Service Management Transformation - Big Bang?
We've all felt the pain of big waterfall project — the pressure of functionality dropping and teams asking for more time and money. Post-implementation reviews lead to teams reflecting on what they could have done differently, but usually it too little too late.
Sadly we see too many organisations adopt a big-bang approach to Enterprise or IT Service Management (ESM/ITSM) transformation. Often its due to ‘that’s how it’s always been done’, or considering an alternative approach like Agile isn’t for support or operations teams.
It is possible to start small, learn from an existing workflow or support function and run two systems in parallel using a strangler approach. This involves removing functions, one step at a time, from the legacy to the new system. If risk appetite is low and service availability is critical to the enterprise, then an iterative approach is far less risky and disruptive.
Additionally, using the out-of-the-box Atlassian Jira Service Management with pre-configured ITIL or domain-specific workflows may seem too simple, or may feel it is not complex enough. However showing how a leaner or more simplified process actually works starts to gets people on the journey and become comfortable to move away from old ways of service management.
Recently Sentify helped a customer take the first step in unlocking their IT change management process. First, we moved a small number of their change management decisions from a weekly meeting involving 12 people verbally checking dependencies and potential conflicts. We digitised the entry function of all change requests and put in a risk-based quality gate that pre-approved low-risk items and continued to push medium to high-risk items through the current process. We had the support of the delivery teams, who were feeling the pain of their current approach.
Sentify began by creating a workflow in collaboration with the client. But before taking the next step, change leaders and senior management needed to be reassured of the new process. Sentify conducted multiple demonstrations to share how the process would work. These demonstrations were the catalyst that created understanding at the executive level. The client realised that historically, they experienced a tremendous amount of time lost waiting for manual processes and experienced delays due to the gatekeeper ticking boxes. Interestingly teams doubled down on the quality of their work, knowing that this new pathway was the opportunity they had been waiting for to begin delivering value faster and more regularly.
The alarm bells should go off if you see your organisation planning a major programme of work to implement ESM or ITSM with the traditional design, development, implementation and rollout phases extending weeks or months.
You can adopt a less painful and far leaner approach to improve your workflow, so start asking questions today.
Our work
Case Studies
The Mine Sweeper and Clearance Diving Systems Program Office in Defence had recently adopted a Kanban-driven approach to organising their work. They had aspiration to improve the cadence of outputs to customers and fix the prioritisation issues across multiple teams and service providers.
Twelve months into an ICT transformation program, little had changed in their organisation. There were bottlenecks at every turn. Every major area of the company including Governance, Architecture, Infrastructure, Change Management, Security, and Leadership were experiencing problems.
The NZ Government Superannuation Fund was looking for a substantial improvement in its ICT operational and support service levels. With our help they were able to move to a new service delivery construct that included a regular cadence of feature development, strong IT governance, technical guardianship, and robust support.
Actions over words breaks consultant fatigue to build trust and momentum. Allowing the University of Newcastle to embrace a new beginning.
While a cross-programme workshop seemed unnecessary overhead, the opposite was proven. “Now we cannot see how such a programme could be successful without one. We aligned teams, and galvanised improvement priorities with a renewed energy. It was altogether a very worthwhile exercise."
Our client wanted greater transparency and insight into the causative factors that contributed to inefficiencies and impediments delivering feature updates to customers and staff
The last thing Tasman District Council (TDC) wanted was an independent viewpoint on digital strategy and an industry assessment on its maturity. They didn't want to go through an exercise to find out where they were at only to then ask. What do we do? They wanted to move forward.
Merging AWS infrastructure management with the application build pipeline brings development & operations together. That sounds like DevOps.
Providing an outgoing support arm for day to day advice, training and guidance.
Organisations have reached a tipping point of frustration dealing with legacy tools. Read about the movement to look for a modern solution such as Atlassian’s Jira Service Management.
We've all felt the pain of big waterfall project — the pressure of functionality dropping and teams asking for more time and money. Post-implementation reviews lead to teams reflecting on what they could have done differently, but usually it too little too late.