ITIL v3 addresses the question how to measure and improve the service offering of an IT organization by Continual Service Improvement (CSI). CSI is not about how to implement a service set and put it into production, it is about how to implement mechanism and KPIs that help to measure and review and improve the service offering that is provided to the customers.
ITIL v3 provides you with different ideas where to tie in your CSI initiative:
- Service Approach
- Functional Group Approach
- Lifecycle Approach
Based on my experience it hardly can’t stated what the best approach is because this depends on your unique service organization. Whatever what approach you adept, make sure you do not miss the most important players to measure and feed back on your service quality and its maturity: your customer. Their feedback - combined with other reporting / monitoring results – makes it easy to create a “sense of awareness” which is the most important factor in order to successfully improve your services. Only if you draw a worst case scenario that describes what will happen if you leave your service offering unchanged, you might get the attention you need to drive your initiative.
While creating that scenario you will certainly find out who’s supporting you, who’s sceptic and who’s trying to prevent the oncoming change. Use this alliance to achieve your goal easier and with less pain!
This team needs to be feed and inspired with a vision of how the future service offering may look like and all of a sudden you’ll find yourself in the challenge of becoming a communication specialist. During that phase it is crucial that your vision is realistic and does not cause more changes than absolutely necessary! Remember: CSI is a persistent process – the wheel keeps turning!
If you have defined the vision and aligned your team you need to empower additional resources of the affected departments / teams in order to realize the defined changes. Never try to enforce the changes on your own, empowering coworkers of the departments where the change needs to take place is the smarter way!
Proof the benefit – further on you’ll have to act as the motivator: make the benefit of the change visible to the organization, quick wins is your friend!
By taking these small steps you will – sooner or later – achieve your final goal: all changes are implemented, the services are improved and transferred into production. A regular projected would be finished at that point but as we’re talking about continual service improvement it’s about to initiate the next round !
((enjoy))
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