Introduction
Business is moving faster than ever, and IT needs to move along with it or get left behind. IT can lack the capacity and flexibility to meet organizational needs. IT’s inability to adapt as requirements change has led to diminishing service quality and an increase in shadow IT.
Many IT organizations have traditional structures and approaches that have served them well in the past. However, these frameworks and approaches alone are no longer sufficient for today’s challenges. Many practitioners are evangelists of one particular approach or process, missing the value of different perspectives and options.
Are your business leaders saying things like this?
- Why is IT saying no? This needs to be done.
- Why is everything so complicated and taking so long to get started?
- We need this yesterday not tomorrow!
- IT needs to understand the business and stop being a bottleneck.
In the other hand….Are your IT teams frustrated with these complaints?
- They don’t get it and want everything now! There are integrations and dependencies that they don’t consider.
- We are ready to help, but I don’t know exactly what they want and they never take time to explain it.
- Why does everything need to wait for approval? We have everyone here right now to make this happen.
- We designed it right, so why can’t operations just execute it?
In this newsletter we will show you a proposed approach to resolve most of the previous business and IT team´s concerns.
Organizational health
Organizational health is the ability to align, execute, and renew faster than competition, leading to sustainable performance over time. As shown in a recent study from Info-Tech Reserch Group, the majority of Agile companies are in the top quartile of organizational health, while in a digital environment “slower” companies have poor organizational health:
Agility in Service Management improves business satisfaction
Have in mind the following recommendations to improve business satisfaction when you are implementing Agility in you service management practice:
- Ensures business needs can be met when and where required, while still providing security and structure to protect the business.
- Improves IT’s ability to quickly address changing business needs and to handle a higher volume of unique demand.
- Enhances IT’s ability to actively improve the quality of the service it provides, driving better service outcomes and performance, and improving customer satisfaction.
- Staying rigid and immobile is no longer a viable strategy.
- You need agility to get ahead and stay ahead in today’s dynamic business environment.
Solution & Highlights
Follow this proposed methodology to build a tangible approach to improving the agility of your service management practice, making you more effective in the way you design and deliver IT services. This will work to ensure service value and improve the business’ perception of IT’s value. This approach will help you identify where agility can be added to your organization to suit your specific needs and goals, providing needed flexibility while ensuring the right structure, ownership, and direction for service management. Establishing a consistent Agile mindset within your organization to ensure the successful embedding and integration of Agile principles so that service management organization is properly oriented around agility in support of business value.
Have in mind that the goal of service management is to enable and drive value for the business. Service management practices have to be flexible and adaptable enough to manage and deliver the right service value at the right time at the right quality level. Being Agile is a mindset. Leverage the best approaches, frameworks, and tools to meet your needs and get the job done now. Finally, the culture is a fundamental pillar for organizational agility so address cultural constraints as barriers & silos, bureaucracy, team distance and fear of change; and maximize cultural enablers as transparency, development & training, autonomy, top down buy in and collaboration . As said by McKinsey: “Shortcomings in organizational culture are one of the main barriers to company success in the digital age.” – McKinsey Quarterly, 2017.
The plan to build the solution
The proposed plan to build Service Management Agility in your company has three (3) main phases, and the final phase for the implementation of the initiatives included in the roadmap:
Phase 1:
- Understand Agile principles,
- Understand how Agile methodologies can complement service management.
- Understand the optimal components of culture for agility.
- Identify the optimal structural components for agility.
- Identify optimal processes for agility.
- Identify optimal resources for agility.
Phase 2:
- Assess your current organizational agility in culture, structure, processes and resources.
- Identify your agility strengths and weaknesses with the agility score.
Phase 3:
- Create a roadmap for service management agility and
- Create a stakeholders presentation.
These are the deliverables for each phase:
- Phase 1: Summaries of: cultural enablers and constraints for agility, optimal structures for agility, optimal processes for agility and optimal resources for agility.
- Phase 2: An assessment score of current state of agility
- Phase 3: A roadmap for service management agility and a stakeholders presentation.
Track metrics throughout the project to keep stakeholders informed
To measure the success of agility in service management, you must establish baseline metrics to determine if your roadmap is on track:
- Did the roadmap lead to the desired outcome?: This metric requires you to determine if the IT organization achieved the optimal state. To answer this question, repeat the DilettUX´s agility assessment that is introduced in phase 2 and determine if there is an increase in the overall agility levels.
- Did the roadmap lead to delivering value to customers?: This metric tracks the achievement of measurable outcomes such as customer satisfaction levels. Document and track the value of services delivered with agility instilled throughout your practice and organization.
Conclusions
Moving to Service Management Agility will help you to:
- Decide when and how shifting to an Agile approach to service management will be right for your organization.
- More effectively deliver IT services to business when and where they are needed.
- Improve IT’s ability to respond to the speed and volume of business demands.
- Understand Agile principles and why they can help the business pivot and succeed in dynamic and competitive environments.
- Leverage agility in the whole organization to drive service excellence that will help the business succeed and lead.
Valence Howden, Director, CIO Practice Info-Tech Research Group; summarized in this sentence why your organization should move to Service Management Agility:
“Shifting customer expectations, accelerating business needs, and changing management styles have greatly impacted the landscape of IT, especially as technology has become the primary mechanism of providing value across most industries. In order to stay relevant, service management needs to become more Agile without simply focusing on speed. Service management will remain valuable by establishing true agility within the practice, building the capacity for flexibility and adaptability to support the value of services for organizations regardless of the way they change.”
In DilettUX we have the experienced people and the methologies & artefacts to build a successful Service Management Agility practice in your organization. Contact us!
