Published: April 26 2011, 09:20 AM | no comments
by Robert Stroud

Service Talk is the quarterly magazine of itSMF UK, designed to keep its members informed on trends in the service management industry and techniques to better execute their role.  This quarter, my article "Efficient, effective and just enough service management to drive business value" is the first of a series of articles identifying the requirement and techniques for professionals to focus on business value.  More information on ServiceTalk, contact communications@itsmf.co.uk

This article highlights incident management, the process I find most implementations of service management commence with. It offers some guidance and metrics to assist you in being focused on your business and not simply the process.  The text of the article is provided below and you can also download a PDF of the article.

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Efficient, effective and just enough service management to drive business value

Rob Stroud suggests a more enlightened approach to incident management

With the focus on rapid value, shorter change cycles and the requirement to be agile, many CIOs have asked my opinion recently about their service management strategy. I have been hearing more frequently about large-scale service management implementations fixated on a long-term vision of a vague five-year plan with minimal project strategy. These implementations typically employ incident and problem management with the objective of driving better availability, and some of them get into what I call the ‘incident focused death spiral'.

The incident focused death spiral is where a service management implementation focuses on being reactive and solving problems with little or no focus on the business case or the value proposition.  Now being very effective at solving incidents is not a bad objective, but if you fail to focus on the other aspects such as incident removal, providing usable and productive knowledge, you are going to suffer customer satisfaction challenges. A good example is your local restaurant: if they make the same mistake every time you arrive, over time you will find somewhere else to eat even if it means travelling further.  In short, we're talking about implementations focused on solving the symptom rather than dealing with the cause.

Businesses change rapidly and, with business processes totally dependent on technology, one must mirror the other, flexing and contracting as required based on the value that the business delivers.  This means that IT must be focused on the delivery of service, a service aggregator sourcing the raw or partly finished components to be consumed by the business like a manufacturer does. Just as the business is focused on delivering a quality product at an appropriate price that supports the margin required, the same is true of IT. 

In this day and age when change is accelerating and technology is changing ever more rapidly, the supply chain is becoming increasing complex. We need to focus on a balanced implementation delivering enough resource across the full service lifecycle. This requires an understanding of capacity management, sourcing materials and managing delivery according to agreed service levels at the appropriate cost.  In service management terms, I believe that we have to move the focus away from incident management and place it instead on demand, measuring service levels against business expectations and basing our investment decisions on the business return.

All this may seem a little daunting after years managing incidents, but this fundamental transition can be delivered with the use of some basic guiding principles:

• Service management implementations must be structured, with detailed project plans and defined milestones and metrics.

Most CIOs believe that 80% of service unavailability is due to failed change, both planned and unplanned, and this leads to implementations commencing with incident management to give the organisation a clearer view of service outages. This will allow the organisation to understand the service impacts, yet most fail to link outages and incidents to the change and consequently they are missing an essential metric.  As a result changes are made to resolve incidents with risks that are not effectively and appropriately managed, continuing the hero mentality and the cycle of downtime continues. The first technique is to capture the time spent on unplanned change as a lost productivity metric.

• Each phase should be based on the 80/20 principle. 20% of the implementation should give you 80% of the value

The implementation of effective and efficient service management requires a focus on the key aspects of each process rather than a deep and detailed analysis.  In order to show business value quickly, we need to understand change and implement effective change processes, perhaps using request management to automate frequently implemented low-risk and low-impact changes.  Request management is one of the most underutilised and valuable tools in the service management arsenal, as it allows us to ensure that all the appropriate legal and audit metrics are in place and the data automatically collected as the request is executed.  Further service levels can then be linked to service delivery and automated in line with agreed business SLAs, making the IT organisation appear to be exceptionally responsive - a real bonus in this agile world.

• Implement factual reporting and attestation that support data-driven decisions, linked to the business

IT is great at delivering technical data on the performance of hardware. This offers minimal value to the business.  IT needs to aggregate technical information and report against performance metrics that make sense to the business, and it must prioritise the delivery of metrics. 

In the initial implementation of effective service management you can typically use some indicative metrics. For example, for change management try the following:

• Number of changes (a high rate of change with poor availability implies control problems)
• Number of authorised changes (if the number is low then unauthorised change is occurring without your knowledge)
• Change success rate
• Incidents related to/arising from change
• Business impacts of failed changes
• Number of emergency changes
• Average change processing time.

The one constant in any effective business is change, and the critical aspect of implementing good service management is making sure that you are close to the business and are synchronised with the changing business environment. Do everything with your goals and objectives in mind and be prepared to start the journey and learn. Leverage the 80/20 rule and always remember that process improvement is a journey - not the destination.