Running a long term ITSM transition feels a lot like spinning plates.
As I've said before on The ITSM Review I feel that organisations should start small, with a sub-set of ITSM processes and w....
Treat your ITSM transition as a product, release often and early… don't wait for every detail to be absolutely finished to perfection — and don't hold up the release of a process for new, "late to the table" requirements.
It's not a winning strategy to consider every single last detail and requirement up front, as your time to release will only stretch away into the future.
I'm going to write up a few articles on how to manage ITSM transitions within ServiceNow, from taking the requirements from the customer to delivering the new process enhancement using Scrum as a methodology.
One lesson that we can take from Software methodologies such as Scrum is to focus on the features that matter, and get them delivered.
So first of all, here is my methodology for handling new requests for ITSM process enhancement.
There are several methods for handling enhancements that I'm sure don't work very well.
- FIFO (First In, First Out): process your enhancement requests in chronological order.
Not great because you aren't considering which process enhancement is delivering the greatest value. - An stack ranked list: assigning each enhancement a priority and working through in sequence.
Not great because with a longer list of requirements you end up constantly re-ordering new items as they come in.
My recommended approach is to consider 2 attributes of each enhancement request and assign each attribute a numerical value (between 1 and 10)
Benefit to the customer
What am I delivering to the customer by implementing this process enhancement?. Does it matter to them?- Urgency
From a customer point of view how urgent do they consider this request to be?
At this initial, requirement gathering stage we are basing the relative priority of the enhancement request simply on user relevant attributes: Benefit and Urgency.
Later on in the process we need to consider a whole host of other factors including:
- Data conversion
- Development time
- User Training
- Staff Training
- Documentation
- Compliance and Change Management
But for the moment, we are only interested in the customer interpretation of the request.
With these 2 metrics for each enhancement we should be able to sort the request into one of four categories
- Do Now (Top Right)
These enhancements offer high value to the customer, and are urgent for the business. Lets get these done! - Do Next (Top Left)
These enhancements offer high value to the customer, but are less urgent for the business. Going to be harder, but lets do these. - Do Later (Bottom Right)
These enhancements offer lower value to the customer, but are urgent for the business. Things to work on when the volume of work is lower - Do at all?? (Bottom Left)
These enhancements offer lower value to the customer, but are less urgent for the business. I might ask why we want to do these at all!
All that's left is to plot the enhancements onto a charts. Try downloading this Excel spreadsheet and adding your backlog of enhancement requests.
Each enhancement will fall into a Do when? phase, although you may get some on the borders.
If you find you have all of your enhancement requests in the Do Now phase I'd re-evaluate with a more subjective distribution of points. You could also consider making your Do Now quadrant smaller by setting the Benefit and Urgency thresholds to 7. Do this by editing either the X or Y axis in Excel and setting the Major Gridline to a higher value.
Getting a Team consensus
The next stage might be to get multiple people to rank the changes and average out the scores. This is an opportunity to get feedback from people outside of the ITSM team, and maybe for customers and users to feel they are influencing the changes that are being proposed.
Integrating it into your request procedure.
And lastly you could work to integrate the scoring matrix into your ITSM platform itself.
Now you could accept requests for new enhancements and start a workflow, inviting people to rank the enhancement.
My next blog post on this subject will be about implementing an ITSM enhancement process in ServiceNow to improve on the spreadsheet concept.
In summary, building out your ITSM environment is going to involve building a backlog of features that you want to implement.
It's a good idea to consider both customer benefits, and urgency, and make sure you deliver the features that matter
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dirkscircusimages/6156245609
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