Best Practices for Implementing ITIL
Implementing ITIL within an organization can be a daunting task and one that should not be taken lightly. ITIL is full of powerful methods and valuable concepts that can be used to bring structure, scalability and increased efficiency to an IT organization. Those things can then in turn yield better quality, more dependable IT services that meet users’ expectations while managing organizational considerations like cost, security and risk. ITIL has been implemented tens of thousands of times since the initial version was published and the experiences have exposed a set of implementation best practices that can serve as helpful guidance for organizations seeking to adopt ITIL.
A note of caution… like any powerful tool, it is easy to get lost in all the things that ITIL could do for you and lose sight of the overall objective which is to improve the quality of products and services available to support your business and your users. As you implement ITIL and other frameworks, it is easy to over-do it. There is an infinite number of paths that can get you to your destination and the key is finding the best one for you.
Where to Start
ITIL experts won’t always agree on where to start with your company’s ITIL implementation journey. That is because each organization is different and the factors which make an approach favorable in one setting can make it inappropriate in another. For some companies, a lightweight ITIL implementation is all they need – some basic concepts and processes to address specific operational pain-points. For other companies, a more in-depth ITIL implementation is needed to help drive scalability and manage operational complexity.
What ITIL implementation experts can agree on is the best place to start with implementation planning is to define the problems you are trying to solve and articulate a clear goal for what you hope to achieve by implementing ITIL. What is most important to your organization – reducing cost, improving service performance, enabling agility, scaling your operations? These are the questions that can help frame the many decisions you will make as you progress on your ITIL implementation journey. There are two foundational components that are widely used to support other ITIL activities. Even if these aren’t the first parts of ITIL that you implement, they should be some of the first components that you discuss and design. Configuration management (and the CMDB) is the part of ITIL that deals with managing the connective tissue between all the various pieces of your IT environment. As your company evolves and your IT systems change, managing the assets and dependencies and making the information available to the functions that need to use this information is essential. The sooner you can put configuration management capabilities in place, the easier it will be to implement other ITIL functions.
Knowledge management is the other foundational component in ITIL. As your ITIL processes operate, your staff will begin collecting nuggets of information about how your services work, how they are used, and the various actions required to make them operate effectively. Knowledge management is all about capturing this information, organizing it and making it available to the various people who need to use it. Populating a knowledge management system takes time and the sooner you can get started, the faster you’ll be able to start harvesting value from it.
When to Customize vs When to Adhere to Standards
This is a topic where the consensus opinions and best practices have changed over the years. It was once thought that the best way to implement ITIL was to use it as a reference and heavily customize it to fit into the processes, organization structures and culture of your existing organization. Initially, this approach seemed to make sense as it lessened the change management effort and made early adoption of ITIL easier. Unfortunately, companies that took this approach found that their organizations were not able to fully benefit from the ITIL best practices because, although it looked like they were following ITIL, they were really executing the same processes and exhibiting the same behavior that they showed before ITIL implementation and just calling it ITIL. If behaviors and actions didn’t change, the benefits were hard to realize.
Companies also found that highly customized ITIL implementations required significant re-work and regression testing when new changes to the standard or new versions of ITSM software packages were released. This has led many companies to “reboot” their ITIL initiatives (a costly endeavor) multiple times to support the modernization of tools and thinking.
Over the past 10 years, best practices have evolved (primarily due to the proliferation of ITSM software) to recommend leveraging standard (out of the box) processes, roles and tool capabilities whenever possible. Most companies are now limiting customizations to only those that are deemed essential to creating competitive differentiation for the company. IT service management is an essential operational function but for most companies, it isn’t a source of competitive differentiation in the marketplace. As a result, leveraging standard processes and commercially available tooling enables the company to easily achieve similar results as their peers in the industry (without a lot of additional overhead customization costs).
ITSM Tools
It is difficult to imagine a modern-day implementation of ITIL that doesn’t include a large focus on tooling in the form of ITSM software. ITSM tooling provides the essential capabilities for managing the full lifecycle of a service from strategy and design through transition and into service operations. As a service progresses through its lifecycle, many people within your company (and often an ecosystem of IT suppliers) need to interact with it and a considerable amount of service related data is collected. ITSM software provides a consistent means of capturing data, orchestrating workflows and providing the information needed to make informed decisions about the services and operations that support them.
Most commercially available ITSM software platforms are designed to support ITIL processes. This makes them easier to implement in your existing ITIL based organization and easier for your employees to use. The key differences between ITSM tools are ease of use, integration capabilities, and the ability to effectively blend the ITSM solution into the rest of your company’s IT systems and brand it as your own.
Training & Change Management
Years of experience have shown that the most important activity in any ITIL implementation project (and most commonly neglected when planning the effort) is user training and change management. Implementing ITIL is a transformational change for most organizations – changing the way many IT employees will execute their daily job roles. Successful implementation requires shifting the entire organization over to new ways of working in a coordinated manner that achieves the intended outcomes without causing undue disruption to the business. One ITIL expert described the experience as “changing the tire on a bus as it’s rolling down the road”. Leveraging standard processes and out-of-box tools (without a lot of customization) can make the change management task easier, but it will not eliminate the need completely.
Change management and training shouldn’t be limited to IT support roles – it needs to include business users and other stakeholders as well. ITIL implementation will often involve changing how services are created, how users request them and the way they get help when their business activities are disrupted. A successful ITIL implementation should not be transparent to business users – they should see and feel a difference in the way they engage with IT. Even positive change can be difficult when individuals and teams are going through it. Effective change management is essential for helping users navigate through the changes and reach new levels of productivity.
Don’t wait for the perfect time to start
There is no perfect time to start your ITIL implementation project. There will always be other things going on within your business – new systems rolling out, financial close periods, reorganizations, growth, downsizing… the list is endless. The nature of IT is that it is constantly changing. So, don’t wait for things to slow down before you start your ITIL implementation project.
Rather than wait for a lull in the storm, best practices have shown that churn originating from other parts of your organization can be used as an effective catalyst and accelerant for achieving your ITIL implementation goals. For example, an increased focus on risk management can provide justification for implementing more robust asset and configuration management capabilities. A series of recent high-profile outages could be used to rationalize implementing a Major Incident Management process or conducting more formal problem management activities. Often the best time to implement ITIL capabilities is when things are busiest, not when they are slow.
80/20 Rule – Focus on impact & value
The most important ITIL implementation best practice is to not try and implement everything at once. Focus on implementing the ITIL capabilities that will have the greatest impact and create the most value for your organization. There are often a few capability areas that will address some specific and pressing needs. By focusing on these areas first, you will be able to demonstrate success and value that can be then be used as justification for further ITIL investments.