Often unnoticed by casual fans and underappreciated by the more experienced, footwork is a fundamental skill that separates the good from the very good. Footwork is a Critical Success Factor for great basketball play.

Aditi Kinkhabwala had a very nice piece in the Wall Street Journal that links Kemba Walker’s basketball success to the footwork he developed studying dance as a youth. Before picking up roundball the young Mr. Walker was a very serious student of dance, appearing a few times at the Apollo Theatre.

Quoting the article: ‘The hints of this training in his basketball moves are subtle, but to those who know dance, they’re unmistakable.’

What does this have to do with IT Transformation and ITIL? Well, to have success sometimes you have to put the time in to develop the fundamentals. Just as footwork is a critical success factor for basketball stardom, a process approach is essential for a successful ITIL adoption.

Just as Mr. Walker’s career began on the dance floor, perhaps your IT transformation might better begin with re-engineering a cross-functional business process or two.

When starting with ITIL, many organizations stumble on defining and introducing the processes that are a central part of the framework. Culturally, the organization is just not prepared to think in process terms. So the initiative must attempt to introduce two things at once; process fundamentals and the specifics of the ITIL framework. This adds considerably to the challenge.

Just as it’s easier to advance in basketball if you already know how to move your feet; it will be easier to make progress in implementing ITIL if your organization already naturally ‘thinks in process.’

-Bill Cunningham

bill.cunningham@cppit.com

I can relate to Valerie’s comments in her recent post in this space concerning the efforts of many managers to find a simple path to ‘implementing ITIL.’ When discussing the ITIL program at one organization and touching on some differences between the Version 2 and Version 3 ITIL releases I was asked, ‘what version are we on?’

Well, it doesn’t quite work that way. As Valerie indicates-  ITIL is not a product, it is a body of knowledge. No organization is ‘on’ ITIL v2 or ‘on’ ITIL v3. The framework offers guidance and an organization can choose be to be guided by either version, or to derive useful insights from a combination of the two versions. I know that this does not provide any easy answers; but then Valerie is correct that there is no easy recipe for service management processes.

It’s even worse, as there is no easy template to apply to define and manage any business process.

‘Sometimes it is simplest and shortest to take the long path.’

If the above  is not a statement made by a Zen master, it should be. How does it apply here? One of the most successful ITIL adoptions  I have witnessed did not begin with defining an ITIL process, or looking for an ITSM Tool at all.

Recognizing that a process approach was a necessary critical success factor for adopting ITIL,  the organization began by redefining two critical IT business processes using a Six Sigma methodology (and CPP can help with that…). Key to this was the fact that these processes were cross-functional, i.e., they required the participation of several of the different IT units to work correctly.

Two other keys were the designation of a process owner and managing the process development as a project. The result was a well-understood business process that was managed across functions. This helped to change the culture of the organization to understand the importance of process and project management.

Rather than starting with evaluating a tool, this organization understood that defining and managing a business process is about defining organizational behavior. They sought to embed a  process management approach and this prepared the organization when it was time to embed the ITIL processes.

This ‘long path’ put them ahead of many organizations that have begun with the idea of looking for a simple ‘in a box’ automated solution.

-Bill Cunningham

bill.cunningham@cppit.com

Both ITIL and Six Sigma are excellent mechanisms to build an effective, productive, service-oriented IT organization. The trick is to understand the role that each plays and assure that your implementation approach is designed to produce the maximum benefit.