Why ITSM Projects Fail…
It’s sometimes laughable reading blogs, LinkedIn group discussions and Tweets about ITIL and it’s successes and failures. With ITIL, it seems, there are detractors, zealots, philosophers and practitioners. And then there are those who just want to be able to associate success with what they are doing…
There are many examples of where ITSM projects fail to fulfill the objectives set forth. There are plenty of reasons why this happens;
- Goals and Objectives aren’t defined ahead of time.
- ITIL for ITIL’s Sake
- Process Only Focus – Processes are defined that cannot be executed within the given (or standard) software
- Technology Only Focus – Misplaced trust/expectations in the software vendor that a single process design basis drives the way the tool functions
- Missed Management of Change or Organizational Change Management
- Failure to define what “success” is or knowing “we have arrived”
Other than #2, these are reasons that many IT programs and projects fail.
I would argue that these are symptoms of a larger issue that plagues many in the Information Technology organization. ITIL is about running IT “like a business”. This presumes a profit/loss mentality, managing expenses, and being measured real time and managing to that. Unfortunately for many in IT, they have never actually operated a business before. They have not had to “make payroll” this month. They have not had to deal with the up and down business cycles.
Historically, IT has been a safe place to be regardless of economic or business conditions, and waste can abound without being noticed. Only until recently, has there been real pressure to focus and measure IT. The number of IT Service Management consultants now looking for work is a testiment to the fact that ITIL is no longer a blank check or guarantee of success. It still requires smart, intelligent, data based decision making on the part of those desiring the end results (and actually defining those end results in business terms ie. contribution to the bottom line). In organizations where making a profit is not criteria for success, efficiencies that drive down the cost of operations and drive up operational revenue are foreign concepts (gov’t, IT, etc). This is why there is often so much waste in government—“what gets measured gets done”, and the profitability or efficiency of operations (they are the same thing) doesn’t get measured. In private enterprise (like business units) you literally don’t exist without profit; therefore, survival is predicated on constant attention to costs and revenue and efficiency.
As long as IT is a cost center – this divide will continue to exist, and finding efficiences to drive down costs of operations or increasing operational revenue will be as foreign to IT as the fundamentals of private enterprise. As long as the same urgency for profit is absent in IT, I don’t expect IT business alignment to happen overnight.
When you start a business, you define what your product or service is, who are the customers, what is the marketplace, and THEN focus on support and returns. This is standard Supply Chain best practices (Supply chain council), but IT typically implements this business model in reverse (starting with Incident and problem management).
My suggestions on how to think about and approach things differently and with a business (profit) focus;
- Define Business goals and drivers, linking principles to be realized to those goals and drivers – assessment! Make sure these principles align closely with your business partners.
- Start with defining your customers and the services you provide to them. For anything else that doesn’t have a direct or indirect customer, ask “What value is this bringing to my business?”
- Do NOT label it your “ITIL project”. It’s your improvement, quality, or efficiency program, brand it accordingly… ITIL is simply an input and set of books. Don’t make it about ITIL.
- Make sure process and technology teams are aligned and incorporated. Their success criteria should be highly coupled (they both succeed or fail together).
- Remember “Organizational Change Management” (OCM). Process and technology, especially when there is a considerable “People” component to it, often succeeds or fail because of OCM.
- Select process and service supporting technology that not only supports Incident and Problem management (those are “return” processes of a business supply chain, and not what a normal business would start with), but also provides the service design, transition, and improvement processes as well. Most important; with a focus on efficiency ie – not a lot of different products bundled, doesn’t require a PHD to implement, doesn’t require a ton of time to implement, etc.
It’s really not that hard – but the answers aren’t always in a chapter of the ITIL books. The answers are all over the Internet, taught at most business schools, and most likely someone in your organization already has these fundamentals down, or you wouldn’t be in business to begin with.
