Basics to leveraging ITIL processes for an IT company

 

Basics to leveraging ITIL processes for an IT company

About ITIL

One of the most popular IT Service Management frameworks in the world, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides an organization the focus necessary and its employees a road map to promote professional change in its IT services, besides providing the makeover and maturity. With it, efficiency can be enhanced and successful service levels can be attained. A primary reason for ITIL's productivity is that it is vendor-neutral, ensures that best practices are followed and allows forming of a charter that can be easily comprehended by the management which intends to implement it. Axelos, born out of a collaboration between the British government and Capita Plc, is credited with developing the ITIL framework.

In the age of technology, technology and business are interdependent. In such a scenario, for an organization to be efficient and successful, its business goals and IT competencies must be progressive.

Relationship between ITIL and ITSM

ITIL is nothing but an existing framework of ITSM. Owing to this, the ITIL process ensures stability. While ITSM stands for what an organization must achieve, ITIL lays down the process to realize it.

ITIL lets organizations operating in the IT sector monitor, manage and provide technical services within. If implemented properly, the ITIL process assists in achieving productivity and also improves the satisfaction of the organization’s personnel.

The five stages of the ITIL V3 life cycle

The ITIL V3, which was initiated in 2011, has a lifecycle constituting 5 stages that are as follows,    

 ITIL Service Strategy

ITIL Service Design

ITIL Service Transition

ITIL Service Operation

ITIL Continual Service Improvement.

Service Strategy lays stress on identifying the strategy of an organization so that it can serve its customers well and describes the manner of achieving them. In this stage, the aim is to allow an organization to function tactically.

The focus of Service Design is to realize the Service Strategy by creating and developing new service offerings. It alternately improves the existing services of an organization.

Service Transition’s objective is to bring all its service offerings under one umbrella and to make sure they are examined before being incorporated. It also evaluates the quality of a service or a product before it is up and running.

Service Operation’s thrust is to ensure that solid best practices are being put in place to aid responsive services. Included in this stage are an organization’s incident management and its customer service offerings.

It is the mandate of Continual Service Improvement to improve the capability and productivity of the IT processes and services of an organization. This final stage of the lifecycle constantly ensures that the other four stages are enhanced.

Six rules for deploying ITIL successfully

The six strategies for successfully implementing the ITIL process are as follows.

a)    Modify certain ITIL processes wherever required

b)    Educating an organization’s personnel on ITIL procedures

c)    In addition to IT practices, deploy as per processes

d)    Encouraging change

e)    Hiring the team for a project

f)     Elaborate the ambit of the complete project

An organization’s IT employees need to be given proper training in ITIL tenets and procedures so that they understand clearly their roles and responsibilities in implementing the processes. This will improve their capabilities and productivity, satisfy customers of the organization and improve its ROI. Before this is done, an organization should identify areas where improvements are needed and begin to deploy ITIL only for the processes in those specific areas.

Although many vendors in the marketplace vie to offer software packages that comprise ITIL, they would not be applicable to all organizations. Each organization’s ITIL requirements would be unique.  It is, therefore, essential for each company to customize implementation as per its IT processes.

While deploying the ITIL framework, an organization would need to transform the methods, functions and responsibilities of its workforce. The staff should be given sufficient motivation to embrace change proactively and tweak their work responsibilities accordingly.

No matter how effective certain processes are, they are dependent on the people who carry them out. It is necessary, therefore, to hire people who are convinced about ITIL.

After analyzing the hurdles in the IT processes, an organization should strive to resolve them. It needs to assess the hardware and software requirements needed to implement the ITIL processes by coming up with a budget to implement them.

Using ITSM software to transform an organization’s service desk  

Bringing about a major change in the customer service desk of an organization can be made a reality by embracing cloud technology and developing the capability to develop software that is centralized for its customer service department.

It should incorporate incident management to keep tabs on requests from customers, to automatically allot tickets to an expert in that area and the progress achieved here should be shared via automated emails throughout the organization.

It is crucial for the organization that is implementing the ITIL initiatives to identify who is using what assets and which of them need to be replaced.

Finally, the organization needs to place a request, go to the drawing board and assess properly the entire workflow within it.

Mirat follows all the mentioned ITIL processes to the T. If your company requires help in its implementation, don’t hesitate to contact it.