ITSM part 3

III. Must-Have Implementation Steps
Locate your biggest wins. Educate and get buy-in. Map out one process or practice at a time.
IV. The Golden Rules for Maximizing ITIL’s Competitive Advantage
Use your tools to understand the customer. Understand your overall strategy and your goals as an organization. Ground everything in configuration management. Use ITIL modularly
From “Harnessing the Power of ITIL” by Anthony Orr, John Turner, Oryst N. Kunka and Guy Bullen.

These two steps above from a five-point action plan proposed by Orr et al are foundation pieces for ITIL but also have parallels for OSS that are spoken about regularly in this blog.

Locate your biggest wins – In an ITIL situation, this means identifying the ITIL elements that are most helpful to you. For example he most heavily used elements such as Incident Management, Configuration Management, Change Management, Asset Management, Service Request Management, etc are probably going to be areas where you can gain your greatest wins. They are probably similar in OSS-land.

Educate and get buy-in – Whether it’s OSS or ITIL, these implementations introduce significant change into an organisation so education and buy-in are key planks of an organisational change management approach.

Map out one process at a time – To establish quick wins and simplify the implementation, whether it is an ITIL element or one of the TMF Application Framework (NGOSS TAM) elements for OSS, it is better to narrow focus onto one thing at a time, which should probably align with “Locate your biggest wins” above

Use your tools to understand your customer – In both OSS and ITIL, this is probably the most underestimated requirement in the requirement capture process, but it is possibly also most closely aligned to the perception of success of your solution / project by stakeholders.

Understand your overall strategy and your goals as an organization – This should be the starting point for building any OSS or ITIL framework…. but usually isn’t.

Ground everything in configuration management – if the underpinning data (ie asset and configuration data) is inaccurate, the tools (OSS or ITIL) can never deliver a positive outcome. Everything else ties back to these foundations.

Use ITIL modularly – Modularity tends to perpetuate standardisation and in turn tends to reduce custom integration between modules. Both of these tend to reduce costs, both CAPEX and OPEX. Just as this stands true for ITIL elements, it also holds true for OSS but is often difficult for CSPs to achieve due to lack of consistency of interpretation of standards between vendors.

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