize that you don't have to involve Einstein's entire work every time you conduct an experiment with time and space, not all notes need be in a composition, and not all rules apply to all ledgers at all times. They go quietly about the business of being good at whatever they're good at.
Not the IT consultant. You're not a man to be reckoned with until you've stated that this or that framework is far too complex, never mind that you've never worked for an organization large or complex enough to utilize it. Project leaders are even worse. Depending on whom you ask, well over half or, according to some, more that three quarters of projects end in failure. Failure. Not on time, not within budget, and certainly not delivering the desired result. In my (albeit limited) experience, most projects suffer from a lack of preparation and an excess of unstructured work. I've yet to encounter the truly pointless progress report, the completely useless review meeting or the irrelevant risk register. Neither have I seen an IT department run so well that it cannot benefit from a little process optimization and a smidgeon more compliance to standards.
The criticism that a framework is too complex is irrelevant as long as it is not the stated purpose of that framework to be implemented down to the last detail. Scalability is at the heart of all frameworks I mentioned. The criticism that compliance comes at the price of agility and efficiency is a non-sequitur. It's true, but compliance is still worth the warranty it gives.
BP can tell you, they were not broken by over-compliance to a set of rules and regulations. One or two executives might even admit that a few more inspections and reviews would not have gone amiss. Similarly, I doubt a CIO was ever berated by his CFO for wasting money on process compliance. Rather a lot of them have had complaints about budget overruns on their projects, poor knowledge and asset management and opaque departments, I daresay. A little bit of common wisdom, also known as a best-practice based framework would not hurt to make sure the same comments don't come up during the next review.
Rather than proving the mastery of your trade by critiquing the work of others (which is used to great effect by many on a daily basis), contribute to the improvement of your tools and help to make the frameworks as slim and efficient as they can be. It's not like ITSM is an academic discipline (as opposed to, say, aerospace engineering).
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
ITSM-fu, beware the acquisitions!
IT service management is all about ensuring the warranty and utility of IT assets and services. Simply put, the IT has to support the company's main process well. Incident management, change management and so on are fairly standardized processes that help companies manage their IT environment.
Some changes to the environment are wholly out of scope of these regular, 'busines-as-usual' processes, because they do not originate from within the processes themselves. IT Service Management is a bit introspective.
A favorite activity of growing companies is acquisition: gobbling up big competitors, promising start-ups and maybe something more outré for diversification. These companies are bought for their valuable people and assets, and nowadays a lot of the value of a company is its data. IP, content, patents, customer data, research databases, what have you.
A lot of this virtual gold is in formats and systems which are different from, sometimes fundamentally incompatible with, the buyers own data and systems.
The positive impact of new purchases is therefore determined in part by the ability to absorb new data, and bring it in line with ones own databases, systems and procedures for access.
IT Service Management frameworks need to expand their focus beyond running business-as-usual IT services. Robust procedures and best practices for integrating new IT systems and large, diverse data sets need to be developed as part and parcel of IT service management in general. Running a series of technical projects every time an acquisition is made is less effective for bypassing the regular IT service management organization, because that is where, ultimately, all new systems and data end up being managed anyway.
Currently, a lot of knowledge resides within large companies. Some of them have very strict policies for this sort of thing, and have absorbed a new buy in six months. Others take forever as ponderous projects with lots of external expertise are sent up to digest acquired data. The technical know-how can always be found, however, all the management and governance level experience is currently not distilled into frameworks and best practices, and companies are poorer for it.
As long as an integration process is not properly managed from the perspective of the regular IT-organization, it will have a large and detrimental impact on regular ITSM processes because they are calibrated towards preserving the business-as-usual IT organization, not towards merging IT organizations while preserving the current warranty and utility of IT services. This is a hard thing to do.
The next iteration of frameworks like ITIL need to address the needs of large companies when it comes to adopting acquisitions to maintain their status as comprehensive IT Service Management frameworks.
The current set of processes needs to be expanded. Currently, change management and release management are originators of change in the environment, presuming that IT service management instigates change, rather than reacts to it. New processes have to be defined and integrated with the rest, which deal with imposed change and seek to absorb and integrate new data and systems. The knowledge is definitely out there, and it is up to platforms like the IT Service Management Forum to distill it into the current frameworks. I mentioned ITIL a lot, but certainly BiSL and ASL are up for the same improvement.
The bottom line is that the biggest changes in an IT environment often come from the outside, and the success of the company can hinge on how well these changes are dealt with. IT service management frameworks need to adjust from introspection to adaptivity: ITSM-fu.
Some changes to the environment are wholly out of scope of these regular, 'busines-as-usual' processes, because they do not originate from within the processes themselves. IT Service Management is a bit introspective.
A favorite activity of growing companies is acquisition: gobbling up big competitors, promising start-ups and maybe something more outré for diversification. These companies are bought for their valuable people and assets, and nowadays a lot of the value of a company is its data. IP, content, patents, customer data, research databases, what have you.
A lot of this virtual gold is in formats and systems which are different from, sometimes fundamentally incompatible with, the buyers own data and systems.
The positive impact of new purchases is therefore determined in part by the ability to absorb new data, and bring it in line with ones own databases, systems and procedures for access.
IT Service Management frameworks need to expand their focus beyond running business-as-usual IT services. Robust procedures and best practices for integrating new IT systems and large, diverse data sets need to be developed as part and parcel of IT service management in general. Running a series of technical projects every time an acquisition is made is less effective for bypassing the regular IT service management organization, because that is where, ultimately, all new systems and data end up being managed anyway.
Currently, a lot of knowledge resides within large companies. Some of them have very strict policies for this sort of thing, and have absorbed a new buy in six months. Others take forever as ponderous projects with lots of external expertise are sent up to digest acquired data. The technical know-how can always be found, however, all the management and governance level experience is currently not distilled into frameworks and best practices, and companies are poorer for it.
As long as an integration process is not properly managed from the perspective of the regular IT-organization, it will have a large and detrimental impact on regular ITSM processes because they are calibrated towards preserving the business-as-usual IT organization, not towards merging IT organizations while preserving the current warranty and utility of IT services. This is a hard thing to do.
The next iteration of frameworks like ITIL need to address the needs of large companies when it comes to adopting acquisitions to maintain their status as comprehensive IT Service Management frameworks.
The current set of processes needs to be expanded. Currently, change management and release management are originators of change in the environment, presuming that IT service management instigates change, rather than reacts to it. New processes have to be defined and integrated with the rest, which deal with imposed change and seek to absorb and integrate new data and systems. The knowledge is definitely out there, and it is up to platforms like the IT Service Management Forum to distill it into the current frameworks. I mentioned ITIL a lot, but certainly BiSL and ASL are up for the same improvement.
The bottom line is that the biggest changes in an IT environment often come from the outside, and the success of the company can hinge on how well these changes are dealt with. IT service management frameworks need to adjust from introspection to adaptivity: ITSM-fu.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)