ITSM and Organizational Change - Focus for Success

 ITSM and Organizational Change - Focus for Success

While your new ITSM initiative may have clear and significant potential benefits, it will only truly succeed if the organizational change that it represents is correctly managed. Experience has shown that this aspect of ITSM implementation is often discounted or seen as a side issue, while tremendous focus is given to new processes and tool deployment. Regardless of the technical or process improvements achieved, improper or insufficient change preparation within the organization can lead to the project being deemed unsuccessful by its sponsors.

How to avoid this unfortunate paradox? We believe that the entire ITSM initiative needs to be viewed as an organizational change effort with ITSM as the related effort. This is different from the usual way of seeing ITSM projects, but in our opinion, is the key differentiator between success and failure. In addition, there are several key practices that must be consistently observed, both during and after project completion:

1. Management alignment: All executives, managers and supervisors must be in agreement and in alignment on the value of the implementation, and must be fully committed to its success. That sounds obvious, but is not easy to achieve. The native level of engagement for any effort often observes the 20-60-20 rule: 20% disengaged and negative, 60% neutral, and 20% enthusiastically engaged. With ITSM projects, the lowest 20% for engagement express this via tentative naysaying and skepticism, which can accelerate and spread in the absence of management alignment. These people can eventually be won over to appreciate how ITSM helps them in their work, but only if the project stays healthy enough, long enough, to achieve its early wins. Having management present unified and positive support goes a long way toward allowing this to happen.

2. Project Management: Use internal and external Project Management to add weight and organization to the effort. Look for a vendor who will partner with your project managers to set the project in a clear framework for discovery, implementation, training, deployment, and maintenance. A clear Communication Plan and internal marketing materials can greatly help with conveying new concepts to the organization, and making everyone comfortable with the change. Project Management is vital to ensure appropriate milestones are tracked, that QA and UAT are to standards, as well as structuring for audit, disaster recovery, and succession planning.

3. Use skilled practitioners: Make sure that the people who execute your project appreciate the organizational change that is happening, and that this colors each step of their activity. Ensure that these people truly understand the technology that they will implement in depth; are they aware of application interactions, dependencies, necessary workarounds, architectures to provide best solutions? Ask these people (not their sales reps) what they have seen and experienced in rolling out similar projects; what is their viewpoint, their philosophy, their primary focus. Ensure that they will deliver a solution that your users will love. Look for consistency as they work with project management to:

• Take requirements
• Advise on solutions, taxonomies, frameworks, service portfolio, cmdb structure, etc
• Develop and implement new processes
• Implement technical solutions on an ITSM platform
• Document and ensure maintainability

4.  Communication and Training: In concert with Project Management, the training plan, training materials, and training execution are of paramount importance to overcoming uncertainty and anxiety about change. Publicize the project consistently, provide very regular updates to stakeholders and future users of the system. Engage users in the internal marketing process for best results; this can be a lot of fun as well as reinforcing the message of commitment to change. Consider setting up a user group that meets regularly to keep up with new product features. Use small videos to illustrate form usage, and graphics to stress basic information (Example: what is an Incident vs what is a Request?).

5. Correct Process execution: After rollout, it is very important to ensure that the new processes are correctly performed by end users. These processes, in concert with their automation in an ITSM tool, are the entities that will drive IT improvement. That improvement realizes the initial goals of the effort, and reinforces the value of the initiative. For example, the correct usage of interactions between Incident, Problem and Change can greatly reduce the number of failed changes and unscheduled work. These improvements come from both the process and its usage by end users. Coaching and regular process review meetings help to ensure compliance.

6. Celebrate Success: Stay upbeat, make it fun, have events to celebrate! And keep doing this periodically to keep the focus on your new (great) ITSM system.