ITIL is a useful digest of IT best practices put together the UK's Office of government Commerce. Here's how to get started with it

Over the years, most IT shops have focused their energies inward and concentrated on resolving technical issues. Today's business environment demands that IT be more attentive to customer requests by delivering quality solutions and aligning with the business objectives -- in other words, to focus on service management.

One approach to making this happen is to use Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Created by The Office of Government Commerce (OGC), the UK Government IT advice agency which succeeded the CCTA, is a set of best practices and methodologies, developed from previous work known as GITIMM

When people turn to you for help in improving IT service management, suggest that they implement ITIL best practices. I'll explain how to do it and some of the steps my company has used to implement the ITIL framework.

Assess

ITIL best practices cover five service support processes:

• Incident Management
• Problem Management
• Change Management
• Configuration Management
• Release Management

ITIL also includes five service delivery processes:

• Capacity Management
• Financial Management
• Availability Management
• Service Level Management
• IT Service Continuity Management

Begin your implementation by benchmarking the activities of the IT organisation to determine how well it's performing. The OGC provides online resources that you can use to assess the IT organisation and a worksheet that you can download from their Web site. You'll answer sets of questions for each of the processes. For example, the evaluation for Incident Management includes questions like, "Is the business need for a Service Desk clearly identified and understood?" and "Does the Service Desk provide a status update to the customer on the closure of incidents?"

Take the test and score the results. When my organisation went through the assessment, we expected our results to be much worse than they were. (I think there's a normal tendency to predict that you're not performing as well as best practice guidelines or you would not be going through an exercise like this.) What we found was that we were doing more things consistently with best practices than we realised. For example, our financial management process was well on its way to being optimised, mainly due to how we were able to use a product/service model to determine the costs of the individual services we provide to our clients.

Determine goals

After the organisation knows where it stands, it has to decide to what extent they want to implement ITIL best practices. You can use a Process Maturity Framework (PMF) to score the results from the assessment and determine what level the organisation will attempt to attain. Scores range from zero to five; zero indicates "absence" and five indicates "optimisation."

This is where your input is extremely valuable. People might expect that optimisation should be the organisation's goal, but you may have to explain that it is too lofty because of the high cost. When my organisation began its pursuit of ITIL, we decided that we would strive for processes that were defined and in control, which scores a three on the PMF. That way, we could take advantage of the ITIL best practices at a reasonable cost to the organisation and our IT clients.

Identify gaps

Once you have settled on an appropriate organisational goal, it's time to determine the gap between how the organisation is performing and the best practice target that they've selected. Analyse the results of the assessment and explain to the management team where the gaps exist and how large those gaps are. Without the IT management team's acceptance, the staff will never buy in to any changes that you might suggest. At my company, our CIO sends regular e-mail messages to all the IT staff reminding them of the benefits that we hope to achieve from our pursuit of ITIL, along with updates of our project plan progress.

Page 2: Get started and gain benefits

Choose the process

After you've performed the gap analysis, it will become obvious which processes will be more difficult to improve. Most organisations choose not to improve all ten processes simultaneously.

Determining which process or processes to begin with is sometimes a difficult decision, but this is where a consultant's experience can pay off. The client will expect advice about which process can most easily be brought to the defined, controlled state.

If the Incident Management process hasn't reached a controlled state, or a three on the PMF scale, I recommend starting there. The goal of Incident Management is to restore normal operation as quickly as possible. Therefore, Incident Management is a foundation process on which many of the others will depend. Problem Management, Configuration Management, and Change Management may be the next processes for you to consider. In my company's case, we determined that we could move our Incident Management process to a more controlled state with little effort due to its state of process maturity, so it was one of the first processes we set out to improve.

Begin a project

Develop a project plan for how an IT process can be changed to adopt the best practice standards. (A formal project management methodology like PRINCE2, Projects in Controlled Environments, is very complementary to ITIL because it has similar origins.)

Our organisation uses The Project Success System, a project management methodology from Young, Clark, and Associates (YCA), for all development projects, and we chose to use it for our ITIL implementation as well. The project plan should allow for the development of multiple drafts of your deliverables and several checkpoints for review by the organisation to ensure that they buy in to the new way of managing IT services.

During the course of your project, you'll identify process activities that should be monitored and measured. Your selection of these activities will be dependent on the goals for the process and will support the organisation's desire to meet the ITIL best practice criteria.

Measure

Once the project has concluded and the changes to the IT process have been implemented, it's time to take measurements of various tasks -- which ITIL helped you identify -- throughout the process. For example, you might want to measure the percentage by which the helps desk's response time is reduced. By measuring these tasks, you'll be able to determine whether the process will reach the desired results. If the results aren't being achieved, now is the time to make some adjustments to the newly revised process. If you're satisfied with the results, perform another self-audit to ensure that the process has reached a defined, controllable state of maturity.

Continuous improvement