This week I attended a well attended talk by Gary Case, an author of the ITIL v3 Continual Service Improvement book and a consultant for Pink Elephant. The itSMF folks in the San Francisco Bay Area have staged some pretty high quality talks and they don't charge for admissions. Definitely worth checking out if you consider yourself an IT professional.
Having been involved on the operational as well as the product side, the topic of continual improvement is dear to my heart. As Gary pointed out during his talk, there are quite a few hurdles in the implementation of IT CSI with the clients he worked with. I have also heard similar sentiments while pitching the value of visibility, reporting and executive dashboards for Service Catalog implementations.
Here are a few that I thought might be interesting for you too:
- There is nothing to measure or report on until the system is in production - Not true. You need to consider the metrics and measurability as you design your IT services. Only then you will have a well-considered service that provides metrics that are meaningful to the business.
- We already generate tons of reports; we don't need more - There are different audiences to different reports. If you send 50 pages of reports to everybody, chances are nobody will read any of them. Figure out what's important for each role, e.g. IT executives, director of IT groups and service managers, then give them only 2 or 3 pages of relevant reports. When you talk to your stakeholders, chances are you'd realize you can get rid of most of what you are generating and create a few new ones.
- We don't want to report now because our metrics are really bad - You DO want to start reporting now and institute an improvement process. In fact, showing the poor metrics now enables you to report improvements and good ROI for the CSI process down the road. Look at your problem as an opportunity!
- It costs too much to measure - That maybe true. In fact, I heard anecdotally that it cost some organization 10 working days each month to generate reports. I think the solution boils down to better service design and better reporting tools. Measurement and report generation should be automated and audited periodically. You want the metrics to guide the organization towards its business goals instead of consuming massive resources for its own sake.
When you consider a Service Catalog or any other service management tools, put a premium on its ability to support a rigorous CSI process through a robust reporting capability.
In fact, after making an initial post on this topic, I found a good discussion thread by some folks on the IT Skeptic website.
