This blog follows on from the recent post from Phyllis Drucker and stems from my recent experience delivering Service management tools training for Service desk professionals.
I recently delivered this foundation training on Service Desk tools for Process owners. The course outline and prerequisites were communicated well in advance and when I stepped in for the first day, I had a great surprise. 80 % of the candidates did not have a formal ITIL foundation certificate and were sitting on a class that talks about service management tools aligned with ITIL process. When I enquired why they did not get themselves ITIL trained, the simple answer was we did not have time. We have scheduled a course in 2 weeks time.
I then spent half of my day 1 to just get them familiarised with the ITIL concepts and also managed to cover the rest of topic and lab exercises.
I was curious to understand how they planned to use the tools and the team leader mentioned that they were building a Service Mgmt COE and needed all service desk guys trained and on various SM toolset.
I see this issue mainly in countries like India where there is keen interest on tools and technology while the process aspect is always expected to be a freebie and is normally ignored.
Tailoring of tools or heavy customization is done by consultants within the client environment basically because they expect the tool to behave in a certain way and are not bothered about the actual need and rationale to customize.
Also I would have to say that I have hardly ever seen organisations leveraging more than 50 % of the features and capabilities shipped out of the box (OOB)
So in my opinion if the situation needs to improve there are 5 things that needs attention.
1. Understanding the true need of the organization or customer business requirements
2. Identifying the key ITIL processes that are applicable and help people understand the rationale behind usage
3. Identify an appropriate Service Management tool that fits to the purpose and objective
4. Enable meaningful business reporting to measure results and customer satisfaction
5. Ensure that the whole approach is communicated throughout organization and business units supported by training and soliciting feedback for ongoing service improvement
What has been your experience in addressing such gaps? Would love to hear your feedback and insights
This post was published at Shift on 03rd July 2014
