SCENARIOS FOR UTILIZING THE CSI APPROACH€¦ · CSI is first and foremost a practice that is implemented across the IT organization. It requires a mind shift from: • Reactive to

SCENARIOS FOR UTILIZING THE CSI

APPROACH

PINK ELEPHANT THOUGHT LEADERSHIP WHITE PAPER

Executive Summary

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Remember the following about Continual Service Improvement (CSI).

CSI: Organizations talk about it and think about it, but in reality often don’t plan, schedule, allocate

resources, or monitor CSI initiatives. Improvement initiatives are often reactionary in nature to a

specific event, and are not proactive in nature.

CSI is first and foremost a practice that is implemented across the IT organization. It requires a mind

shift from:

• Reactive to proactive

• Having the CSI Manager or CSI team responsible for identifying improvement opportunities

to everyone in the organization

• Blaming and pointing fingers, to finding and identifying opportunities in a collaborative and

supportive environment

Whether improving services, service management processes or the service lifecycle itself, there will be

a cost to implementing a CSI practice. However, there is a much greater cost to not implementing the

practice.

Organizations will spend millions of dollars developing and implementing service management

processes; yet, they don’t have any plan on how to protect their investment and continually improve the

processes.

The CSI practice relies upon five major guiding principles defined in the CSI book:

• The CSI Approach

• Seven Step Improvement Process (discussed in more detail in the High Level ATLAS

document)

• The Deming Cycle

• Professor Kotter’s Eight Steps For Successful Transformation

• Knowledge Management

This paper will focus on three scenarios that many organizations struggle with and how the CSI

approach can help with improvement opportunities.

Scenarios For Utilizing The CSI Approach

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Table Of Contents

1 CSI Improvement Model ……………………………………………………………………….. 4

2 Sample Scenarios Where The CSI Approach Can Be Used .......................................... 7

3 Conclusion ………………..………………………............................................…………...… 11

5 About Pink Elephant ………………………......……….………………………....................... 12



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1) CSI Improvement Model The following model was developed to provide key steps on how to approach CSI:

Copyright © AXELOS Limited 2011. All rights reserved. Material is reproduced under licence from AXELOS.

(Figure 3.1 Continual Service Improvement Approach, pg. 35 of Continual Service Improvement® 2011).

The model can be used for a variety of situations; if you are looking to improve processes,

services or the Service Lifecycle itself.






Step 1 – What Is The Vision?

CSI is all about the business, so when looking at the CSI Model the first step is to clearly understand

the business vision, strategy, goals and objectives. It is also important to understand IT’s strategy,

goals and objectives, and to ensure they support the businesses strategy, goals and objectives.

Step 2 – Where Are We Now?

In order to identify if you have improved, it is important to know where you started from. Answering this

question is about performing an initial assessment, or measurements, in order to create a baseline

upon which improvement effort success can be measured. Assessments can be done on the

availability and/or performance of IT Services. Assessments can also be done around processes, such

as a process maturity assessment. If you don’t have any basic measurements or metrics today, you

may need to start collecting these for three to six months in order to get an agreed upon baseline

number.

Step 3 – Where Do We Want To Be?

Set realistic targets for the improvement initiative. This may require setting short-term, mid-term and

long-term targets. Targets can be set for availability measures, for IT Services, or new maturity levels

for processes.

Keep in mind that setting targets should be based on business requirements, and not on business

wishes. If a customer says they want 99.999% availability, be sure this need supports the desired

business outcomes the organization needs to achieve.

Also, remember that for process maturity the key is to understand the value of a process to the

business. Not all processes are equal and some processes will deliver more value to the business than

others. You may find that having a level three maturity is all you need to deliver value, so keep in mind

you do not need to have all processes at a level five.

Create your Measurement Framework of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) so that later on you can

measure if you have achieved your targets.






Step 4 – How Do We Get There?

These are the process improvement projects that are identified, agreed on and funded. Keep in mind

that Senior Management often does not have the luxury of long projects. They are interested in getting

quick improvements, so don’t overlook the quick wins that can be implemented around IT Services

and/or processes.

Step 5 – Did We Get There?

Using the KPIs defined in Step 3, continue to monitor, measure, and report on your achievements.

Step 6 – How Do We Keep The Momentum Going?

Market your successes to Senior Management as well as the rest of the organization. It is important to

use successes to gain more buy-in for additional improvement initiatives.






2) SAMPLE SCENARIOS WHERE THE CSI APPROACH CAN BE

USED Organizations often make implementing CSI more difficult and complex than it needs to be. CSI is

about improving and this means incremental improvements, not always big, game changing

improvements.

Every organization has pain points. Look for opportunities to apply the CSI Practices against these

pain points, but be sure your improvement initiative will deliver value.

Below are a few examples of how CSI can take advantage of opportunities. Can you identify with these

scenarios?

Remember that an organization can use the CSI Approach to understand and align the strategies,

goals and objectives of both the business and IT. CSI is all about aligning and realigning with the

business requirements.



Organizations often make

implementing CSI more

difficult and complex than it

needs to be. CSI is about

improving and this means

incremental improvements,

not always big, game

changing improvements.

“

”




Scenario One

An organization struggles with communication during Major Incidents.

Where Are We Now?

They perform a baseline assessment of how they handle all communication aspects during a major

incident – what is communicated, when it is communicated, how it is communicated and to whom the

information is communicated.

Where Do We Want To Be?

During Major Incidents, organizations want to have effective and timely communication in order to

keep Senior IT Leaders and employees informed on the work being done and an estimated time line

for the Major Incident’s resolution. There must be clarity around who is responsible for communicating

to different groups, standard methods for communications to take place and documented and agreed

timelines of when the communication will take place.

How Do We Get There?

This is a great opportunity to apply the CSI Practice to work with the Incident Management Process

Owner, Senior Leaders and Business Relationship Managers to develop and implement

communication roles, procedures and policies around communicating to the Senior Management IT

Leadership Team and the business.

In order to do this, create a small team to develop and/or modify existing policies, procedures as well

as communication roles. Document the best method for communication based on the Major Incident.

In other words if you have chosen email as the normal way of communicating (not recommended), and

email is down due to the Major Incident there should be an alternative method for communicating,

such as the telephone. Socialize and review the changes with key stakeholders and develop any

scripts that can be used when a Major Incident occurs. If the phone will be a way of communication

with the business and Senior IT Leaders, create a phone tree list. Once the development is completed

and approved, develop and deliver the required training to management and staff so everyone is

aware of the communication activities and their responsibilities when the incident occurs. It may be

useful to test this method before a real Major Incident occurs. Based on your test results, modify and

implement the changes.

Did We Get There?

Monitor the effectiveness of the improvement during the next Major Incident.






Scenario Two An organization struggles with the adoption of Problem Management. This is an opportunity for CSI to

work with the Problem Management Process Owner to identify improvement opportunities as the

organization realizes they are not deriving any value from the process.

Where Are We Now?

Even though the process has been implemented, they have logged very few problems. Of the

problems that have been logged, few have resulted in Root Cause Analysis activities.


An organization wants to have problems identified, logged and managed across all Technical and

Application Management teams. Ideally, an organization wants an increase in the number of

workarounds provided, an increase in permanent solutions implemented and a decrease in the number

of recurring incidents.


The gap between where they are now and where they want to be derives from a division between

management and those who don’t see the value that Problem Management provides to the

organization. As part of the CSI initiative they put together a “road show” to discuss the value and

benefits of Problem Management with management and staff and explain how this process could free

up more of their time. At this time, they ask for a commitment from key functional mangers to provide

resources to spend a certain number of hours per month on root cause analysis activities instead of

incident management activities. They start pulling a top 10 incident report and picking one recurring

incident to log as a problem and then focus on the root cause of that particular incident. Ensure the

proper Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) have been documented and agreed to before you begin to

measure and report on how well you are performing compared to the KPIs.

Did We Get There?

The number of problems logged increases dramatically. There is an increased number of true Root

Causes being discovered that lead to a permanent solution. More workarounds lead to knowledge

articles, and there was is a reduction of recurring incidents that improve the productivity of Service

Desk Analysts and some Tier Two Support Teams.






Scenario Three Business Relationship Management has received feedback from customers who are concerned with

the Quality of IT Services; particularly those services that have recently gone through Change

Management and Release and Deployment Management.

Where Are We Now?

Complete a baseline of what the current situation is and what the customers are referring to. It’s found

there was an increase in the number of change related incidents in the last quarter that created service

impacts. When investigating they found there was a lack of proper testing and change evaluation

taking place that led to quality issues. Change Management was not taking test results into

consideration when assessing the change before it went into production.


The organization wants to establish clear policies associated with the testing and evaluation of

changes as part of the Service Lifecycle stage. The goal of the organization is to deliver changes

based on the agreed quality requirements and they had been falling short on this.


A Service Improvement Plan is put together and approved to improve the quality of changes to the

production environment. The improvement plan included ensures there are agreed to test

requirements, test plans and adequate resources allocated to conduct the actual testing. Resources

include people and technology. The Change Management process also improves the assessment of

test results and defines criteria around when exceptions can be made to move a change to production

when the test results were less than what was expected.

These types of initiatives are not the responsibility of a CSI team, but of a team that will include the

CSI Manager, Incident, Problem and Change Management Process Owners, Service Owners as well

as various Process Managers. The Business Relationship Manager and Service Level Manager also

play key roles. The Senior Leadership team and Functional Managers are also key stakeholders.






3) CONCLUSION

Remember that it doesn’t take long to put an improvement into place.

Utilizing the CSI Approach is a great start as it forces you to look at things from a business perspective

and understand how you are currently delivering your services, processes or interaction between the

different lifecycle stages. It also requires an organization to discuss and define where they want to be

in the form of targets that could be in the form of Service Level Agreements. A Service Improvement

Plan will then need to be documented and approved and then finally, the approach requires you

continue to monitor, measure and report on the results in order to track if improvements actually

delivered the desired value and benefits.

CSI cannot work in a

vacuum. It requires support

and integration with other

processes, and utilizes the

expertise found within the

Technical, Application and

Operational Management

functions.

”

“



CSI cannot work in a vacuum. It requires support and integration

with other processes, and utilizes the expertise found within the

Technical, Application and Operational Management functions.

Business Relationship Management and Service Level

Management both play key roles as they often are the “voice of

the customer,” and are also both involved in defining functional

and non-functional requirements. Availability and Capacity

Management are responsible for the monitoring of services. If

these processes and roles are not active within your organization,

than you will need to allocate resources to fulfill many of the

process activities that support CSI.

Good luck with using the CSI Approach!




Pink Elephant

Knowledge Translated Into Results

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© Pink Elephant Inc., 2014. The contents of this case study are protected by copyright and cannot be

reproduced in any manner. Pink Elephant and its logo, PinkVERIFY, PinkSCAN, PinkATLAS, and

PinkREADY are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Pink Elephant Inc. ITIL® is a registered trade

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ABOUT PINK ELEPHANT Operating through many offices across the globe, Pink Elephant is the world’s #1 provider of ITIL® and IT

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than 350,000 IT professionals have benefited from Pink Elephant’s expertise. Pink Elephant has been

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SCENARIOS FOR UTILIZING THE CSI APPROACH€¦ · CSI is first and foremost a practice that is implemented across the IT organization. It requires a mind shift from: • Reactive to