Measuring effects before and after ITIL implementation

One of the reasons management wants to get ITIL in house is to be more efficient. And in order to prove improve efficiencies, your IT organisation must measure the effectiveness of processes before and after ITIL.

Begin your implementation by benchmarking the activities of the IT organisation to determine how well it’s performing. The owner of ITIL, Office of Government Commerce (OGC), provides online resources that you can use to assess the IT organisation. OGC also provides worksheet that is downloadable from their Web page. To perform basic assessment, you’ll need to answer various sets of questions for each of the processes. For example, the evaluation for Incident Management includes questions like, “Is the business need for a Service Desk clearly identified and understood?” and “Does the Service Desk provide a status update to the customer on the closure of incidents?“

Just take the test and score the results. Basically, the result of the test will usually tend to be much better than you expect because majority of the organisations have at least basic sets of processes in place. However, it is the way these processes work together that shows the true value of your IT readiness.

Why ITIL scares IT managers?

According to the great article at the Network World (http://www.networkworld.com) there are several reasons why your organisation may resist implementation of ITIL.

To directly quote the article:

"The resistance comes from fear, according to ITIL experts and industry watchers, who argue that education around ITIL, its potential benefits and challenges would help implementations get off the ground more quickly. For one, the premise of re-aligning IT operations around standard processes intimidates most non-believers, and the recent updates to the framework, ITIL Version 3, is causing confusion among many IT managers that started adopting ITIL Version 2.

To help address fears and reduce confusion, ITIL expert and author Linh Ho compiled a list of the most common fears she encounters in customer environments and detailed some ways to keep the anxiety around ITIL at bay. Ho, product marketing manager at Compuware, also served as a reviewer on the ITIL V3 foundation books and is co-author of the itSMF's Six Sigma for IT Management book. Ho also worked for business service management vendor Proxima Technology before it was acquired by Compuware earlier this year. She says that the industry is working toward reducing the confusion around ITIL.

"We are often on the front lines talking to customers and find that there is a lot of fear and confusion out there today," Ho says. "We are working to demystify and help abate fears." "

Here are couple of things you might encounter when you try to implement ITIL in your organisation:

Fear of change
Fear of Measurement 
Process limitations
Investment
Buzzword bandwagon
Process selection
Complexity
Executive expectations
Organisation size
Stifled creativity