Sneaking ITIL into the business

[SimonMorris]

I interviewed with The ITSM Reviews "Chief cook and bottle washer" Martin Thompson about my experiences before joining ServiceNow.

As I said in my first blog post on the ServiceNow community I came from an organisation that were quite far down their ITSM implementation (Is there such a thing as "finished"?)

The interview talks about how we got started with the little process framework we had, and how it developed.

Excerpt below - head over to the main article for the rest.

Thinking back I can now see that implementing ITSM gave us the outcomes that we expected from the investment we made in time and money, as well as outcomes that we had no idea would be achieved. Because ITIL is such a wide-ranging framework I think it's very difficult for organisations to truly appreciate how much is involved at the outset of the project.

We certainly had no idea how much effort would be spent overall on IT Service Management, but we able to identify results early on which encouraged us to keep going. By the time I left the organisation we had multiple people dedicated to the practice, and of course ITSM processes affect all engineering staff on a day-to-day basis.

As soon we finished our ITILv3 training we took the approach of selecting processes that we were already following, and adding layers of maturity to bring them into line with best practice.
I guess at the time we didn't know it, but we started with Continual Service Improvement — looking at existing processes and identifying improvements. One example that I can recall is Configuration Management — with a very complex Infrastructure we previously had issues in identifying the impact of maintenance work or unplanned outages. The Infrastructure had a high rate of change and it felt impossible to keep a grip on how systems interacted, and depended on each other.

Using Change Management we were able to regulate the rate of change, and keep on top of our Configuration data. Identifying the potential impact of an outage on a system was a process that went from hours down to minutes.