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By
Janet Kuhn
Today’s IT managers live
in an alphabet soup of best practices: ITIL®, COBIT®,
PMI®, Lean Six Sigma, so on. They all mention the needs and
desires of staff during the implementation. Failure to realize that IT
staff makes or breaks any best practice implementation can result in
failure.
Adopting any best
practice requires IT staff to change; and most people are resistant to
change. So how does an IT manager get the
enthusiastic support of IT staff?
The answer is social
best practice! In the seminal book “Community Organization,” one of the leading authors on community organization
techniques, Murray G. Ross, identified key assumptions about communities
that can help IT managers build consensus and
momentum to create a successful program.
Let’s take a look at 7
of these assumptions and their implications within a typical program to
bring ITSM principles into an organization.
Ross wrote:
“Community Organization
is a process by which a community identifies its needs or objectives, orders
(or ranks) those needs or objectives, develops the confidence and will to
work at these needs or objectives, finds the resources (internal and/or
external) to deal with these needs or objectives, takes action in respect to
them, and in so doing extends and develops cooperative and collaborative
attitudes and practices in the community.”
The essence of this statement with
regard to ITSM is that any change requires organizational development
skills, as well as technical skills. Ross found that goals can only be
achieved if the entire community recognizes them as being important; and a
community can only establish goals and objectives if the community has
already developed the capability to collaborate and work together toward a
specific goal.
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Assumptions within Community Organization1 |
Relationship to ITSM Implementation |
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Communities can develop capacity to deal with their
own problems. |
By initiating formal ITSM implementation projects and
programs, IT groups establish the needed foundation to actively
develop the skills and practices for bringing ITSM into the
organization. |
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People want change and can change. |
More than any group within an organization, IT has
recognized the persistence of change. Key to the acceptance of ITSM
as an ad hoc world-wide standard has been its capability to deal
with constant change. |
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People should participate in making, adjusting, or
controlling the major changes taking place in their communities. |
ITSM best practices embrace the inclusion of
representatives from business, as well as various IT disciplines and
levels, in developing and implementing change. |
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Changes in community that are self-imposed or
self-developed have meaning and permanence that imposed changes do
not. |
ITSM best practices are a framework, not a
methodology, and each organization implements the parts and
processes in ways that are appropriate for its business environment. |
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A “holistic” approach can deal successfully with
problems with which a “fragmented” approach cannot cope. |
ITSM’s focus on relationships between processes and
dependencies on other functions within IT and the business breaks
down “silos of operation” within IT, and provides critical oversight
into managing IT resources in alignment with Business needs. |
|
Democracy requires cooperative participation and
action in community affairs and people must learn the skills to make
this possible. |
ITSM identifies roles, not positions, that work
together to achieve the benefits of IT Service Management. The
learning track of ITSM certification courses and planning and
implementation workshops provides a channel for developing required
skills. |
|
Frequently communities need help to organize and deal
with needs. |
Accredited ITSM training providers, along with
organizations offering planning and implementation services can
serve as critical catalysts in helping an organization organize its
ITSM implementation effort. |
1Murray
G. Ross, Community Organization,” Harper & Row, 2nd. ed.,;
1967, pp 86-93.
In summary, the path to bringing ITSM
into an organization can be shortened and smoothed by adopting some of the
principles put forth by the social science community:
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Focus on developing the internal capability within the
existing IT organization to maximize the effectiveness of your ITSM
implementation program.
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Recognize that change is a way of life, and encourage and
nurture the ability of IT staff to accept and produce change.
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Involve a wide spectrum of IT disciplines and users in
your implementation plans.
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Involve the entire organization in implementation
planning from the start, as the organization will naturally initiate
modifications to its existing attitudes and practices as a result of
participating in the project.
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Design your implementation plan to accommodate
relationships between processes and between IT groups in order to unlock
the full potential of IT Service Management.
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Avoid implementing ITSM only in isolated groups or for
isolated processes.
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Build participation in the implementation effort by
initiating skills and management training programs.
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Finally, bring in outside expertise only where needed to
provide objective views and to inject highly focused skills and
knowledge as part of your overall plan.
Bringing sustainable change into an
existing organization does not require costly outside resources who are here
today and gone tomorrow. Bringing these principles to bear in a Do IT
Yourself program can build consensus and momentum to create a successful
program.
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