Chapter 42
Challenges, Critical Success Factors, and Risks
THE FOLLOWING ITIL INTERMEDIATE EXAM OBJECTIVES ARE DISCUSSED IN THIS CHAPTER:
- ✓ Service operation challenges
- ✓ Service operation critical success factors
- ✓ Service operation risks
The learning objective for this chapter is to gain an understanding of the challenges, critical success factors, and risks of service operation. Upon completion of the chapter, you should understand the specific issues relevant to service operation.
Service Operation Challenges
The following main challenges facing service operation management are expanded upon in this chapter:
- Lack of engagement with development and project staff
- Justifying funding within service operations
- The differences between design and operational activities
- Ineffective service transition
- Ineffective service metrics
- The use of virtual teams
- Balancing internal and external relationships
Engagement with Development and Project Staff
The first challenge in service operation is to ensure the correct level of cooperation and engagement between the service operation staff and the development and project teams.
The focus of the development and project teams is very different from that of service operation staff. Staff involved in projects and development will focus on the development of new applications or functionality and delivering it into the operational environment. Their work has a defined end point, which is when the application or functionality is delivered. Staff involved in service operation focus on the long-term operation of what has been delivered.
While project staff consider that the delivery of a service on time and to budget is paramount, operations staff care less about meeting a specific date than they do about how well the service will run and what will be involved in supporting it.
Development and project staff may know very little about service management and regard it as relevant only to operations. The ITIL framework makes it clear that service management processes are involved from the very beginning of a service, as part of service strategy, right through to design and transition. Service operation should be involved throughout the development of a new or changed service to ensure that the deliverable is supportable at the end.
These two areas of IT often work quite separately, and there may even be animosity between them. Development staff may see operations staff as introducing unnecessary delay into their project, while operations staff may feel that projects are “dumped” on them with little appreciation or consideration about how they are to be operated in the live environment.
Ensuring that this division is overcome is challenging, but it will mean that operational aspects are considered early enough in the development activities that they can be incorporated into the design fairly easily. Failure to achieve this would constitute a risk to the successful transition and operation of the new service.
Justifying Funding
Service operation managers face the challenge of justifying funding for their area. They may meet with resistance to their funding requests because money spent in this sphere is often regarded as infrastructure costs, with no clear benefit arising from the investment.
Service operation managers should be able to show how investment in the operations area can save the organization money as well as improve the quality of the service being delivered. Here are some examples:
- Reduced software license costs through the better management of licenses
- Fewer incidents and problems and faster resolutions due to effective problem management, leading to reduced support costs
- Improved processes, leading to better usage of existing resources and the elimination of duplication of activities
- Better customer retention from delivering higher levels of service consistently
- Improved utilization of existing infrastructure equipment and deferral of further expenditure as a result of better capacity management.
Differing Service Design and Service Operation Focus and Priorities
The differences between design activities and operational activities will continue to present challenges:
- Service design may tend to focus on one service at a time, whereas service operation tends to focus on delivering and supporting all services at the same time. Operation managers need to work closely with service design and service transition to provide the operation perspective.
- Service design will often be conducted in projects, while service operation focuses on ongoing, repeatable management processes and activities. This may mean that operational staff are unavailable to participate in service design project activities, although as we just mentioned, their participation and engagement with development and project staff is essential if the new service is going to take account of operational issues.
- Once project staff have finished the design of one IT service, they could move onto the next project and not be available to provide support. Overcoming this challenge means ensuring that service operation staff are actively involved in design projects and participate in the early life support of services introduced in the operational environment.
- Success is measured differently for design and operation. Service design is measured by projects being on time and to budget, whereas service operation must ensure, through involvement in the design phase, that the service will operate as expected. If support and other costs are greater than expected in service operation, operational staff will blame the design, and service design staff will blame operations. Addressing this challenge requires service operation to be actively involved in the service transition stage of the lifecycle. The objective of service transition is to ensure that designed services will operate as expected. When the service operation manager is involved, operational aspects can be considered, allowing transition to understand and remedy issues before they become issues in the operational environment.
Other Challenges
- Ineffective service transition processes pose another challenge. Ensuring service operation personnel are involved in validation and testing is required in order that a decision to authorize changes is based on factual evidence. Good change management processes will ensure changes that do not meet expectation are denied.
- Choosing meaningful metrics can be challenging. What can be measured easily may not actually be a useful indication of the level of service being provided. For example, measuring the time taken to answer the phone on the service desk may be easy, but does not show whether the user then receives a good service. (The service design stage is responsible for ensuring that the appropriate metrics are included in the design of the service). Every service will produce its own measurements interpreting these to understand the level of service being provided may not be straightforward. Service level management can help to overcome this, but this requires involvement of operations staff.
Management of Staff
- The use of virtual teams can also present challenges. Hierarchical management structures do not fit increasingly complex organizations, so matrix management has developed in response, where employees report to different sources for different tasks. This makes allocating accountability difficult. Knowledge management and the use of RACI matrices will help in this situation.
- One of the most significant challenges faced by service operation managers is balancing many internal and external relationships. Most IT organizations today are complex, with an increased use of value networks, partnerships, and shared services models. This increases the complexity of managing services, so investment in relationship management knowledge and skills is advisable to help deal with this challenge.
Critical Success Factors
Let us now consider some of the critical success factors for successful service operation:
- Visible ongoing management support, in relation to adherence to processes; appropriate ongoing funding of tools; and staff to support operational activities are essential for success.
- The support of the business is also important, to assist with formulating prioritization tables for incident management, ensuring that the users contact the service desk rather than approach support teams directly and providing the budget to fund operational activities.
- The existence of champions who lead others by their example and enthusiasm is another important factor. These may be senior managers, but champions can be at any level in the organization.
- Make sure there is sufficient staff resources to allow time to be spent implementing new processes and tools while ensuring that the day-to-day work does not suffer.
- Staff with the correct knowledge and skills is important. Staff need training and awareness of technical and service management aspects and may also require training in other areas, such as “soft skills,” business awareness, and tool administration.
- Staff retention is important. Having invested in training, it is in the organization’s interest to retain the trained staff, so it should try to develop career paths for these staff.
The final critical success factors that we consider are those surrounding the toolsets used:
- Using a tool that has been designed to support the processes described in ITIL makes the implementation and management of those processes much easier. Being able to link incidents and problems and to obtain information about configuration items and changes will support these processes, as will being able to report easily against KPIs.
- If a new tool is to be procured, evaluation against a set of defined criteria is required to ensure a good fit to requirements. The tools will also need to be configured and tested.
- The final critical success factor for tools is the ability to produce reports to show the effectiveness of the processes.
Service Operation Risks
In the last section of this chapter, we’ll look at the risks service operation face. These include the absence of the critical success factors—for example, the visible support of management is a CSF, and the absence of that support is a risk.
The ultimate risk is the loss of critical IT services and the resultant damage to the business. In addition to financial loss, there may be extreme cases where the IT services affected are used for critical health or safety purposes when poor service operation poses a health and safety risk.
Other risks are as follows:
- Inadequate funding and resources. A clear business case needs to be made to secure adequate funding; inadequate funding will inevitably have an effect on the level of service that can be delivered. Once allocated, such funding must be reserved for its intended purpose and not spent on other items.
- Loss of momentum. Implementing best practice service management in service operation needs to become a permanent “business as usual” activity, not a short-term “flavor of the month.” Without this clear message, staff may lose enthusiasm over time and revert to previous bad practices, seeing the move to best practice as purely temporary. An additional risk is that organizational changes may mean that the new best practice approach is dropped; again, this is the result of seeing the changes as temporary, to be replaced by the next initiative, rather than embedded.
- Loss of key personnel. This may be a significant risk for less mature organizations in which the loss of one or two key staff members can have a severe impact. This can be mitigated by ensuring that staff are cross-trained, thus reducing dependencies upon individuals. A more mature organization should have formalized knowledge transfer into processes, documents, and tools; this removes any dependency on a few knowledgeable people.
- Resistance to change or suspicion regarding the changes. This can be helped by education and training and better communication of the benefits of the changes. Often resistance to change is actually fear of change; providing staff with information as to how the changes will affect and possibly even benefit them in terms of job satisfaction and learning new skills may help to allay these fears and thus reduce resistance.
- Lack of management support. Middle managers may not see the overall vision or appreciate the hands-on benefits that more junior staff will gain. As stated previously, management support is a critical success factor for implementing best practice. Senior management must ensure that the middle managers understand both the benefits and the need for the changes, which deliver these benefits, to be visibly supported. Involving these managers in the appropriate stages and processes of service design and transition may help them to understand the benefits.
- Poor design. The success of each lifecycle stage is due, at least in part, to the quality of the inputs into that stage. A poor-quality design output from the design stage will impact both transition and operation. The implementation will never be really successful, and redesign will ultimately be necessary.
- Distrust. Service management can be viewed with suspicion by both IT and the business. While IT staff dislike the new controls it imposes on their work methods, the business may take the cynical view that IT is seeking more money without actually delivering any improvements. Overcoming this distrust and cynicism mean ensuring that the benefits are clearly articulated to stakeholders and then actually delivered.
- Differing customer expectations. Different customer and user groups may have differing expectations. One group may pay more for a superior service, but this higher level is resented by other groups. Clear service level management, and the involvement of business relationship management if required, will help overcome these issues. The solution is not to simply deliver improved service levels upon request if they are not required or funded.
Summary
In this chapter, we discussed service operation challenges, critical success factors, and risks. You have now completed all the material included in the syllabus for the service operation lifecycle course.
Exam Essentials
Understand the challenges faced by service operation staff when working with projects. Understand the different drivers and priorities for project management and service operation staff and why they may lead to conflict. Understand why these two groups of staff must work together if both utility and warranty of the new service, and therefore its value, is to be delivered.
Understand the critical success factors that need to be in place if successful service operation is to take place. Understand the importance of visible management support and the role played by other champions of the changes, at whatever level in the organization.
Understand why the involvement of the right people is a critical success factor. Be able to explain the difference between the number of people involved (as a resource) and the skills and motivation of those involved (as a capability). As stated in this chapter, success requires the right number of staff with the right skills and knowledge.
Understand how implementing service operation disciplines successfully can lead to cost savings and ensure a return on investment. Be able to list and describe possible savings, as detailed in this chapter, in the section describing the need to justify funding.
Know the risks encountered in the service operation stage, in particular the danger that the implementation of service management may lose momentum. Understand how these risks might be mitigated.
Understand why there may be resistance to the new methods being adopted as part of the implementation of service management. In particular, understand the possible reasons behind this resistance, the best way to tackle it, and the importance of visible management support in addressing the situation.
You can find the answers to the review questions in the appendix. One of the key challenges of service operation is funding. Which of these statements is/are correct? With which lifecycle stages should service operation engage? Visible support from which of the following is critical for successful service operation? Which of the following factors are critical for staffing and retention and successful service operation? Which of the following is a source of risk for the service desk? Service operation staff need to work with staff from other stages of the lifecycle. Which of the following statements describe why this a challenge? Service operation must show how investment in operations will show a financial return. Which of the following is NOT a financial benefit that would be a result of investment in service operations? Which of the following is NOT a challenge for service operation? Which of the following is NOT a critical success factor for service operation? Which of the following is NOT a risk for service operation?Review Questions