We all understand that ITIL is a best practice framework that is widely used across the IT industry. We know that it can be used to standardize practices, improve quality and reduce cost but why do we continue to hear mutterings about doing ITIL for ITIL’s sake? Where does the real value come from and what processes should we start with? I consider myself to be an ITIL evangelist of sorts but I am also a very practical guy who wants to see how things can be improved in the workplace. I want to deliver improved customer value and services through operational excellence.

I have conducted multiple ITIL maturity assessments in various organizations and I like the baseline that it provides. In my view the baseline is a good pointer to where things need to be improved, as it identifies the processes that can be improved individually but there is a more fundamental point that needs to be addressed:

Where does the real value come from and how do we measure it?

If you are part of the ITIL linked in community, you may have come across the phrase: ‘outside in’, which is commonly associated with a lean approach. And this is where I think the real value comes from – Taking this external perspective rather than an internal IT perspective. Using lean and its continuous improvement culture, organizations can improve operational efficiency, quality and responsiveness to demand.

This lean approach should focus firstly on value and secondly on the end to end system, which includes your internal organization and your external (third party) organizations. I would contrast this with the assessment/baselining process that has the virtue of being top-down, but fails to keep the customer’s perspective as its primary driver of value and focuses almost exclusively on IT’s internal metrics.

Here are some suggested activities that can help IT to provide real value:

1. Focus on the customer, not IT. Understand what the customer really wants from IT and then set measures and targets through all levels of the IT organization, ensuring that IT staff is aware of their role and impact as it relates to the end to end service. The measures should have clear line of sight to improving service delivery aligned to the customer’s objectives. This should mean measuring IT services in appropriate customer language e.g. if the customer wants its employees to be paid on time every two weeks, the measure should be in pay checks, not IT system availability.
   For most organizations this means changing the way IT organizational targets are set; moving away from the retrospective focus on adherence to budgetary forecasts, towards clear line of sight to customer endorsed goals. But target setting, and crucially, the mechanism for measuring performance need to be driven bottom-up and embedded in the work of operational teams, under the coaching of IT leadership.
2. Use staff with varying degrees of seniority in swat teams or Kaizen blitzes to rapidly fix known issues. Most customers will be able to quickly identify their top five IT issues whether this is a complex process such as on-boarding and all its associated sub processes, or a more simple process such as password resets.
   The purpose of these swat teams/kaizen blitzes is to speedily resolve a customer issue by using a well-structured and facilitated process.
3. In addition to the kaizen blitz process, you should be able to increase the capacity of your organization by applying lean to all of your processes. There is typically an inordinate amount of waste when performing routine processes. Each process should be focused on value adding activities, and remember, this is value add from a customer perspective. Any activity that does not focus on delivering value to the customer is potential waste and should be removed or at least reduced. If you investigated the end to end process for user provisioning of a lap top and recorded the actual time spent on value add activities, you would probably not be surprised that it will be a small percentage of the end to end process time. Far too much time is wasted while the request goes through various approvals; sequential hand offs between different resolver groups, or just sits in a queue.

Conclusion
There are real benefits to IT organizations in adopting lean practices. However, these do require material changes to the culture of focusing on the value add from a customer perspective; target-setting; taking an active interest in reducing the burden of management processes to free-up capacity and collaborating with service providers to focus on increasing business productivity.

In a future column, I will look at the Service Desk as a specific example for applying lean tools and techniques