By: Anton Avila, Process Manager for R-Group International Pty Ltd
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Often the discussion topic with Management Stakeholders comes up – “So when will our new toolset be ready?” Well that depends... comes the answer. What do we want to use it for?
If you’ve ever given that response, and been met with blank looks or vague business-speak for your trouble, you’re certainly not alone. In fact, most Best Practice adherents out there will tell you it’s a common fault in many organisations; trying to align the way you operate to the toolset after you’ve chosen it, rather than the infinitely more sensible approach of choosing (and then configuring) your toolset to support your existing operations and processes (and the processes you think you’ll be adopting in future as your organisation matures).
Taking this “Toolset supports the Process” approach gave us at R-Group a challenge recently in regards to ITIL Change Management. One of the few ITIL process areas to really gain traction in Western Australia to date (and indeed a primary process driver in the rest of the IT industry in Australia), Change Management really does represent the elephant in the room. But why does it represent such a challenge if everyone acknowledges just how important it is?
The key to any Process implementation is that the Process needs to be Effective, Efficient, and Responsive. This isn’t just for the sake of service delivery; it’s also just as important for the sanity of your own personnel. After all, if the way your organisation implements Change Management (and thus builds the tool to support the implementation) isn’t these three things, will your people use the process? If they don’t use it properly because it’s unwieldy (responsiveness), time consuming (efficiency), and just doesn’t deliver the results it’s supposed to (effectiveness), how can you expect your service delivery to your customers to be what you want it to be?
We took the perspective that we wanted Change Management to be as easy to use as possible. This means documenting as many types of minor, low-risk/impact Changes that we otherwise make every day as pre-set procedures; this allows our team to use the QoS-IT customised ‘Outage’ entity for a lot of general maintenance work... For the technician it means no mess, no fuss; a minute or two to log their ‘Outage’ ticket and they’re done with their administrative requirements.