Rules For Implementing ITIL V3

The Brits came up with this; http://www.itil-officialsite.com/home/home.asp
Sorry, IT nerd alert here. Those Brit bastards....

Rule 1, Fund it. If you don’t have the manpower dedicated to do this, everyone will be too busy. Hire some temps for 6 months to carry the load and have other staff in your different company areas nearly dedicated to the effort. If you don’t, it will take years to get this done and the effort will be half-assed. Senior management buy-in goes unsaid, it’s a must.

Rule 2, Train your people before you start. If you don’t no one will understand what the people that actually went through training are talking about. The effort winds up being ineffective.

Rule 3, Buy a tool. ITIL says to not do this, which I think is a huge mistake. There are enough credible products out on the market that will meet your needs. If you don’t get a tool, you will wind up needing one as things progress and then building something from scratch, that won’t ultimately meet your needs and be abandoned. A huge waste of time and money.

Rule 4, Keep your teams small. You will have teams for Service Level Management, Service Level Agreements, Service Catalog and Service Desk (to name a few). The more people you have on these teams, the harder it will be to get anything done. Try 10 people, maximum. Use even smaller groups when you are doing final document/template reviews. Designate a few people to participate in all of the groups so you make sure no one is stepping on the other’s toes (very important).

Rule 5, Make a Project Plan. I saw my organization waste 4 months having meetings that were utterly useless and just wasted everyone’s time. I had to step up and publicly complain about the situation before we made any real progress. It could have cost me my job, but it was appreciated by management later.

Rule 6, Involve your end users/customers early. If they can front the time, you will come out with a much better product in the end. You need their input so ask them to take some time and support you, so you can support them.

Rule 7, Lighten up. This isn’t really an ITIL rule, just one I have in general. Crack a joke sometimes and lighten the mood. People will have more fun when they are smiling. Try not to go overboard, which I do almost daily.

Rule 8, Don’t start from scratch. If you sit down in a room with a bunch of service providers and say “What would you like on the SLA template”? , you are screwed. It will take months to get everyone in agreement. There are so many samples available out there you are insane if you don’t use them. Contact me if you want ours, your US tax dollars paid for them. Give people something to comment on and you will find things move faster and smoother. Don’t make too many sections on your SLAs mandatory.

Rule 9, Dumb it down. Your end users don’t know what Active Directory or Exchange 2003 are. Keep it generic in your Service Catalog. Try “Network Account” and “Email service”. You get this, right?

Rule 10, There is no rule 10, just try to use some common sense and get people to take off their blinders; especially after ages of providing a single service, and really see what a customer wants and understands. If you don’t have people with a common sense understanding of your own customers involved, you will fail.