Chapter 31
Challenges, Critical Success Factors, and Risks

THE FOLLOWING ITIL INTERMEDIATE EXAM OBJECTIVES ARE DISCUSSED IN THIS CHAPTER:

  • ✓  The challenges facing service transition
  • ✓  Measurement through analyzing critical success factors
  • ✓  Potential implementation risks that could affect services currently in transition and being planned
  • ✓  External factors that affect the approach to service transition

In this chapter, we review the challenges, critical success factors, and risks relating to transitions. These concepts will enable you to manage transitions more effectively by understanding the issues you may face, how to measure for success, and to put in place mitigation actions to reduce the risk to the transition.

Service Transition Challenges

Challenges for service transition are driven by the complexity of provision because organizations now deal with a large variety of customers, users, programs, projects, suppliers, and partners. This provides a challenge in managing a large stakeholder group because transition affects everybody. The relationships with customers, suppliers, users, and projects are often complicated and need to be managed as a transition moves into operation.

Ensuring that transition processes can integrate with other business processes (for example, finance, HR, and procurement) is also a challenge. There may also be insufficient knowledge of the dependencies on legacy systems, making impact analysis difficult, and this may have a significant effect on the introduction of new systems and services.

A major challenge is to address the balance between maintaining a stable live environment and being responsive to the business needs for changing the services and achieving a balance between pragmatism and bureaucracy. Transition is perfectly placed to support this, and it is one of the reasons that this lifecycle stage is so important and must not be ignored or cut short.

Many of the challenges relate to cultural change, such as creating an environment that fosters standardization, simplification, and knowledge sharing. Service transition must persuade the business that it is an enabler of business change and, therefore, an integral component of the business change programs. It is made easier if the challenge of finding process champions is achieved. This can create a culture that encourages people to collaborate and work effectively together.

Developing standard performance measures across projects and suppliers and ensuring that the quality of delivery and support matches the business use of new technology is a significant challenge for all organizations. Effective use of the service transition processes requires protecting the service transition time and budget from being impacted by events earlier in the service lifecycle.

Risk management is the source of several challenges, including understanding different stakeholder perspectives on risk. This reflects the complexity of managing organizations with varied structures. During transition, it’s important to achieve the optimum balance between managing risk and taking risks and to provide effective reporting in relation to risk management and corporate governance.

Some organizations will be driven by the requirements and reporting required by Sarbanes-Oxley, ISO/IEC 20000, ISO/IEC 38500, and COBIT (if applicable). These standards and governance requirements both support and provide challenges to the success of service transition as a lifecycle stage.

Critical Success Factors

Service provision, in all organizations, needs to be matched to current and rapidly changing business demands. The objective is to continually and cost-effectively improve the quality of service while ensuring that it is aligned to the business requirements. To meet this objective, certain critical success factors need to be considered for service transition.

It is necessary to understand and manage the different stakeholder perspectives that underpin effective risk management within an organization. Establishing and maintaining stakeholder buy-in and commitment and having clearly defined relationships and interfaces with program and project management is vital to the success of a transition. Equally important is maintaining these contacts and managing all the relationships during service transition.

Another critical success factor is the integration of service transition with the other service lifecycle stages and the processes and disciplines that impact service transition. It is important to ensure that the dependencies among the legacy systems, new technology, and human elements are clearly understood. Legacy systems are often overlooked but can have a significant impact on the introduction of new services.

Here are some additional critical success factors necessary for successful service transition:

  • Automating processes to eliminate errors
  • Managing knowledge
  • Developing good-quality systems, tools, processes, and procedures
  • Exploiting the cultural and political environment
  • Understanding the technical configurations and dependencies
  • Understanding the processes, procedures, skills, and competencies required for service transition
  • Having a workforce with the necessary knowledge and skills, appropriate training, and the right service culture
  • Ensuring clear accountabilities, roles, and responsibilities
  • Encouraging a knowledge-sharing culture

It is important for service transition to deliver change with less variation in time, cost, and quality predictions during and after transition. This should ensure improved customer and user satisfaction, which is critical for continued successful transitions.

If it cannot be demonstrated that the benefits of establishing and improving the service transition practice and processes outweigh the costs, then there will be a significant impact on the credibility of transition. This should be supported by effective communication of the organization’s attitude to risk during service transition activities and by building a thorough understanding of risks that have impacted or may impact successful service transition of services in the service portfolio.

Service Transition Risks

New service transition practices should not be implemented without recognizing the potential risk to services currently in transition and releases that are planned. A baseline assessment of current transitions and planned projects will help service transition to identify implementation risks.

Particular risks include the change in accountability, responsibilities, and practices of existing projects (for example, project teams not keeping operational teams up-to-date with progress on a particular activity) that demotivate the workforce, leading to alienation of some key support and operations staff. There may be additional unplanned costs to services in transition due to unforeseen circumstances, which is a risk, as is resistance to change and circumvention of the processes due to perceived bureaucracy. Another implementation risk is incurring excessive costs to the business by being overly risk averse.

Uncontrolled knowledge sharing, allowing people to have access to information they should not have, is another implementation risk. A lack of maturity and integration of systems and tools may result in people “blaming” technology for other shortcomings. There may be poor integration between the processes, causing a silo approach to delivering IT service management (ITSM), with no integration between processes. Finally, the loss of productive hours presents a risk, as do higher costs, loss of revenue, and perhaps even business failure as a result of poor service transition processes.

Service Transition under Difficult Conditions

In some circumstances, service transitions will be required under atypical or difficult conditions. These conditions may come about as a result of shortness of time or lack of money or people, or at least people with the right skills. There may be factors outside of service transition’s control, such as internal political difficulty, the threat of redundancy, or outsourcing. The corporate culture may be riven with internal rivalries and competitiveness between managers. There may even be other external factors, such as extreme weather, political instability, the aftermath of a disaster, or new legislation.

In some cases, it might be possible to predict these adverse conditions, but it is often the case that they occur during the lifecycle of the transition. When this happens, reaction must take place during the transition stage.

Risk Management

There may be occasions when speed is more important than accuracy or smoothness. This is effectively a risk management decision, and general risk management principles apply. In time-critical situations, implementation of a new or changed service may be more important than a degree of disruption.

Some of the key factors that assist with delivering success in this context are the empowerment of staff to take appropriate levels of risk. It is essential to know the absolute cutoff date/time by which a service transition must deliver. If a “safety margin” has been built in, the service may be delivered earlier to meet the new timeline requirements, complete with errors that could have been removed before the actual deadline.

Similarly, assuming that there is some margin when none exists means missing deadlines. Being open and honest is the best policy in this situation.

Achieving early delivery depends on knowing which components must be available at the cutoff date and which could be added later. This requires an understanding of the dependencies for the whole project or program. Knowing which users/customers/locations must be in place at the cutoff date is also essential. Finally, you must understand what actually happens if you fail. Again, honesty is often the best policy here. Consider the business impact as well as cost, health and safety, embarrassment, and reputation. If a deadline is missed, is it just embarrassing or will huge penalties be involved? Will there be other implications?

In a crisis, follow the rules of crisis management:

  • Rule 1: Don’t panic.
  • Rule 2: A good crisis manager makes decisions instantly and acts on them confidently. If these decisions later turn out to have been correct, so much the better, but speed is often more important than efficiency when managing a crisis situation.
  • Rule 3: Accept that decisions won’t be perfect and that people should not be blamed for making the best decision they can under difficult circumstances.

Success in these circumstances will rely heavily on the trust that is put in the people making the decisions. If a blame culture exists, then there is likely to be hesitancy in decision-making, whereas if the culture is one of empowerment, then a crisis may be handled more effectively.

Proven and reliable processes, procedures, and channels for authorization and control will be important as well. There must be agreed actions if the channels don’t function—for example, increased delegated authority, escalation, and alternative support channels.

Restricted Resources

When resources are in short supply, a key aspect here is deciding what to measure and sticking to that decision and the framework for delivery.

It will be necessary to identify the most important factors—speed, low cost, or something else? These then need to be addressed in a practical manner. This may require some hierarchy of factors or qualification of the way in which they are applied. For example, it must be done within a certain time frame, but only if it remains below a certain cost.

Good communication, management structure, and integration with stakeholders are vital in this circumstance so that all the necessary decisions can be made with the correct authority and within the required timescales.

Safety-Critical Services and High-Risk Environments

Increasingly, IT services directly support or actually deliver services on which lives depend, such as hospital and emergency services and air traffic control. In these circumstances, extra security and foolproof approaches are required. This sort of environment favors accuracy over speed and requires rigorous testing as well as sign-off at the appropriate level and the ability to veto a change on safety grounds. Consider NASA and the go/no-go decisions by individual teams when a space rocket is launched.

Working with Difficult Customers

Of course, there is no such thing as a bad customer, but often there are customers who are unclear of their role and so act in a way that prevents rather than supports successful implementation. They may get more involved in the delivery than the end result, or make decisions based on their own experience and needs, not the overall business need. These kinds of situations can often be improved by awareness and education of all parties involved in the transition. Business relationship managers may be able to help too, but this is another area of cultural change, which needs to be carefully addressed.

Nothing can replace a good relationship with customers during transition. Although each of the lifecycle stages provides guidance on best practice, and service transition is no different, there is nothing that can be specifically applied without understanding the context of the organization. Employing transition leaders with experience and skill in managing transitions and who are sympathetic to the culture of the organization is a vital part of the success of any implementation.

Summary

In this chapter we discussed the following topics:

  • The challenges facing service transition
  • Measurement through analyzing critical success factors
  • Potential implementation risks that could affect services currently in transition and being planned
  • External factors that affect the approach to service transition

Exam Essentials

Understand the challenges faced by service transition. Understand the variety of challenges that are facing service transition, including those involving the business, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

Understand how service transition challenges may be overcome using ITIL best practice. Understand how to address the challenges of service transition by implementing best practice through service transition processes.

Understand the critical success factors that need to be in place if successful service transition is to take place. Understand the importance of clearly defined objectives with measurable targets. Be able to list some CSFs for service transition.

Know the risks encountered in the service transition stage, in particular the danger that the importance of this stage may not be recognized. Understand the risk that service transition’s importance may often be overlooked, resulting in too little time or resources being spent, which can cause increased costs and delays later.

Understand and be able to explain the challenges of working with customers and stakeholders. Understand the challenges of managing customers in all circumstances and the ways in which stakeholders need to be managed.

Explain the use of risk management as part of service transition. Consider the elements of risk management and crisis management and the difficulties that may arise during a transition, and be able to explain how to deal with them.

Review Questions

You can find the answers to the review questions in the appendix.

  1. Which of these statements is/are correct?

    1. One of the significant challenges for service transition is managing a complex stakeholder group.
    2. There is a challenge in integrating service transition with the business processes.
      1. Statement 1 only
      2. Statement 2 only
      3. Both statements
      4. Neither statement

  2. Which of these statements reflects a major challenge for service transition?

    1. There must be a balance between the cost of design and the length of time it takes to complete it.
    2. There must be a balance between maintaining a stable live environment and being responsive to the business needs for changing the services.
    3. There must be a balance between the need to restore service and the requirement to identify root cause of failures.
      1. 2 only
      2. 1 and 2 only
      3. 2 and 3 only
      4. 1, 2, and 3

  3. Which of these are included as challenges to service transition implementation?

    1. Business strategy
    2. Cultural change
    3. Risk management
      1. 1 and 3 only
      2. 2 and 3 only
      3. 1, 2, and 3
      4. 3 only

  4. What guidance does ITIL provide regarding performance measures across projects, providers, and suppliers for service transition?

    1. The performance measures do not matter for service transition.
    2. The performance measures are used only during the operational lifecycle stage.
    3. The performance measures should be standardized for use in service transition.
    4. The performance measures are applicable only during service design.

  5. True or False? A critical success factor for service transition is to engage and maintain stakeholder buy-in to the transition.

    1. True
    2. False

  6. Which of these statements is a critical success factor for service transition?

    1. Automating processes to eliminate errors
    2. Managing knowledge
    3. Developing good-quality systems, tools, processes, and procedures
    4. Exploiting the cultural and political environment
      1. 1, 3, and 4 only
      2. 2 and 4 only
      3. 1, 2, and 3 only
      4. 1, 2, 3, and 4

  7. What is the most important key factor for demonstrating the success of service transition?

    1. Demonstrating that change authorization is important
    2. Demonstrating that changes are delivered with less variation in time, cost, and quality predictions
    3. Demonstrating that release and deployment is important in the testing and delivery of new services
    4. Demonstrating that knowledge management supports the delivery of transitions

  8. Which of these are included in the guidance for service transition in difficult conditions?

    1. Risk management
    2. Restricted resources
    3. Design constraints
    4. Crisis management
      1. 1 and 2 only
      2. 2 and 3 only
      3. 1, 2, and 4 only
      4. 1, 2, 3, and 4

  9. Which of these is NOT a rule of crisis management?

    1. Accept that decisions may not be perfect.
    2. Don’t panic.
    3. Authorize all funding as part of the process.
    4. Make instant decisions and follow them through confidently.

  10. True or False? Certain environments require specific transitional handling, including a go/no-go decision on the final delivery.

    1. True
    2. False
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