Service Management Journey: Service Management CSI Journey

I recently began to reflect on my Continual Service Improvement (CSI) contribution to my organization as I moved into a new role which focuses on Service Delivery. It began almost two years ago when I joined a company that was continuing its transformation into a large organization through acquisition, and ultimately a corporate rebranding. In the beginning I was hired as an IT Service Management Specialist to primarily work as a Change Management process owner. Although through interview process when I had identified some other “responsibilities” which were listed in the job posting which looked out of place for a change management role, I realized that there might be other activities from an improvement standpoint.

While our IT community had agreed that we already had processes for incident, request, asset and change management, the question that needed to be answered was “Where were we on a maturity scale?” After taking an honest look there were several processes where we could make improvements to maturity from a stage which was repeatable, to one which was more defined.

The initial reaction from IT stakeholders was that while they were glad to be reviewing these processes, they did not want to add any unnecessary bureaucracy (and work) to the team’s already busy day. They key here was to market the future state of what the benefits of the process improvements to the next level maturity meant for them, how it would empower them to improve their services in ways the older processes could not.

Identifying current state and the scope for the improvements was critical for success. What I realized quickly was that no one process will have a high maturity level so long as the other processes are at a low maturity, there is a symbiotic relationship for the two. Identifying which process to review can be daunting when there is no obvious business case or need to do so.

As we made progress on each process we made sure to take time to reflect on the current state and identify where the next set of gaps in our processes existed. It is important to take these quick wins and build on them, after a time people will look back and say “How did we get from there to here?”

While even today we continue to review our processes, these internal IT alignments allowed for us to lay the groundwork for our customer interactions as a part of Service Delivery.