There has been much discussion about the ITIL V3 core books since they were published in May 2007 and clearly some people have been disappointed with these publications judging by the statement made by OGC in February 2010: “… there have been some fair criticisms fed back to OGC. Hundreds of issues have been logged under change control on the best-management-practice website”. As you will know the core books are being revised/realigned by OGC in an attempt at improvement.  Meanwhile, in late October 2010, OGC published an ITIL V3 update to a classic and highly-respected ITIL V2 book.  It is titled: ITIL V3 Planning to Implement Service Management (PISM).  Here is my review of this book.

I’ll start by explaining that I extensively studied, used and continue to use the ITIL V2 version of this book – Planning to Implement Service Management (2002) – back in 2003 writing a training course based on the book for my employer at the time. I often tell people it is the best OGC ITIL book. Now it is replaced and improved. The new book will certainly provide valuable guidance to anyone contemplating PISM or looking to conduct service improvement for the soon-to-be-available ITIL Master qualification.

ITIL V3 Planning to Implement Service Management has been written by Colin Rudd, an ITIL and ISO 20000 contributor, best-practice consultant and publicist for much of his 40 year career and a co-author of ITIL V3 Service Design. The book’s preface takes great pains to thank the original contributors and reviewers of the V2 book and the new book has retained the earlier approach.  However, it has been completely rewritten and substantially improved by the inclusion of considerable extra content, particularly in the area of governance and the importance of understanding the need for, and approach to achieving, cultural change.

The core chapters of the book, as with the old book, are structured around the ITIL Continuous Improvement Model that anyone holding an ITIL V3 Foundation or ITIL V2 Manager qualification will be familiar with:

• What is the vision?
• Where are we now?
• Where do we want to be?
• How do we get there?
• Did we get there?
• How do we keep the momentum going?

There is a chapter for each of these questions supported by initial chapters:
  1. Introduction
  2. Achieving cultural change
and concluding chapters:
  9. Relationships, roles and organisational structures
  10. Enablers and blockers to continual service improvement.

There is also a concise Chapter 11: Summary, that explains the 7 key activities for achieving success in PISM and there are 7 appendices plus a new glossary related to the content.  However, there is no abbreviations list and there is only a 13 item bibliography rather than detailed referencing to the sources used – a pity, but that is the OGC ITIL publishing style it seems.

The book recognises that for success with PISM, it is vital to not solely focus on implementation and process improvement but to recognise other elements need to be considered including:
“Vision and governance
Steering and strategy
Processes
People
Products and technology
Culture, service and attitude
Organization, communication and relationships.”

I am aware of several large organisations that needed to re-launch their ITSM implementation programme to fully take account of these elements after their initial “implementation-only” approach failed to make significant improvements.

Here are my views on some important areas of PISM and how the book covers them.

Recognition of the importance of an IT steering group (ISG)
Chapter 1: Introduction has a section titled: Planning and Implementing Fundamentals that discusses the need for an IT steering group or IT strategy group (ISG) “committees of senior management from the business and IT organizations…(with) overall accountability for setting governance, direction, policy and strategy for IT services”.  This is good advice and is the #1 factor for successful IT governance as discovered from academic research by Van Grembergen and De Haes. Differing from PISM – which I think is trying to reflect the terminology currently used in organizations – Van Grembergen and De Haes take the view that the IT Strategy and IT Steering groups are separate – the IT Strategy group is at board level whereas the IT Steering Group is at senior management level. In my experience, most organisations currently have only an IT Steering Group that conducts the activities PISM describes.

Focus on improvement of organisational culture
The importance of improvement of organisational culture is vital for success. As the key message in the Summary chapter says: “The most important resource and the most important capability of any organisation are the people.”

Chapter 2: Achieving Cultural Change carefully explains organizational culture with a useful table of indicators of good and bad organisational culture , referencing the seminal work of Handy and the more recent – but popular – ABC of ICT  by Wilkinson and Schilt. The chapter discusses culture improvement in the context of the Deming Cycle with a refreshing view that it is best to start with Check (Check – Act –Plan – Do). The Plan section does a good job of explaining Kotter’s 8 steps  – the approach of the ITIL Continuous Improvement Model and basis of this book.

How to conduct process maturity assessments
Another vital step is to understand the current state of ITSM in an organisation. Chapter 4:Where are we now? discusses several approaches to assessment including assessment of the 7 elements.  There is practical guidance on how to be successful with stakeholder involvement and benchmarking.

Vision and governance include ISO 38500, outline COBIT processes and COBIT’s approach to maturity assessment as well as recognising that the COBIT Deliver and Support (DS) processes overlap substantially with ITIL V3 processes.  Surprisingly, there is no mention of the fact that two very significant ITIL V3 processes: Change Management and Release and Deployment Management map significantly to processes AI6 and AI7 in COBIT’s Acquire and Implement (AI) domain. However, quite rightly, the control objectives of the processes in COBIT’s Plan and Organise (PO) domain are recommended as a way to assess maturity of steering (and strategy) activities that the ISG conduct.

There is much focus on the ITIL extended process maturity framework (EPMF) including an appendix describing it with detailed assessment criteria for practical use. EPMF is an extension to PMF (see V2 PISM Appendix J and V3 Service Design Appendix H). Other approaches to assessment are introduced: ISO 20000 (ITSM), ISO 15504 (process maturity assessment) and CMMI (process maturity) – although failing to mention CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC). However, unlike EPMF, there is no practical guidance on how they might be used, other than a reference to ISO 20000-5 (exemplar implementation plan) and the now-published (25 Nov. 2010) ISO 20000-4 (process reference model for process maturity assessment). However, there are many specialist books on these topics, such as Implementing ISO/IEC 20000 Certification – The Roadmap by Clifford and van Bon

Metrics
Organisations conducting PISM need to introduce appropriate metrics for ITSM. I’ve always advised using the V2 PISM book as a good source. The metrics are updated in this book with the addition of a section on overall service provider measurements. However, rather surprisingly, not all V3 ITIL processes are covered; there are no metrics for IT Security Management or Portfolio Management, for example. If you need a source of Portfolio Management metrics, look at ISACA’s Val IT 2.0 framework and study the domain Portfolio Management (PM).

Summary
Overall, I am impressed with this book.  It has retained the Kotter 8 steps approach together with much of the original content and has incorporated many key ideas from not only the ITIL V3 core books but also ISO 20000 (ITSM), ISO 38500 (IT governance), ISO 15504 (process maturity assessment), ISO 9000 (quality) and well-established frameworks such as COBIT and CMMI. There is a seven page case study (Appendix G) and the book is completely up to date, even describing Part 5 of ISO 20000 that was only published in the summer of 2010. The book has 320 pages, is priced at GBP 75 ($110) and is available from many online bookstores or the publisher, TSO.

© 2010 Geoff Harmer