1. The Art Of Building An ITSM Process Design Team
Sometimes the Journey is More Important Than the Destination!
Author : Troy DuMoulin
Date : December 2009

2. The Art Of Building An ITSM Process Design Team
1 The Art Of Building An ITSM Process Design Team
Documenting processes is rarely on the top 10 list of an organization’s fun and interesting
things to do with its non-existent free time! However, it is a fundamental necessity once
the organizational complexity no longer supports an organic or immature approach to key
management processes. Or perhaps other key drivers that force a company to the drafting
table may be risk to the business mission or the legal requirement to comply with audit
and legislation. Whatever your drivers may be you will one day find that it is time to
formally put pen to paper and map out the who, what, when and why of what you do or
perhaps more importantly what you should be doing.
As each organization reaches this point they are inevitably faced with the fact that they
have scant resources to accomplish their process design goals. They also often find out
that their current processes no longer scale or need to be changed to follow best practices.
This double constraint gives them the idea that surely they are not unique and that there
must be other organizations or consultants that could help them short cut the time
required to define new processes with pre-defined templates and hard won experience.
While this is true it is important to understand that there is a positive and a disastrous way
to bring in external assistance to help with your resource and knowledge gaps.
Using External Consultants
How and when to use external resources is a very important decision that can either fast
track your way to having your processes defined or end up with you wasting a great deal
of money with little to no real lasting impact or value for your investment.
While it is true that external resources can provide the missing expertise, knowledge and
pair of extra hands you so desperately need, it is equally true that they are seen as not
belonging to the inside family circle and have limited ability to change perception and
practice. The result of which is that they can excel at some tasks but will fail miserably
at others if used unwisely.
For example, if you are bringing in external consultants to document what you do already
then it is feasible for them to hold a series of workshops and interviews to piece together
the intricate workings of your existing policies, processes and roles, and hand over a
written account of what you do today. However, if you are changing what you do to
follow an external best framework such as IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®) or CMMi
then what you are really talking about is a transformation project where you have to
convince a very distributed and culturally diverse organization that they need to change
their long held behaviors, beliefs and tools. In this second scenario it is self-destructive to
assume that you can hire out all the work to an outside firm. What you will end up with at
the end of the day is a very nice process binder that no one in the company believes they
had any part of designing (even though you involved them in interviews and workshops)
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3. The Art Of Building An ITSM Process Design Team
and will treat it as a “Not Invented Here” deliverable which will sit beautifully on the
shelf and not be followed.
Building Buy In Through Sweat Equity & Emotional Attachment:
At the end of the day a transformation project requires organizational involvement in the
heavy lifting of a process design and software configuration project. As indicated in the
paragraph above, the internal stakeholders will not feel connected to the new process
unless they have the perception that they have been involved in its design in more than a
casual way. However, if you accept this premise, the key question and constraint
continues to be how do you free up the internal resources to work on this project in some
meaningful capacity. The answer to this question is a blended approach to using both
internal and external resources.
Here are a few important assumptions:
• You need to involve key stakeholders in the design for the organization to believe
it will work for them
• You also need to use external consultants to bring to the table the key value
elements of experience, knowledge, resources and fast track templates
• It is important to realize that without a formal project approach to the
transformation effort little change will occur. Transformation efforts never
succeed as a side of the desk activity
• The most likely candidates for your internal design team are already engaged in
other activities making dedicated commitment to the project not plausible
• You need to balance the involvement of high value internal resources with a need
for speed to delivery
• The true deliverable of your project is not a completed document or process but
your organization operating in a new way with new values
This last point is perhaps the most significant of all the assumptions and is the basis of
why using only consultants to help define your new processes is not a viable solution.
The key realization here is that it is the process of building and gaining agreement (not
consensus) that is the true deliverable of a process design project. The actual
achievement of a finished product is the icing on the cake and perhaps a minor but
relevant detail for actually supporting a transformation project.
Consider that the true goal of a transformation project is to change behavior and
eventually culture. To achieve this it is necessary to define a process, write it down and
automate it in a software application, but these are only enablers to the true outcome of
transformation.
At Pink Elephant our experience tells us that there are seven key ingredients for a
successful recipe when building transformation teams:
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4. The Art Of Building An ITSM Process Design Team
1. Establish a formal project with the classic project sponsorship, governance and
controls necessary to accomplish any major initiative.
2. Source a reliable, external, trusted advisor that has a solid track record in
supporting process transformation projects. This vendor should provide both
strategic and operational support and come with a little red wagon full of time
saving tools.
3. Develop a small part-time internal process design team that will work on the
process deliverables 2 to 3 days a week; schedule permitting. This team should be
made up of internal subject matter experts, change agents from key stakeholder
groups and be supported by your external advisor and software administrators
responsible for process automation.
4. Define an extended internal stakeholder group of middle and Senior Management
roles that will provide feedback and approval on your process deliverables via
email feedback loops or workshops to optimize organizational acceptance.
5. Start early on defining the ongoing process governance, support and execution
roles that will use the process after it has been deployed.
6. Leverage other organizational support groups such as corporate communications,
HR, internal audit, procurement and software development to support your
initiative.
7. Plan your deployment and rollout strategy to occur as rapidly as possible without
jeopardizing your existing service delivery (it’s not easy to change your tires as
you are driving down the highway).
As individuals and key stakeholders take an active part in the design of your new
processes, they begin to feel the necessary emotional attachment to their deliverables and
want to see the blood, sweat and tears they have shed be effective and successfully
deployed. It is amazing how far a little bit of sweat equity will go in the effort to
convince people that change is a good or at least an acceptable thing.
Many organizations have tried to short cut this effort or relied exclusively on external
resources believing that this level of involvement and internal investment is not really
necessary. Only to find out that to ram the change down the corporate throat with out
consultation or involvement may have short-term success but will also just as likely result
in the organization’s eventual rejection of the change once the heavy hand of compliance
is lifted.
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©Pink Elephant 2009. Contents are protected by copyright and cannot be reproduced in any manner.