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Author: Shriram Divakar

Initiating ITIL Implementation in a Small Organization

Understanding the need for improving the process and what exactly the organization is trying to address is very important before we plan to apply any framework to an existing system. ITIL address many critical issues faced by any IT industry (small/large). Let us consider the below aspects,

  1. Service downtime that the business tolerate
  2. SLA /acceptable recovery time
  3. Creating customer value from a service industry perspective
  4. Running an integrated help desk
  5. Reducing IT Operational Costs
  6. Improve availability
  7. Optimization of resource Utilization

Considering the above benefits, it truly does not matter if it’s a large or a small organization, it’s very lucrative and we definitely get a lot of advantages by implementing ITIL framework.
I will try and capsule my ideas of implementing ITIL (specific to Small organizations) and document in a very simple and understandable format. This is purely from my perspective; I have implemented and it served and worked effectively in reality.

  1. Depending upon the industry (service or product), ITIL implementation can be initiated by conducting the discussion between the business and engineering. Outcome of the discussion can be multiple action items and the most important will be the agreed SLA.
  2. Second and very important step will be to form a strong team of resources which understands each and every issue/requirements from both functional and technical standpoint. We can name the team as the control team and will be the approving authority for any change to the existing system.
  3. ITIL has a lot of process and it is very tough to implement all of them right from the word go. I feel, it’s a good practice to start with Incident Management, Problem Management, Knowledge management, change control management and release management and setup the process, expectation and teams accordingly.
  4. Implementing the above 5 process and meeting the SLA will give the results which will address the important ROI’s like service downtime that the business tolerate, acceptable recovery time, running an integrated help desk, reducing IT Operational Costs, Improve availability.
  5. Assign process owners/leads.

The flow can be as below,

  1. Strong Help desk team which will record the incident and check for available solutions in the KMDB or raise a problem ticket, assign and follow up.
  2. Effective Problem management/production support team which will work on the solutions and request for change.
  3. As mentioned before, control team which will analyze the change and approve. (Post approval–Close problem management)
  4. A hands on release team to deploy the changes (Post deployment–Close change Management)
  5. Incident Management/Help Desk to confirm the successful change and update the KMDB accordingly (Post confirmation–Close Incident Management)

There are many other aspects which will be controlled by implementing the above process. The control team can make sure of approving the required and correct CMR (change management requests) by which we can control and minimize the after change errors which is the main cause of production outages.

Some of the other key processes are capacity management, availability management, information security, risk management, configuration management, asset management, event management, access management and each process has their own benefits. We can initiate, implement and sustain with these 5 processes first and once successful, we can try and sneak the other process one by one and will fall in place.

What organization doesn’t want an increase in productivity? Or is there an organization that does not entertain cost and operational benefits. We can always customize the framework and implement process to meet our needs.

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