Mush and Room #1: Growth through Delegation

Growth through Delegation (a talk between Mush and Room)

Why I believe in SPACL

Sparkle by Ian Varley at Flickr - Some rights reserved

I believe in SPACL (Service Portfolio and Catalog Language) for it is focused on the service, on the people that use them. And it is in the middle of quite a lot of Service Management activities.

It is open, freely available and addresses hard problems for customer, service providers and vendors:

• Aims to define clearly what is a service and other too often conflicting Service Management core concepts
• Covers interoperability needs. It includes independent specification for service offerings, service requests. This is vital for cloud models, virtualization, multiple and changing supplier scenarios.

So. Visit them, get in. Help balancing it more for you (vendors “sparcled” it – someone had to!). Do something.

ISO 20000: A strange case of new or changed services

20000 squid Nautilus viewbay from Jules Verne masterpiece "20000 Lieues Sous les Mers" at Commons Wikimedia

Back to governance and ISO 20000, a rather different one from the previous Service Management System examples can be found within 5 Planning and implementing new or changed services.

This section marshals top management in to play regarding decision on significant changes to existing services or new ones (the last one truly is strategic thus should not be handled like other Changes are).

The idea behind this higher level process is to address a recurrent issue: the adequate handover of in-house development projects final product to the “other side”, the service management domain.

Although project deliverables are usually formally accepted, their introduction into live environment not always follows a similar clear approval path and neither development management or service management are independent advocates on this.

By making new service approval go through this steps, top management becomes an active decision maker. And service management will know about new services of big service changes way sooner.

Here I think ISO 20000 favors [using Peterson's approach to governance] a combination of processes, relational mechanisms (promoting collaboration between conflicting departments)  and IT structures (like IT project steering committees and IT strategy committees for communication and participation of all interested parties) that lead to a particular governance model.

Interesting example on how IT structures  can tie to processes at various levels (strategical/tactical/operational).

Governance lurking on ISO 20000

Platanus bark, by Vilseskogen at Flickr - Some rights reserved

There’s some governance on those ISO 20000 clauses.

The most obvious is under Requirements for a management system which features a not-so-subtle first section:

[3.1 Management responsibility]

d) appoint a member of management responsible for the co-ordination and management of all services

Next, the first section of the Deming Cycle has this for the service management plan:

[4.1 Plan service management (Plan)]

d) the framework of management roles and responsibilities, including the senior responsible owner, process owner and management of suppliers

And still within Deming Cycle, for the implementation phase:

[4.2 Implement service management and provide the services (Do)]

b) allocation of roles and responsibilities

[side note: I've been at Lynda Cooper's ISO 20000 Audit training and it has been though provoking. Lynda really gave a crisp distinction between service changes and components changes. More on this in the next post]

Have the ITIL elephant in small portions

One way to do it for a given process is to group its setup and maintenance activities like this:

Startup - Here you can put process description including roles. Don’t go too far – you want people to understand it. Most processes have one or two key well-defined deliverables that can signal the initiative and make it easier both sharing and get momentum for next phase. Here you concentrate on documenting (proof of intention).

ISO 20000 and Business Relationship Management – The missing ITIL v3 process?

"Complaint Dept" by Life As Art at Flickr - some rights reserved

Business Relationship Management (BRM) is a ISO/IEC 20000 process from the Relationship group that is not described in ITIL v3.

It’s objective is: To establish and maintain a good relationship between the service provider and the customer based on understanding the customer and their business drivers.

ITGI (CobiT, ValIT, Risk IT,…) supports IT Governance (ISO 38500)

Gary Hardy from ITGI wrote this article “ITGI Enables ISO/IEC 38500:2008 Adoption”  putting the case for using mostly CobiT and ValIT from ITGI portfolio in order to enable IT Governance according to ISO 38500 (it goes through all the six principles and three main tasks described on the standard).

[Found it reading the crystal clear and highly recommended "The journey towards enterprise governance of IT" by Geoff Harmer]

State of the Art of ITIL… It’s the people!

Ponte Vecchio - Crowd, by Tom Stardust at Flickr - some rights reserved

According to Hornbill’s study report written by Mauricio Marrone (published September of 2009), the main barriers to ITIL adoption are (barrier with most responses at the top): 

1. Lack of resources ([people] time or people)
2. Cultural resistance to organizational change
3. Maintaining momentum/progress stagnates

These barriers depend on that fundamental little element on organizations: People. Whence, IT management and IT Governance must align execution and responsibility with envolved people to make sure producing relevant outcomes on time does happen.

Seven “ITIL is not” statements

1. It’s not technology – it’s [IT] service management

2. It’s not the last word – it’s a reference, a good place to start

3. It does not teach how to do it - rather guides on what to do

4. It is not a tool – it is responsibilities, activities, results… it does need tools

5. It’s not instantaneous – it is gradual (for humans!)

6. It is not magic – just reusable common sense

7. It is not peaceful – it always goes with organizational change

[update: There's now an excellent Portuguese version of these seven "not" statements by Rubens Ranginha in his blog. Bem haja Rubens!]

ITIL Blues on Twitter

Now you can receive instant updates of this blog via Twitter by following @itilblues.

After reading Seth Godin’s post on twitterfeed now I’m using it too – excellent service indeed.