Big Bang! Evolution?……or Extinction! – Paul Wilkinson’s blog

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Publikováno: 18. 2. 2019

Big Bang! Evolution?……or Extinction!

Big Bang was the theme at the annual itSMF conference in Prague. The central question being ‘Does ITSM need a big bang in this age of Digital disruption’? My answer is ‘No’! We do not need a big bang, but equally, letting evolution slowly take its course in this age of Agile and Speed is also not an option. We need an evolutionary leap, which needs a management ‘intervention’ and will be hard! If we fail to achieve this rapid evolution the business has choices and can look elsewhere for their IT provisioning. Which really does mean it is survival of the most adaptable.

What do I mean by and evolutionary leap? Many organizations still seem to be struggling to make the growth from an ‘Order taker’ to a ‘Service provider’. The next two levels are ‘Trusted advisor’ and ‘Strategic partner’ (Taken from the BRM Institute ‘Business Relationship maturity Model’). The problem is that our skills, our thinking, our behavior and IT culture all needs changing to become a Strategic partner. The pace of industry change, and the growing criticality of IT means this big shift needs to be accelerated. It cannot be left to happen naturally as in human evolution.

What do I mean when I say change thinking and behavior, and what sort of skills? The most recent ITSMTools survey revealed that both BRM (Business Relationship Management) and COBIT (An IT Governance approach) scored low in the areas of interest for the ITSM community. Which to me is a very worrying situation. Why is this? Here is a recent article I had published on the ISACA site which reveals a clear need to address some long standing challenges and develop some new skills. Particularly in the area of ITSM in relation to IT Governance. As for the need to change behaviors I presented the top ABC (Attitude, Behavior, Culture) issues that have been the same issues for more than 10 years!! Business owners are now insisting IT changes the way is behaves. Here is an example of some of the behaviors and what a CEO said.

Gaming the way to accelerated growth

At the conference GamingWorks conducted two 2-hour workshops in which delegates played a mini Grab@Pizza business simulation game. The aim was to try to create the mindset and behavior shift necessary. In the workshops delegates explored ‘Business & IT-Alignment’, the need for ITSM capabilities to improve, the role of BRM vs ITSM, and the role of ITSM in relation to IT Governance, capturing at the end some concrete takeaways to help speed up the process of evolution.

Only one of the delegates in the two sessions was using COBIT and none of the organizations had adopted, or even heard of BRM. All of the delegates were ITIL experts and practitioners. Playing my role as CEO in the business simulation I challenged them to use their ITSM skills to help ‘Digitally Transform’ my organization together with my team of business managers.

At the start of the simulation as CEO I revealed the Grab@Pizza results showing wasted IT investments and revenue loss because of IT outages. There is a massive growing business demand for new IT enabled innovation, there is too much technical debt which is a barrier to us rapidly responding to changing market conditions. The critical role that IT plays means also that we need to improve reliability and availability.

We then played one round of the simulation. In both simulations growth goals were not achieved and an unacceptable level of value leakage occurred. Communication was poor between business & IT and within the end-to-end IT teams. Collaboration between teams and processes was poor. How come? Why didn’t the ITSM skills help? What did we recognize from our daily reality? What did we learn and what can we take away? The fact that communication was poor is a common symptom and was highlighted by Barclay Rae, Ivor MacFarlane and myself in our conference presentations. Here is a more detailed article showing what happens in a Grab@Pizza simulation. Click on the buttons for Scene 3 and Scene 4 in this article. How do YOU and your colleagues communicate with YOUR business. As in Scene 3? Or 4? And does YOUR business govern IT effectively?

At the end of the simulation exercise we explored ‘What are your key takeaways based upon what you experienced in the simulation?

• Find out the business ‘appetite’ for digital innovation. Use this to scale up our BRM capability, otherwise we create a bottleneck at the strategic portfolio phase and cannot gather the right info for ITSM.
• Changing the business behavior on Governing IT. The business often only focuses on demanding innovation and features and not on outages, risk and technical debt. Insisting all business initiatives get the resources, then blaming IT when the risk items damage value. IT Governance is needed in the form of ‘decision making and prioritization’ around (Performance vs Conformance), or (Value creation vs Value leakage).
• Improve our ability to make business cases in terms of business impact (e.g. removing technical debt such as Errors). But to do this IT must develop better business intelligence. The BRM role and BRM as a capability needs to ensure this is captured, understood and translated into practices (People, Process. Product, Partner capabilities).
• Improve our decision-making capabilities. Unclear decision-making authorities and poor insight into strategic priorities. Too many assumptions! Too much prioritization by ‘whoever shouts the loudest’. Strategic goals and criteria for prioritization needs to be clear throughout the end-to-end value stream and flow of work – BRM has a critical role in helping IT gain this business understanding. And business Governance mechanisms should prevent business abuse of this.
• Ensure all in ITSM understand ‘Value creation’ and ‘Value leakage’ (ITIL – Value, Outcomes, vs Costs, Risks) this needs to be translated into priority mechanisms for Portfolio, SLM, Change and Operational work (e.g. Incidents).
• Need for leadership in end-to-end reflection and improvement sessions. BRM and SM have an important role to play in getting end-to-end engagement, involvement and commitment. There is no Big Bang improvement, we need to apply continual learning and small iterative improvements that deliver value. BRM has a crucial role in CSI bringing in ‘the voice of the business’.
• The Business Relationship manager (BRM) and Service Manager (SM) need to operate as a team to the business. When the business complains about outages and service performance (Value Leakage) the SM can pick this up. The BRM can then explore value and outcomes and value creating work. (To avoid the BRM being pushed into an operational, ITSM fire fighter).
• Develop ‘Trust’ and ‘Credibility’. If we want to move beyond where many are now – between ‘order taker’ and ‘service provider’ to ‘trusted advisor’ or ‘strategic partner’. This means showing business understanding and demonstrating value. Not just reporting meaningless internal metrics and SLA reports.
• Improve Problem management capabilities. Problem management is critical to show business impact of outages and needs to work closely with BRM to make business cases for removing technical debt (in terms of errors).
• Make SLA’s meaningful to the business. Linking them to business impact. Reporting in terms of business impact. Not just 5% increase in first call resolution. What did this mean in terms of cost reduction, increase hours spent value adding work, increased business productivity, increased customer satisfaction.
• Need to change ‘IT lingo to business lingo’. We need to improve communication based upon business impact and use communication to improve the relationship, taking the first step to be seen as a ‘Trusted advisor’. ‘Not just RFC 1,2, and app1, but how these relate to strategic business initiatives e.g. ‘the Superbowl’ (the most important strategic initiative for the Grab@Pizza organization). Understand what your organizations ‘Superbowl’ moments are.
• Integrate ITSM processes, they are now SILO based and not aligned through the value stream. Processes need to explore with other processes upstream and downstream information needs. The SM can facilitate these integration initiatives and add them onto the CSI backlog.
• Gain more visibility in the value stream. We need to be able to show the development and changes in relation to business portfolio and value and ensure this is also visible to the operational ITSM processes, so they can scale up resources, skills and knowledge in time.

Conclusion

The majority of delegates were ITIL practitioners, yet much of their ITIL knowledge was theoretical or SILO focused. Hardly any of the attendees in the conference had read the ITIL Practitioner and were unfamiliar with the guiding principles, such as ‘Focus on Value’. Which is still the number 1 chosen ABC card in global workshops and has been for 15 years!! ‘IT has too little understanding of business impact and priority’.

Very few delegates had even heard of Business Relationship Management (BRM) or knew what it was. Some have account representatives and assume this is the same.

Very few delegates understood IT Governance (performance vs conformance) and how ITSM plays a critical role.

Many delegates recognize that the SLA’s and metrics we have position us clearly as service providers and these are very much ‘internally focused’. I revealed in my presentation at the conference Gartner findings that 45% of organizations do NOT measure the business value of IT, and only 6% have metrics that link back to business objectives.

Many delegates recognize the need to also change business behaviors, yet do not have the ‘trust’ and ‘credibility’ to be seen as a trusted advisor to help bring this about. This is one reason in my view that the COBIT goals cascade is an ideal dialogue instrument that the BRM role can use. It being an IT Governance instrument for business leaders it is more likely to be accepted than ITIL which is seen as a IT set of practices.

This 2-hour workshop aimed at helping ‘ITIL practitioners’ translate theory into practice, showed the value of ‘Experiential learning’ or ‘Learning by doing’ as an addition to theoretical certification training. Delegates not only learnt to apply practices but ALSO captured concrete CSI (continual service improvement) actions to take away. Actions aimed at an evolutionary leap in ITSM thinking and acting toward a Strategic partner role.

Playing this type of simulation with both business and IT stakeholders, representing the end-to-end value stream is a valuable way of changing mindsets and gaining business & IT commitment to changing behaviors.

Take a look at the list of takeaways above. Should you also be gaining end-to-end commitment for these types of improvements? Can you afford not too?

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Autor:: Kateřina Mrkvičková