WIREDGOV

Blog posted by: Michael Imhoff – senior ITSM consultant, 23 May 2016. 

As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit Michael presented a session on Small scale ITSM implementation and ITIL Practitioner. Watch the video and read his new blog post also discussing this topic.

How do you apply a large, comprehensive framework like ITIL® in a relatively small organization? In the real world there are organizations that need ITIL but have to, like eating an elephant, take it in small bites.

This is one challenge I’ve been involved in with a local government organization in Denmark, with an IT department of 15 responsible for 2,000 staff and local users in schools. They wanted to address processes such as incident, problem and change management but also to create a service catalogue and include continual improvement.

However, smaller organizations often don’t have the time to study the ITIL publications in depth or have the resources to send people on training courses. Ultimately, it’s about giving people enough information to make it work but not too much as it’s easy to overdo things for small organizations. So, by using workshops and pragmatic templates we’ve been able to describe processes in no more than 10 pages. And we’ve been able to build in some critical success factors and KPIs, setting goals and measuring whether they’ve been reached.

But when it comes to organizational change management (OCM) the problem is bigger: getting people to change their behaviour and follow newly-defined processes. People need to understand why things have to change and what the benefits are, for example preventing errors and making their life easier. Equally, they need to recognize why it’s important to register change requests to avoid “fire fighting mode” when there’s a poor change implemented. This demands behaviour change, as the people involved may be accustomed to relying on what they’ve always done.

As a result of the work we did with the Danish municipality, our client said it made IT Service Management (ITSM) “understandable and practical”. The interesting part is that the approach we used with this public sector organization, though pre-dating the launch of AXELOS’ latest ITIL guidance, actually reflects the nine guiding principles of ITIL® Practitioner.

ITIL Practitioner guiding principles

Above all, the ITIL Practitioner guiding principle of “Keep it simple” is exactly what we did in this case.

And the principle of “Start where you are” was useful in workshops where we identified the undefined processes that the team was already using. Doing this means you can record what you know and agree on which approaches make most sense. At the same time, they can look at what ITIL says and if there’s terminology that works better with colleagues and suppliers, then use it. Again, don’t overdo it – adopt and adapt ITIL to your requirements.

Up to now, it has been difficult for small organizations to figure out which ITIL training would be relevant. ITIL Foundation offers more about the “why” and the “what” in ITIL but without the “how”. Now, ITIL Practitioner addresses the “how” with a more practical, hands-on approach.

Although it won’t remove the need for IT consultants, training a few people in ITIL Practitioner will be sufficient for small organizations to see real results, such as the ability to start implementation of change and improvement in ITSM.

See our ITIL Practitioner section for more information.

More blog and webinar content from our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit

ITIL Practitioner: Ensuring projects are delivered with greater collaboration

ITIL® Practitioner: Tackling the challenges of Service Strategy

Using ITIL Practitioner across a range of IT job roles

ITSM challenges – the benefits of good training

ITIL Practitioner: who is it for and what are the benefits?

Using ITIL® Practitioner to solve challenges of ITSM