Real ITSM in the Real world

Just been to a session on Real ITSM in the Real World, a personal story about the Service Management journey at Newcastle University.

Have IT teams based in departments with their own processes etc, but are all now part of same central department.

Different levels of digital literacy. A couple of good examples. One caller phoned service desk with an intermittent problem printing. Found out it was only while they were having cup of tea. Problem solved by identifying that they were unplugging the printer to plug the kettle in. Another user phoned Helpdesk and when asked if the network cable was plugged in, he said he didn't know because he was only a brain surgeon! Teaches you not to make assumptions about what people understand when you are communicating with them.

In the early days of their ITIL journey, they documented processes, and published good practice guides. Then had a departmental reorganisation, and got a dedicated service management team. Defined roles for service owners and service leads, drew up a service catalogue, made people think about things from a service perspective, not a technology perspective.

Drew up ITSM roadmap, put in place incident management process, and held incident reviews. Recently replaced ITSM system, and introduced self service so calls could be tracked. Now introduced change and problem management for first time.

As a result, have seen benefits including learning from major incidents. Identifying causes of major incidents. Biggest cause was implementation of changes, which helped them introduced change management. Next biggest was electrical contractors causing power problems. They publish operational reports for managers, including the date of oldest open ticket. In two cases, customer had died before the problem had been resolved!

Department is now much more focused on the customer. They think more about impact and communication.Technical teams have gone from causing incidents by making unplanned changes from home on a Saturday evening, to piloting the change management process. Everyone is less defensive, incident reviews are blame free with a focus on learning.

Personal learning has included:

• Adapt. Understand your environment and adapt to your organisation's requirement, don't just blindly implement ITIL. Embrace the culture and get allies wherever possible.
  
• Improve. Start somewhere, then improve. Balance idealism with pragmatism. Evolution not revolution.
  
• Don't forget the people. Engage early and engage often and give constant reaffirmation. Set a good example, explain why and make it easy to do the right thing.
  
• It's a never ending journey. Break it into chunks to make the big changes seem less daunting. Focus on issues causing problems. Build on your successes, and accept there's no final destination.
  
• Never stop learning. There's always more you can learn. Talk to people - we're lucky that in HE we have a very collaborative culture. Use free resources, especially social media.

Enjoyed this very personal talk. We've implemented already some of what Newcastle have, but the learning is very applicable across the board.

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Service management takes shape

This morning we had a University Collaboration Improvement Board meeting where I outlined to them the new structures we're putting in place as part of our service management strategy.

We've had a first go at defining our service areas, and these are currently being defined in our Service Catalogue, We've appointed service managers for each area who will be responsible for the delivery and development of the seven service portfolios. One of the important things we want to do here is bring together new projects, and business as usual. Too often they are seperate and the service as a whole is not looked at by the same group of people. This should also enable us to more clearly define the resource split between innovation and new things, and keeping existing services running.

Each area will also have a Service Advisory Group made up of key customers, users and stakeholders. These groups will be strategic and hopefully will not get bogged down in detail,and should help form the direction of each service area by identifying key services, agreeing service levels and performance indicators, identifying areas for improvement and ensuring that benefits are realised.

These will report to a Service Strategy Board made up mainly of the CiCS Programme Board and the service managers, although we're still looking at the exact membership. The purpose of this board will be to improve planning and decision making by having a single place to look at all aspects of all services.

That's the plan - lots of details still to be worked out, including how existing groups fit into the structure or whether they will continue to exist. We've still to complete the service catalogue and work out whether we have the service areas right, but things are definitely moving in the right direction.

This afternoon I was interviewed as part of a JISC project on developing a toolkit to help CIOs and other senior managers to assess how mature their organisation is in terms of ICT strategy. Interesting set of questions about how we define our strategy, how it aligns with the objectives of the organisation, and more importanlty, how is ICT represented at the University Executive level. I look forward to seeing the results!

Planning, problems and incidents

In the middle of our planning round at the moment so very busy. Checking financial forecasts for next year, and planning for different financial scenarios - it won't surprise anyone that none of them actually involve us getting more money than now..... Also articulating our key activities for UEB and trying to work out the costs of them and how we demonstrate value for money. Producing a service catalogue as part of our ITIL implementation (more later) has made this easier, but actually costing our services is a bit of a black art, but more work is being done. Key objectives for next year being worked on, as well as their critical success factors.

Yesterday we had a good meeting looking at progress on the different aspects of ITIL we're implementing - I've already posted about change management, and yesterday we were looking at progress on our service catalogue which is going well, and incident and problem management. In terms of incident management, we have to first define what an incident is, and we had been using a definition of any significant service failure whether planned or unplanned, but as planned should be covered by the change management processes, we're changing the definition to unplanned only. And then - what's an incident - any service failure reported to the helpdesk? If Dr X rings to say his printer's not working is that an incident? It's a service failure to him. So, if you define everything as an incident, you have to have a good method of determining the level of an incident. This is where you need to take account of SLAs, OLAs (operational level agreements), Impact assessments, the calendar of activities etc. Who decides on the level of an incident, and how much can be automated by our helpdesk software?

Of course, the purpose of incident managment is to restore normal service as soon as possible, and to minimise the adverse effect on business operations. Incidents have to be identified, logged, categorised, prioritised, diagnosed, resolved and closed. All of this is under the control of the helpdesk (note - not the actual fixing). The incident is then reviewed.

In summary:

Communicate -- Fix -- Communicate


We're also drawing up procedures for problem management, the purpose of which is to reduce recurring incidents and these follow a similar cycle of:

• Detection
• Logging
• Review
• Prioritisation
• Investigation and diagnosis
• Resolution
• Review

I'm pleased with the way everything is going so far and look forward to the day these processes are embedded and we have no incidents or problems to manage...

Ch-ch-changes

Lots of meetings again today - this morning a meeting to look at change management. We're on the way to implementing ITIL - in a way that suits us - and are mainly looking at problem, incident, change and test management. Some good processes already in place, and we've looked at the sorts and amounts of changes we make by logging them all for a month. Today we were looking at what change management processes to put in place for planned changes and emergency fixes. What changes will be pre-approved, and what will need to go through a CAB (Change Advisory Board). What systems will need more scrutiny than others, and what data changes (rather than configuration changes) won't need approval at all. We also looked at how we will handle emergency fixes out of hours. Lots of heated discussion, and probably more questions than answers, but I'm sure our change manager will make sense of it!

This afternoon I got together with the rest of the Executive Team where we covered a whole range of things - from what titles we're using for staff, to feedback we're received recently about our services, and appointing a new PA to work with us. We also had a good discussion on some of the financial pressures facing all Universities at the moment, and how we might react to them.

Finally we met with a staff development colleague to discuss holding another "World Cafe" event for all staff in the department. This is part of our on going staff development programme, and the feedback on the last one we had was very good. The aim will be to bring all staff together so that they can have a say in how we go forward as a department, particularly in the light of challenges we are all facing in the sector. Hopefully it will produce some good outputs, as well as being an opportunity to network with colleagues, and be fun as well!

All change

What constitutes a change? That's a question we're wrestling with at the moment as we implement ITIL, and yesterday we had a meeting with our Process Managers to look at progress so far. As part of looking at change management , our Change Manager had carried out a data collection exercise in November where all staff had to log any change they made to an outward facing (ie live) system using a web form. They also had to assess the risk and the possible impact of the change.

Interesting results. A total of 2564 logged changes over 24 days ( so some were made at weekends). That's about 1 every 5 minutes on a working day. Lots of data collected, and some initial analysis has been done. Lots of discussion on what constitutes a system change, and what is a change to data - on the telephone system for example is moving an extension a change? maybe it's just a change to data, but it could have an effect on either a user or a group of users if it goes wrong.

The next step is to use the information we've collected to inform our thinking on what sort of change management and change approval process to put in place. I'm keen that we don't just implement the process as recommended by ITIL but that we do what works for us, and we'll have different processes for different sorts of changes - the 60 reported changes that had been assessed as high risk and with a high impact will be subject to a different process to the straightforward data changes. What's important is that everything follows an agreed process.

We also had a presentation from our Test Manager - test management being the process for reducing the risk of service failures when moving from development to production. There are many different ways of testing systems (even by releasing something and letting users test it which some software manufacturers have been know to use....). We know we have many different ways of doing things here - things like payroll we test almost to destruction before anything goes live, with other services we're much less stringent. Again, it's about getting an appropriate process in place.

Other presentations included progress on the service catalogue, and incident and problem management. Our incident management procedures are now well established for in-hours incidents, but we're currently reviewing out of hours ones.

Should we abandon ITIL

An interesting and thought provoking session as always from Noel Brunton, an IT service management consultant. He examined the question, should the service desk abandon ITIL?

In short, the answer is - it depends! His view was the with version 3, ITIL has become more corporate, not about IT support, but about IT and the business and of less practical relevance to the service desk. Many things of prime importance to service management are missing from ITIL - dealing with users, out of hours support, skills, operational stats, structures, and staffing. All the difficult stuff!

However, ITIL is still relevant to the IT department. It addresses the basic concepts of change management, problem managment and incident management. You need to stick with ITIL until change management is universally adopted, all developments have supportablilty as a primary issue, and the development team carry out problem management including root cause analysis as a matter of routine.

But, if all of those things are embedded, then it might be time for the service desk and IT support to start developing differnet methodologies, more relevant to their user support role.

RUGIT at King's

Spent the day in London today at a RUGIT meeting - boy was it hot! We were meeting at Kings College - one the few Russell Group Universities I've never been to. didn't get chance to see much of it, but it's in a very good location - on The Strand, overlooking the Thames. There's a lovely chapel which I managed to peak into.

Main items of business today included Budgets, Benchmarking and Business Continuity. Everyone is planning for the effects of the economic downturn to be felt, and we discussed a number of ways in which we could cut costs whilst maintaining services. Reviewing all of our contracts with suppliers, including maintenance agreements and software licence arrangements was discussed, as well as streamlining business processes across different schools and faculties and using IT to help the Unviersity become more efficient. Also outsourcing - where there is minimum risk, low levels of complexity and high volumes, such as email and storage.

I've lost count of the number of times we've discussed benchmarking - it's a topic that won't go away, especially as our own institutions want to know if we're being cost effective and provding value for money. The problme we always come up against is our widely different portfolios services and structures - it's very difficult not to compare apples and pears. But, we're going to have another go!

Business continuity remains high on everyone's agenda with a number of HEIs reporting cases of swine flu. Pleased to note that all IT Directors getting the same reaction as me - people will work from home using our email/web/corporate systems, use our VLEs to teach, our research computing facilities and electronic resources. Because our systems will keep running won't they? Because we're not going to get ill! It was pointed out that systems often break when changes are applied and not often when they're running in steady state. So. don't make changes. Or, implement ITIL and make them in a carefully controlled way....

ITIL on the way

We're moving closer towards implementing Service Management in the department using ITIL. Our service catalogue is being drawn up, service managers appointed, and now we're looking at who can fill some of the other key roles including Change, Release and Test Managers, and Incident and Problem Managers. Several staff have been trained and have their Foundation Certificate. I know we're behind some other Universities who have already implemented these processes, but we can learn from their experience and share their good practice. Sometimes it's good not to be at the bleeding edge.

Internal resistance to change is often cited as the hardest thing to overcome in any ITIL implementation, particularly as it will involve some major changes! But I hope the benefits will outweigh some of the discomfort that these changes might initially cause. The benefits I hope to see include better incident managment and review (so that when things do go wrong we know why and can put measures in place to stop or reduce the liklihood of them happening again) and better change management (so that both costs and the effect on users are reduced). Of course there are many more, and I've been impressed talking to other Universities who are further down the road how many benefits have been realised. One which we are already seeing is how defining ourselves in terms of services rather than systems is improving our communication with the University and our customers.

The Shipping Forecast

As part of our preparation for implementing ITIL, we had an awareness session today for some of our senior managers. For most of the day we took part in a game - running a port! We all had different roles - port schedulers, service desk, infrastructure managers, finance mangers, service managers - and had to schedule ships of different sizes, cargos etc, into a port with different bays, cranes etc, whilst coping with a number of different incidents, ranging from crane failures to complete power failures and port closure. It was great fun! We were allocated roles by the facilitator, and I ended up as one of the service desk staff. Other interesting allocations included 3 of the current customer service team as back room infrastructure engineers. We played 4 rounds of the game, each lasting 24 minutes and after each round had to make a number of process improvements to improve our service, which was mainly measured on service uptime and profit.

The first round was rubbish - no proper processes, the service desk not communicating properly with the infrastructure team (and vice versa!), the schedulers not communicating with the service desk. We lost a fortune, and only had 44% up time! Gradually we made process changes, nominated proper communication channels, put in resilence, built in problem management and service continuity, and developed a knowledge base. By the end of round 4, we'd made a profit and got to 90% up time.

I said it was great fun, but we learnt an awful lot, and I think saw how ITIL could work in practice. I also found out how stressful it can be on a helpdesk!

Happy Monday

Good day today, for a Monday. Took a huge box of chocolates into work (and I mean, huge!) from a colleague on sick leave - wonder how long they'll last. A nice lunch in the sun with a colleague from another department, a few pleasant meetings in the afternoon, then spent the evening in the garden sipping wine and following Steve Job's keynote to the WWDC announcing the new iPhone and MobileMe. Loads more things for me to play with - can't wait! Lots of new Enterprise applications - for once Apple seem to be targeting business. Lets hope they get their corporate contracts and tariffs sorted out then!

Exec Team meeting this afternoon where we discussed lots of topics - sometimes we have one or two major items to discuss, other weeks we go through lots of smaller items. Today was one of the latter. We talked about team awaydays, and how to link them in to our management development framework, making sure they have clear objectives and outcomes, as well as the fun and team building element.

As we move forward with implementing ITIL, we've arranged some training and awareness sessions for key staff which will happen towards the end of the summer.

Our self service portal for the helpdesk is almost ready to go live - this will allow users to log their own calls, track calls and jobs and access a knowledge base. The second stage will be the analyst portal where second line support staff will be able to deal with and close calls.

We're also thinking about a review of the way all our media is delivered, including podcasting, streaming media, IPTV, and lecture capture. The main aim of the project will be to ensure that fragmentation of service provision is hidden from the end-user.

Executive Team

Today's Executive Team discussed a number of things, including arrangements for a couple of meetings to discuss our vision for the department, and how we might get there, once we have a common agreement of what it is.

We also discussed something which started off as initially appearing simple, but became more complex the more we looked at it. We have a shared area on the departmental server, which has a tendency to become slightly anarchic in terms of organisation and what's there. It can become a bit of a dumping ground, with files rarely deleted, difficulties in finding things, and the possibility of duplication. Files on it include working documents, collaborative documents, published documents, databases, statistics, incriminating departmental photographs.... So, we talked about a proper structure, a retention and disposal policy, access rights etc. But then, more complications arose - how does this shared area fit with the document management system? What's its relationship with the departmental wiki? Or the departmental group in the portal? Or the departmental web site? A meeting will be convened to discuss...

We've also arranged a briefing session on ITIL for the new year, with a view to deciding which bits of to implement and when.

Executive Team

Several meetings today, and I wasn’t impressed that the last one was at 5pm! I’ll start with the one of most relevance to the department - the Executive Team meeting. Items discussed included:

• How CiCS might have to realign its services to take account of a major restructuring of the University which will happen next year. I’ll post more on that later when the report is circulated to the Senate.

• ITIL - this provides a structured framework for best practices for IT Service management and related processes. ITIL has been widely implemented within the IT industry but has only recently been adopted by the HE sector. A number of Universities have started implementing ITIL in specific areas with a view to applying the principles to other areas over time. The areas covered are:
• Service Strategy
• Service Design
• Service Transition
• Service Operation
• Continual Service Improvement

Potential benefits of implementing ITIL include improved service quality, better resource allocation and pro-active IT management.
We’ve agreed that in principle we want to implement ITIL but in order to find out more, and decide which bits and how, we’re arranging a half-day overview for key people.

• Lessons learnt from the power outage incident last week – we’ll be having a number of discussions about how we might improve a number of things.

• How we might provide training and support for staff in CiCS who manage staff, by setting up a management development programme, tailored to the needs of individual staff

Other meetings included the Admin Team – the Heads and Directors of the Professional Services - where the main item of discussion was the implications of the restructuring, and a meeting to discuss transparency and information flows.