Perhaps it is just New Zealand, but I'm seeing a pattern amongst a majority of clients where IT operations business as usual (BAU) is crumbling under the load of project work.
Here is a presentation given to the New Zealand Computer Society on 25th June 2009, on the topic of "Owning ITIL". it covers why ITIL is pretty much always a project, what to watch out for in ITIL projects (ITIL the Cult, ITIl the fad, CMDB can't be done...), what to expect from ITIL.
[Bump to top - any more good stories out there? ] The IT Skeptic's new book Owning ITIL® is out now. The first ten people who contribute an accepted ITIL project horror story get a free copy of the book.
14 questions for a post-ITIL-implementation review
1. How has this changed the way people think, speak and act? Describe instances/anecdotes.
2. What has been the feedback from customers? Suppliers?
3. How did we measure success? Did we measure against something other than ITIL? Did we succeed?
4. What has been re-scoped, deferred or dropped since the business case?
5. Are we measuring the ROI? When will we review again to check that we got the ROI expected in the business case?
14 questions to check on progress of an ITIL project
1. Have you encountered resistance? (Resistance is good). How have you / will you overcome that? (Ignored resistance is bad)
2. What champions have you ‘converted’ to the cause, who weren’t on board at the beginning?
3. What cultural change activities have you conducted: workshopping, communications (newsletters etc), consultation, walkthroughs, training, coaching, monitoring, feedback, celebration? NB. Emails don’t count as communication
14 questions to ask about an ITIL project proposal
1. What is the vision? What is the strategy to achieve that vision?
2. What is the driving need or requirement?
3. How will success be measured? Relative to what benchmark measured now? Are we measuring with something other than ITIL? (See p36) Do the metrics measure the benefits stated in the business case?
4. What process maturity level(s) is the objective? (see p36)
[Hi! IF you came looking for insight into the rebounding world economy, you are looking for Dead Cat Bounce. This post below is about IT project management. But thanks for dropping in! If you are interested in IT, please take a look around]
One of the things ITIL3 improves is the whole development/production interface, introducing radical concepts like production readiness, acceptance, evaluation... oh and testing. Heady stuff. But something that was omitted from ITIL V3 was documentation of Dead Cat Syndrome.
PM is the engine that moves much stuff (hopefully just about everything) from Development to Production, which is pretty important now that ITIL has muscled into Application Management. PM should interlock with Change Management and Testing. PM should provide most of the Early Life Support. Release and Deployment shouldn't move without PM: if it is big enough to be a release it should be a project. And so on.