Week 4 - Summary - Preparation of a Business Case

This week we studied about preparing a Business Case inline with ITIL and Prince2 project management techniques. We learnt about various factors to justify and convince our stakeholders that the change will bring value not only to the business or organisation but to them as well. We also looked at what will make a business case more effective and successful when it is presented to the stakeholders for them to buy-in to it.

We looked at the issues relating to a change in a business/organisation and possible solutions to address them. We discussed the Causes, Effects and the Consequences of a Change in relation to the business and its stakeholders.

Mark also briefed us on how to make a good Proposal or a Business Case and suggested to make it short and simple with more information available to all if they need it, outlining the What (Cause), Why (effect) and the Benefits to be gained (consequences). The Proposal may also covers areas such as risks, costs, contingency, time-scales etc.

We also learnt about how we can get stakeholders to buy-in to the proposal. For this, we did a small exercise to see what benefit a Change will bring and what are the issues around it. We looked at the People or stakeholder's issues and discussed what will it take to convince them and justify this Change. Different group of students came with lots of issues and solution to address this, some of them are listed below:

· Personal Incentives (What’s in it for me)
· Culture/Attitude
· Fear (Afraid of Technology)
· Lack of interest
· Historic Failures of similar change
· Disbelieve
· Too Difficult
· Don’t see any benefit
· Too much radical changes

Then we did an exercise to combat such concerns by highlighting the benefits for business as well as the stakeholders. This is done by:

· Producing case studies of similar change to show the successes.
· Highlight the incentive to the stakeholders and address the ‘what’s in it for me’ by giving examples such as working smart, effectively, more opportunities, higher rewards etc.
· Opportunities to learn more
· Explain that if the business gets efficient and profitable as a result, it will mean sustainability, growth prospects for all its stakeholders

We compared the Cost and Benefits, discussed the potential Risks of not going ahead with this change. Use of tools such as Gap Analysis and PMF to identify Risk associated in regards to the capabilities and core competencies.

Quick Wins:

We also looked at the appropriate communication that is required for quick wins. They include:

· That the communicaiton is understandable
· Explaining what happens before, during and after the change
· Various means of communication is to be used
· Invite stakeholder for feedback and suggestions
· Should be able to quantify improvement

We also needed to measure the improvement that have come due to this implementation, thing to consider here is the reliability, availability, productivity, contingency in place and increase customer satisfaction i.e. from the Goals to Questions to Metrics.
I hope this is useful, I welcome comments on this please.

Thanks,
Javed

Weblog, what's that?

This weblog is intended to support your learning and facilitate discussion on the topic areas we will look at during our lectures and seminars in a richer manner than what is afforded to us using NILE discussion boards.

Besides the posts and hopefully discussion of those, you'll also find some RSS feeds to the right, and some related web-sites a little further down on the right - the latter are Google ads but have been shown to reflect the content of your weblog - this is not an endorsement!

Please read the help document on taking part in a weblog/blog, signup for an account and contribute whenever and as often as you like.

Those of you that have 'volunteered' and yet to put up your summaries to this web-log need to send me an e-mail (see 'Staff Information' on NILE) and I'll send you an invite to become a contributing author. Include in the e-mail your blogger.com username!

Mark & Roy

Good Quotations

Whilst looking at material for this weeks session, I came across the following quotation:

"It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."
The Red Queen in Through The Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Organisations cannot afford to maintain things as they are now, there's no improvement in that, it takes extra effort to improve things, as I read in The Dilbert calendar in our office (Feb. 2007) this month:

"My philosophy is that anything worth doing is usually too hard!"

Have you come across any other great quotes which might illustrate aspects of the ITIL movement? Please comment to this post.

You might also like to add the Dilbert feed to your RSS news aggregator: feed.

Assessing Capability Maturity using Process Maturity Framework for ITIL

Our contact, John Brookes at Fox IT, a specialist ITIL consultancy have made available an on-line self assessment tool for grading the maturity of each of the ITIL functions.
There are about 20 or so questions for each section, a score and suggestions are returned upon completion.
If you have any questions about the service or need more details, John would be happy to correspond.

In the meantime, why not try it out, use the information from your case study and information you have gained through studying the website and responses to the questions your group have formulated to see where the company is now in terms of maturity.

Please comment to this post with your thoughts and/or other links to software maturity assessment tools which the rest of the group might quite like to use.

Service Management Maturity for UoN IT Services

If you haven't reviewed the assessment of UoN's IT Services department on it's current level of maturity for service management, have a read first.

Consider that this assessment is based upon just one stakeholders opinions with regard to KPAs, however having reviewed it myself, and based on my experience too (I also spent a short time temping for them a few years back), it seems reasonably fair.

Having spoken to Dinesh Parmar in IT services regarding ITIL he seemed to think that it was a really good idea, and I am sure that the previous director of IT services might have thought so as well.

So why don't they engage with the processes - What possible reasons do you think there are for this? (please add your comments)

Week 1 - Summary - Planning and Where are we now

At the beginning of this module we needed to set the scene of what was to come in terms of actually implemting an IT service management solution.

As with any project, and implementing good practice as defined by the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) needs to be managed properly and effectively in order to facilitate success. If we fail to plan, then we plan to fail (see the illustration adjacent, and look it up, it is known as the Deming PDCA cycle, it's concepts can be found within ITIL).

Essentially the journey for implementing service management gets us to ask 4 questions, where are we now, where do we want to be, how will we get there, and finally, when we get there what do we do then (the Deming cycle, points us in the direction of the answer to that one!).

The ITIL framework is a set of guidelines originally set down by the OGC (Office of Government and Commerce) which details best practice in a number of interelated areas. The framework is made up of a number of books:

• Software Asset Management (support IT)
• Service Support (support IT and business)
• Service Delivery (deliver IT)
• ICT Infrastructure Management (Manage infrastructure)
• Delivering Services to Businesses (business perspective)
• Applications Management (managing applications)

Because each business is different it is not necessary to use everything from all of the guidelines, a 'dip-in' approach is acceptable.
Why the need for such a framework? First of all it's worth considering where IT fits in the jigsaw of an organisation and how it was, is and will be viewed. 5, 10 or more years back, IT was probably seen as fairly low status within a business, that has changed because of the way IT is now used to enhance, support and deliver competitiveness that businesses strive for. Using IT in a business is a norm. The IT department is seen as a strategic business unit amongst its peers.

Outsourcing was a hot topic in the last 5 years or so, but difficulties have arisen for some businesses where their demands for change to react to the business environment have not been met with their outsource partners at the velocity required. This has seen a number of blue chip companies attempting to bring back inhouse these business functions and of course with that the management thereof - another reason for referring to best practices. Some functional areas were found to be more easily outsourced than others, typically mature functional areas, for example accounting.

The IT department are now an integral piece of the jigsaw and respond to the needs of the other 'pieces', and because of this, CIO/ICT managers require more than just the technical skills of yesteryear, they need good business skills as well (ITIL can help them here), being able to understand the needs of the business and its strategies and to communicate IT solutions to all levels in a manner which will gain 'buy-in' and importantly the budgets to implement services to maintain the levels of service the business demands.

The business as a whole works for it's stakeholders which include customers and clients - ITIL makes a distinction between these latter two - Please take part and comment on this, and any of the above.

ITIL Implementation In Schools

I was looking around trying to find some more material for you, and also some of my undergraduate students studying INS2002 - ICT Systems Support and came across an article on the BCS website regarding implementation of ITIL principles in primary and secondary schools.

The beauty of ITIL is that it is generic, but that means it needs a different interpretation for each and every adopter. Not so says Tracey Torble of T2 Consulting; as an IT service management consultant to education she found that theory can be put into practice once and applied many times.

The IT systems and services in schools was so diverse that BECTA who carried out some research came up with a generic approach which they called FITS - This is well worth a look.

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