ITIL® is the most prominent, consistent, and comprehensive documentation of best practices for IT Service Management.
Over the past three decades, the ITIL framework has evolved and kept pace with the advancement in technology and the growing dependence of IT organizations. It is not a prescriptive solution for all your IT problems; instead, it is a framework that guides you on building and delivering IT services efficiently. Hence, it can be customized to suit your organization’s specific needs and still be as effective.
This is precisely what makes it possible to implement ITIL along with other process methodologies you might already have in your organization, for example – Six Sigma, PRINCE2®, Agile, etc.
These methodologies may have their principles and processes, but they are not mutually exclusive. The objectives of all these methodologies are similar – customer satisfaction, efficiency, and cost reduction. Hence, your organization can reap exponential benefits by implementing these process methodologies in conjunction.
ITIL and Six Sigma
ITIL talks about service management principles, mostly the ‘what’ of service management. The ‘how’ is not as clearly described as we would like it to be. It is up to the enterprise to decide the ‘how’ of implementing these processes. This is where Six Sigma takes over. Six Sigma is a fact-based statistical approach to customer satisfaction, and many consider it to be the answer to the ‘how’.
Six Sigma is synonymous with the quality of outcomes. The process talks about how defects in products and services can be brought down to the minimum proportions possible. This principle is in direct sync with ITIL’s ‘Continual Service Improvement’ principle. CSI suggests that each and every member of the IT service team needs to be on a constant lookout to improve service delivery, operation, and design and keep customer satisfaction on a high.
For example, take the case of a service desk for a complex project that is facing a couple of issues –
- The service desk receives a number of duplicated requests, as in requests that have the same solutions, perhaps from different customers. The efficient process here will be to document the incident management process for each request and use the document to quicken the response time on similar requests in the future.
- The support team has not classified the service requests based on their severity and impact – hence they cannot decide specific response time for each type of request and have given a blanket time of 2 days for all requests. For example, a simple service request such as a ‘password reset’ need not have to take 2 days, it can be done immediately. Hence the efficient process here would be to categorize service requests based on their severity and impact and assign specific turnaround time in the SLA.
Six sigma helps – six sigma is a quality control principle that says, for every 100 events (manufactured products), 99.99966 are defect-free. Applying this to a service environment, the service organization, in an ITIL environment, can aim for their service desk to achieve this efficiency rate with their service requests inside the promised turnaround time.
(Six Sigma does not prescribe a process for solving problems; it is a statistical number that is considered the epitome of quality control)
Two key Six Sigma methodologies are DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control) and DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyse, Design, Verify). The DMAIC theme directly complements ITIL’s CSI approaches.
- Define:
Organizations should define baselines of their service management processes and then set targets. For example, the number of calls taken by the service desk per hour, the number of service requests closed in the first contact.
- Measure:
This is the actual measurement phase of the parameters which were defined earlier. Data needs to be gathered in real-time on all aspects of service delivery and support and presented in a workable format.
- Analyze:
The gathered data is then subjected to qualitative and quantitative analysis. Inferences are gathered in terms of reasons for inefficient service metrics and then improvement methods are laid down. Improvement methods could replace hardware and software with better and updated versions to train the existing staff or hire new and experienced staff. A cost-benefit analysis needs to be performed on each of these methods.
- Improve:
The cost-benefit analysis of improvement suggestions is discussed, and the effective (financially and operationally) ones are implemented. This implementation takes place over time, and after monitoring resources, new metrics are gathered.
- Control:
The new metrics are compared with the old metrics, and the change is analyzed. If gaps are identified in any of the processes or infrastructure, this gap is again considered a new metric to improve, and the whole process starts over again. That is how this is a continual process that is common in ITIL® and Six Sigma.
ITIL and PRINCE2
ITIL and PRINCE have an innate similarity in the fact that they are both founded in the UK. Both these process methodologies are extensively used among enterprises in the UK and Europe, and most of them simultaneously implement both these methodologies.
Let’s look at how PRINCE2 and ITIL complement each other using a scenario. Let’s say a multinational IT company is planning to launch a new IT product in the next few months. So they have decided to expand their service desk. The management has decided to open a service desk in an offshore location – somewhere in India or the Philippines. This service desk needs to be ready to go online before the product is launched. Demand management has shown that they will need at least 200 extra service desk staff. Now, this entire project of expanding the service desk can be executed using the Prince2 Training Course.
Some of the principles of PRINCE2 are quite appropriate and useful as this project is executed.
The principle ‘Continued Business Justification’ says that it must be profitable for the organization to start a project, and this reason should remain justified throughout the project. In the example, the project’s reason was that employee cost in the off-shored service desk was 8 times lesser than what was being incurred currently. The project is in progress. There is information that the new site offers a very efficient disaster recovery system, which will cost a considerable amount of money. If this cost were to be approved, the project’s total cost over a period of 3 years will exceed the cost of having expanded the existing service desk. Hence, if this disaster recovery system was implemented, the project would no longer be financially viable. Thus, the expansion of the service desk for disaster recovery is rejected.
The PRINCE2 principle ‘Management by stages’ comes into the picture as well during the execution of this project. Among the ITIL® processes, the ‘service operation’ process alone is in consideration here and specifically the ‘service desk’. All components of the service desk – incident management, problem management, and access management – are put in place, and service desk staff are hired and trained to be ready for deployment once the product is launched in the market.
The risk management aspect of PRINCE2 will help foresee both opportunities and threats. Potential risks are forecasted, their impact and probability analyzed and a risk budget is allocated. Hence, during an occurrence of any kind of risk during this project – a natural disaster, a competitor announcing the launch of a similar product, governmental regulations – this risk budget can be made use of, and necessary remedial action can be taken to mitigate these risks and execute the project successfully.
ITIL and Agile
ITIL’s primary focus is customer satisfaction through efficient service delivery. It can coexist hand in hand with Agile’s framework where a quick turnover of value-adding products to the customer is the primary principle.
Here are a few ways in which ITIL and Agile can be integrated into the project environment:
- Prioritize Backlog During CAB Meeting
Conduct the CAB (Change Advisory Board) meetings with an Agile framework in mind. Instead of weekly or monthly meetings, conduct daily Scrum meetings and prioritize service requests. Then let the responsible teams handle these requests and come up with short turnaround times to close these requests.
- Document RFCs using User Stories
By deliberately changing requests by breaking them down into smaller products and assigning story points to each of them, the most effective changes get implemented. In turn, the service in itself becomes more efficient and cost-effective.
- Change Manager can be Scrum Master
The Change Manager can conduct the daily Scrum meetings and make decisions on sprints, which are the RFCs (Request for Comments). He can assign responsibilities and keep a tightly monitored project environment to extract the maximum accuracy and efficiency in service delivery.
Benefits of Implementing ITIL Along with Other Process Methodologies:
- The best practices of both methodologies complement each other
- Improves quality of service, the efficiency of a service team, reduction in errors
- Process documentation becomes more comprehensive and consistent
- Customer satisfaction is hugely improved due to a more streamlined service support system
In conclusion, enterprises can garner immense benefits by blending ITIL with other complementary frameworks. The key is to pick up each framework’s right elements and put them into practice in a harmonious manner.
