As a 9+ experienced Solution Architect who is mainly focusing on software system automation in ITSM Domain, I had the invaluable opportunity of being a part of a few successful business transitioning projects. With that experience on hand, I'm writing this article to share the challenges you can expect during this kind of transition.
Agile
Since we are in a rapidly changing business world which directly depends on IT, IT organizations play major roles in every business. Bigger the company, the responsibility of the IT company getting bigger and bigger day by day. Things get much more complicated when an IT organization supports IT businesses like Software development firms or Infrastructure services providers. Therefore a better process of managing delivery activities is required for such an IT company.
Many years ago, When Agile invaded the tech market, businesses eagerly looked forward to restructuring their IT organizations according to those practices.
Agile is a process that helps teams provide quick and unpredictable responses to the feedback they receive on their project. It basically provides enough opportunities to assess and change the direction of the project during its delivery life cycle. Inspired by the concepts researchers introduced many other sub-concepts like "Scrum", "Kanban" and "Agile Service Management". Each of these new concepts had different focuses (i.e. Scum and Kanban focused on software development whereas Agile Service Management focused on ). As Agile perfectly fits with the business models of software companies it managed to govern almost all software development businesses. But IT service Providing organizations do not fully satisfied with the processes. As I felt a lack of research and lower support from the community was the main reason behind these problems. Network, Infrastructure, and Security are the most dissatisfied fields. This reason made a market gap for a process like ITIL.
ITIL
ITIL - an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library is a set of detailed practices for IT service management that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of the business. ITIL basically focuses on 14 general management practices and 17 service management practices. Even though it carries a bulky set of books you need to refer to, ITIL fits many of the gaps which cannot fill with regular Agile process management.
Addressing the bulkiness of the ITIL process required another strategy. This is the market vacuum filled by ServiceNow.
ServiceNow
ServiceNow is a service management software that helps you to manage ITIL processes. As I have enough experience, this is one of the best tools in the market which has a huge potential of making a difference in any matching organization.
That is how these 3 things crossed paths with each other .....................
The Transition
The organization which implemented this transition consist of well-experienced Software Engineers and System Engineers who are tightly adapted to their current work. So convincing the idea of having an ITIL process required comparably less effort.
But on the other side, the lack of mature knowledge in ITIL and the nature of the analytical mindset of these employees created a lot of unanswered questions.
This situation was enough to create unwanted panic among employees. Therefore, if you wish to implement ITIL in your organization it's always good to have a few mature knowledge sources who can provide you with answers. there are plenty of consultants who can provide effective answers to these questions.
The human brain has a maximum frequency of changing contexts. Pushing it too much will result in unexpected resistance and stress. This principle applies to any of the life events including ITIL. This is getting further bigger when you needed to put both ITIL and ServiceNow at once.
Imagine someone asking you to ride a new car with your eyes closed; that was the initial feeling almost all people will have if you try to do this within 2-3 weeks. Therefore you need to give enough time for people to set their mindset for these processes.
So you need to understand the time required before you start the ITIL implementation. usually, this is months and years of work. Even though it's interesting, you can't put everything at once. It's always good to start from the simplest process.
With the implementation of the ITIL process, you will require some new roles and positions (i.e change managers, Incident Managers, etc.) to be in your organization. It's always good to identify and train them in advance. The success of the ITIL process and ITIL transition will totally depend on these people. So building and empowering these key human resources before the implementation will be an advantage.
Encouraging your employees to have an ITIL foundation certificate will avoid a lot of complexities by simplifying the learning curve. So it's worth it if you can provide employees with the necessary certifications during the implementation process.
According to most scholars, ITIL is a complex to remember the process. I also felt the same due to the bulkiness of its content. You can avoid this complexity by simplifying jargon statements of ITIL. It's impracticable if you expect all of your employees to be ITIL masters or enthusiasts. Therefore you should simplify your guidelines with more human words. Basically, this is all about making people use it irrespective of their interests.
When implementing ITIL in ServiceNow, you should carefully select what and which information is required. ServiceNow provides you with enough flexibility to add almost any type of information field. But you should wisely decide how much information you need. Having too much info won't help you in any way. On one side it stresses out your employees while on another side you ended up with a lot of garages in your databases.
Your primary focus should be ruining your business, ITIL is just a framework that you can use to do that effectively. If you blindly push people to follow the process, it will end up with ITIL being their primary focus instead of the real job they need to do. This will create an almost unrecoverable impact on your employees.
On the Run
Even though ITIL satisfies IT Service Management process requirements, Software engineering teams had a lot of complexities with adopting ITIL. Even though ITIL V3 took some initiatives to handle this issue still it was enough to manage complex IT Service Providers like us.
Even the ServiceNow developers and Systems and Service integration engineers like me who use ServiceNow for process and service automation faced the same challenges. Initially, we tried to use change management to solve this issue which we gradually understand as wrong and ineffective.
Luckily ServiceNow Agile module came into the picture. Even though ITIL and Agile don't seem to have any incompatibilities niter of them has any incompatibilities. Therefore we found enough gaps that can put agile in this space which made both parties happy and comfortable.
So the thank goes to ServiceNow which made our life easy. As I have enough experience with the ServiceNow application, it is a good tool that has a lot of features. Most of all it's not over-tuned just for ITIL. If you wish to give up ITIL and go back to agile or upgrade your organization with DevOps still ServiceNow has enough support to manage those processes.
Most of all ServiceNow has really a powerful orchestration engine that you can use to automate recurring operations. This tool allows you to do some advanced stuff without wasting your valuable integration engineers' time on fancy UI creations.
After All.....
- If you wish to implement ITIL in your organization early planning and well planning are the key factors of success.
- Having a good consultant or employee who can be your ITIL ambassador will be worthwhile during the implementation.
- Understanding the complexity and time requirement is a must.
- Always train your key characters in advance.
- Encouraging employees to have ITIL foundation certificates will ease their lives as well as yours.
- ServiceNow is one of the great tools you can use to form ITIL in your organization
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