Assign Roles

Before you start, you need to allocate the key roles to named individuals. These may be existing positions, with people already assigned, or they may be new. The individuals need to understand their responsibilities, especially if this is a new role. The key roles are as follows:

• CSI manager
• Service owner
• Reporting analyst
• Service level manager

The service level manager is going to be particularly important as the key interface between the business and IT.

Begin Monitoring and Reviewing

Improvement should be based on an agreed and documented baseline to enable and track the progress toward measurable targets. This means that monitoring and reporting on technology, process, and service metrics needs to be put into place.

Regular internal IT service review meetings should be held so that the IT service provider can evaluate performance and investigate any issues prior to meeting with the customer. This ensures that they can have a suggested improvement plan to present to the business’s representatives when they meet with them.

The Service Approach

The first approach is to choose just one service first and concentrate on it (expanding to other services later). The continual service improvement manager chooses a service with known issues and works with the service owner to compare the actual performance with what the business needs. The data should also be examined to identify any historical trends.

• The current monitoring should be reviewed to evaluate whether it is appropriate and sufficient. Limited component monitoring may be happening, for example, but no end-to-end monitoring. Although not ideal, the data that is available can be analyzed for trends, possible causes, and so on.
• Incident tickets should be reviewed to identify trends or consistently failing configuration items.
• Changes should also be reviewed to ascertain whether they have impacted the service.
• Report the findings and identify improvement opportunities.

Realistically, continual service improvement must start somewhere, even if this starting point is not ideal. If the data is very poor, then the first improvement to implement is to set up the necessary monitoring from that point forward. As better data becomes available, it can be analyzed to identify trends or repeated similar failures.

The Lifecycle Approach

An alternative answer to the “Where do we start?” question is to adopt a lifecycle approach. The success of each stage of the service lifecycle depends, in part, on the actions and outputs of the preceding stage; if service design does not document the service solution properly, it will be hard for service transition to thoroughly test it. Similarly, if service transition does not carry out effective knowledge transfer to service operations, the quality of support will suffer. Good information is needed for the staff involved in each stage to understand where they are weak and need to improve. It is the responsibility of staff involved in every stage to monitor, report, and analyze their activities and to identify improvement opportunities.

Ultimately, many issues with services can be traced back to failures in one of the lifecycle processes. The lifecycle stages cannot be examined using a linear approach because it will take some time to understand whether the strategy was correct. The key stages to be examined are design, transition, and operation. Each stage can feed back improvement suggestions to the preceding stage. By taking this approach, CSI can identify improvements to processes that will impact the eventual service quality before the service becomes live.

The Functional Group Approach

A third approach is known as the functional group approach. This approach is usually adopted if there is an obvious issue with a particular team, with many faults being traced back to their actions. There may be common issues across all services related to one particular group, so by addressing this, you will be improving all services. As a general rule, however, unless there is a real issue with a team, the end-to-end improvement process is preferable.

Step 1: Establish a Sense of Urgency

The first step is to establish a sense of urgency. Failure to do this is at the heart of many failed transformations. The staff need to understand that change is essential; asking “What if we do nothing?” can help them realize that unless something is done, nothing will get better, and in fact the situation may actually deteriorate because of the inevitable damage to the business that would occur. Examples of damage could include lost sales and therefore lost revenue from outages of business-critical systems or a reduction in the IT budget, which could ultimately lead to unwanted change such as downsizing or offshoring. Thinking about the consequences of inaction can be helpful when composing a business case for the initiative. Answering this question at all organizational levels, and considering the consequences of inaction of different stakeholders, will help people understand that this does affect them, and therefore it helps to win their support.

CSI initiatives must generate the belief that change is both necessary and inevitable—that the status quo is not an option. Staff can be involved in and influence the change, or not, but it will happen anyway.

Step 2: Create a Guiding Coalition

To lead the change, set up a small team made up of key individuals with experience who command respect, trust, and credibility. It is important to realize that team members need not all be senior managers; staff who are respected among their peers at lower levels of the organizational structure can be influential in winning support from the rest of the staff. A single champion cannot achieve success alone. Over time, the team may grow as more people come on board. The team must be totally convinced of the benefits of the change and prepared to spend time and effort convincing and motivating others to participate.

Step 3: Develop a Vision and Strategy

It is important that there is a shared vision of what is being attempted. Part of the job of the guiding coalition is to summarize this in a short vision statement that can be used to ensure that everyone is on board. A vision statement should do the following:

• Clarify the direction of the change
• Motivate people to take action
• Enable those actions to be coordinated
• Outline the aims of senior management

The vision statement also serves as a useful reference point when other suggestions are made. The suggestions can be analyzed to see whether they will help achieve the vision or whether they are a diversion from it. There is a danger otherwise that many different initiatives may be included, whether they complement or conflict with the original. This leads to confusion and ultimately failure. The vision statement needs to be simple and easy to communicate. The goals of CSI should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) and justified in terms relating to the business.

Step 4: Communicate the Change Vision

Communicating the vision in a way that builds support from the staff is essential. They will be thinking, “What is in this for me?” so make sure you make your message relevant to them. We look at how best to communicate the message later in this chapter.

Step 5: Empower Broad-based Action

Steps 1 to 4 are all aimed at creating enthusiasm and winning the stakeholders’ and staff’s support and commitment. Staff must feel part of the project, that it is being achieved by them, not that it is being done to them. This means they must both feel and be empowered to make the necessary changes. To be empowered means being enabled to do something, and the barriers preventing them from doing it are removed. They also need to understand what is to be done, so training and direction is important, and clear and unambiguous fixed goals need to be set. Finally, they need to have whatever tools are required to enable them to carry out the task. Remember, once people are empowered, they are accountable, so it is important for the CSI manager to ensure that the staff really understand what they need to do and are confident that they can carry it out successfully.

Step 6: Create Short-Term Wins

Kotter’s sixth step concerns planning for and creating short-term wins. These early successes ensure that the initial enthusiasm among the staff is maintained, even in a large transformation project spread over many months. Early wins confirm that changes are happening and encourage the feeling of urgency and inevitability we talked about in step 1. An effective CSI manager will plan to have a mixture of changes to be implemented: quick wins, medium-term achievements, and the longer-term structural changes.

Many service management improvements take a long time to show results, so when the short-term wins are achieved, they should be communicated to everybody concerned to help maintain a feeling of forward motion and increasing momentum. It is important to include in the communication information about who benefits and how the changes support business goals. Short-term wins also help convince sceptics of the benefits of the implementation and ensure the continued support of influential stakeholders, who like to have something they can use to demonstrate progress. As more people become convinced by seeing these quick-win benefits delivered, they can join the guiding coalition. There is a saying that “nothing succeeds like success,” which is very appropriate here—the successful delivery of benefits quickly builds momentum and morale and results in increased confidence when more challenging steps have to be taken.

Step 7: Consolidate Gains and Produce More Change

As we have discussed, successful short-term wins keep the momentum going and create more change. CSI should therefore address short-, medium-, and long-term wins. This ensures that changes are not just a flurry of quick wins but that these wins are followed by more fundamental medium- and long-term changes. Each type of gain (short-, medium- or long-term) has value:

• Short-term wins show that change is possible.
• Medium-term wins build confidence and help to develop new ways and practices.
• Long-term wins build CSI into all processes and embed cultural change.

This creates a culture of change by embedding changes into business as usual, avoiding the improvement being seen as “last year’s buzzword.”

Step 8: Anchor New Approaches in the Culture

The final step Kotter addresses is institutionalizing the change by anchoring the new approaches in the culture. This is the “holy grail” of continual service improvement; how do we make our changes business as usual? To institutionalize a change means to show how it has produced real benefits and to ensure that the improvements are embedded. Too often, CSI is regarded as a project, with the project team disbanded before this institutionalization has taken place; before long people may revert to old working practices. CSI must be a way of life, not a knee-jerk reaction to a specific failure.

Here are some ways of institutionalizing changes:

• Recruit staff with ITIL- or customer- and service-focused experience.
• Brief all new staff in the ways of working and train existing staff.
• Ensure that service goals and management reporting are matched to changing requirements.
• Make sure progress continues by ensuring that actions from meetings are carried out.
• Integrate new IT solutions into existing processes.

The proof of success is when staff defend “their” procedures and suggest improvements and service and process owners willingly promote the successful change.

Assigning Responsibility for the Communications Plan

The communications strategy and plan should include appointing an individual with the following responsibilities:

• Identifying the audience
• Designing and delivering communications to stakeholders
• Identifying communications opportunities and appropriate methods
• Developing a plan and milestones and covering who, what, why, where, and when
• Responding to feedback

Who Is the Messenger?

There are several key aspects to keep in mind when devising the plan. First, it is important to align the messenger with the message. Sometimes this will be the CIO; at other times it may be a service owner or process owner who should be doing the communicating.

What Is the Message?

Second, the purpose and objective of the message need to be defined and tailored to the target audience. Continually communicate the benefits of the CSI program as a whole, but address the WIIFM (what’s-in-it-for-me) response from the audience.

Who Is the Target Audience?

Consider the target audience. For CSI, this could be senior management, mid-level managers, or the staff who will be tasked with performing CSI activities. The choice of the right messenger will depend on the target audience and the message; senior managers will expect to be briefed by one of their peers, whereas service desk staff would be intimidated by such a messenger, and the service desk manager or incident manager process owner may be more appropriate for them.

When and How Often?

You need to consider the timing and frequency of communications. Too early or too late will mean it is ineffective. The message needs to be repeated; a one-off communication is unlikely to really sink in. A schedule of what communications are planned, and when, will be an important part of your communications plan. Take a look at the sample in Table 49.1.

How Best to Communicate?

There are many methods open for how a message can be communicated. Methods such as emails, newsletters, notice boards, and the intranet will work well for some changes. Others will need the more personal approach of team meetings, personal briefings, and so on. These have the advantage of the presenter being able to judge how effective the communication has been and how well received; this information can be used to tailor the message in the future and/or show the need for additional means of communicating with the audience. For example, if there seems to be more information being provided than the audience can handle, the plan may be altered to split the meeting into two meetings or to provide a handout. Another advantage of meetings and briefings is that they allow feedback and thus make the communication a two-way process.

Provide a Feedback Mechanism

Finally, provide a feedback mechanism. Allow staff to ask questions and provide feedback on the change initiative. If the topic is sensitive, such as the effect the project may have on staff numbers, allow a method of anonymous feedback and questions. Make sure someone is assigned the responsibility for checking and ensuring that responses are provided to the questions/comments. Unless the question relates to a particular person, it is a good idea to publish all the questions received (without saying who submitted them) and the answers, because someone may have not raised an issue themselves but still wants to know the answer.