IT service management practices as a tool for organizational alignment

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buildingIntroduction

We don’t count widgets coming off an assembly line any more. We don’t have parts to order and inventory to maintain. In place of clearly visible inputs and outputs, we produce information and software as services. How do we measure the real value of our team’s work? How do we overcome entrenched ways of doing things? Add to that silos and other organizational inefficiencies and sometimes I wonder if, after a few hundred employees, even successful businesses are succeeding in spite of themselves.

This short article is about using IT service management (ITSM) practices, specifically those embodied in the ITIL standard, for creating strategic alignment. (Don’t worry: ITSM/ITIL knowledge is not a prerequisite for understanding.)

The causes of misalignment

McKinsey says that 70% of strategic initiatives fail. [1] (That number is in line with other surveys.) We get trapped in legacy processes to such an extent that re-design and re-definition are impossible.[2] Assuming we have the right people who are pursuing the right plan, I believe there are 3 reasons why plans fail:

  1. Failure of executives to cascade strategic intent into team plans
  2. Siloed organizations and conflicting initiatives
  3. Trying to do too many things at once

The first item is much more than a problem of executives, leaders, and teams being able to articulate the strategic plan of the company. It is a problem of turning strategy into actionable goals in all areas of the company where progress can occur. We might set the goals, but we don’t identify and use our levers to make things happen.

Silos restrict information flow and activity coordination. Strategic initiatives seldom can be achieved by the work of only one team. But even when the strategic intent is clear and part of team plans, silos will defeat change, because the coordination across teams necessary to achieve strategic goals does not exist. Each team might define projects that are aligned upward but enlisting the support of other teams will fail when the other teams’ goals and projects are not shared.

Finally, in our PowerPoint corporate world with little real project management in most parts of the organization and only red, yellow, green weekly signals to indicate progress, we do back of the envelope calculations of what our teams can achieve. We say yes to every good idea without considering if it’s really worth doing and what it actually takes. I’ve seen completely gutted and downsized teams under new “superstar” leaders take on greater commitments than their predecessors dreamed—and promptly achieve exactly what their predecessors did. Saying yes to everything is a guaranteed way to fail at the most important things.

Occasional alignment on smaller initiatives points a way to something better

In my experience, I’ve only seen these 3 problems overcome only in the special situation of a time-limited corporate initiative. An example is the implementation of Salesforce.com across sales, services, and support organizations. It could be a skunk works project sponsored by a key executive.  Some companies successfully undertake 1 or 2 of these types of projects annually.

In these special situations, the 3 problems are overcome because the purpose, prioritization, and project management of the initiative are clear in a way that aligns the organization temporarily to the intent even as the bigger strategic intent of the company is missing. Seeing this provides a lens into what might work to create corporate alignment. We need a shared set of practices that can hold the strategic intent across teams and define the initiatives, goals, processes, and measures within and across teams that are necessary to achieve the company’s goals.

Lessons from IT service management to create alignment

What can successfully create real alignment around the company’s strategic imperatives? If you’re the leader of an organization, you’ve experienced stoplight charts and dashboards. I’ve personally tried tools as simple as a one-page business plan and as complex as balanced scorecards and strategy maps. None of these tools is structurally designed to overcome the 3 reasons for failure above.

Recently I’ve turned to the ITIL. ITIL is the most prominent standard for information technology services management (ITSM). Originally created for to manage the internal IT’s teams services to the company, the ITSM practices of ITIL and other standards are excellent tools for top-down and tactical alignment of IT service delivery to customers as well. As I’ve begun to practice this standard, it is clear that it scales to all software, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services.

The current ITIL v3 standard is a way of defining services that are mapped to your organization’s strategy and then determining the commitment, resources, cross-team interaction, processes, metrics, and reporting required to deliver those services.

ITIL’s service definition processes consist of standards and tools to specify:

  • The service and its utility
  • How much it costs
  • How to acquire it
  • How to successfully use the service
  • Standards and processes for providing (availability, capacity, continuity, security, etc.)
  • Standards and processes for supporting (incidents, events, problems, service requests, etc.)
  • Metrics, report, and quality review

I won’t go into details on ITIL.[3] There’s a lot to it. (It can be overwhelming, though there are simplified variations of the ITIL standard and simplified methods for implementing it.) Rather, I want to emphasize its value as a tool for strategic alignment by discussing its value in overcoming the 3 impediments to organizational alignment discussed above.

As we gather our leaders together around the strategy and services the company is offering, ITIL requires us to distill that into commitment, responsibility, processes, measures, and action. We must define the training and documentation for the customer to be successful. We must determine the IT infrastructure and staffing required to provide the service, how we will maintain availability, backups, and security, and what our customer SLA’s will be. We have to determine all of the processes and systems that will be involved in providing the service and in supporting the service.

These decisions take time, to be sure, but have you ever been in a company where software was released and the provisioning and support processes weren’t in place? The reward for investing this time is alignment and the ability to deliver. (And backing up a step, it can provide an understanding of the cost of delivering and supporting in advance of even building the service.) ITIL is the activity of distilling strategic intent not by messaging down and hoping that aligned goals come back up but by defining the processes and measurements that are the alignment itself!

In doing this, teams must discuss the processes for successful hand-offs of information and workflow. This is breaking down silos.

Finally, as the teams are focused on what is required to successfully deliver the service, it is clear what to say “No” to. If the shiny update to the corporate intranet doesn’t help service delivery, don’t do it. We can avoid all projects that aren’t aligned to service delivery, and we can measure success and be satisfied in outcomes that are.

In conclusion, what I’ve learned in working with ITIL is that the service definition, processes, and measures defined by good IT service management practices such as ITIL are a great tool for aligning the organization and that these actualy become the expressions of strategic intent throughout the organization.

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[1] http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/leadership/changing-change-management

[2] Thanks to my colleague and friend, Bill Mastin, for this framing point.

[3] A great start for all things ITIL is the ITIL wiki.]

[4] This post cross-posted on LinkedIn.

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