The Definition Of Insanity

Can be defined as doing the same thing, the same way every time, and expecting the results to change. (try W. Edwards Demings’ red bead experiment!)

Building a process oriented business is not a set it and forget it operation. It is defining and monitoring the desired outcomes. And identifying that if a desired outcome does not happen, that you have an opportunity for improvement.

In other words, if the desired outcome fails, what can we do to reduce the risk that it will fail next time?

In talking about process, you need to look specifically at what breaks. You need to look at the why, and the how of what went wrong. Is it a people problem? A process problem? or a system problem?

(within the context of ITIL I give some samples starting in this post titled; ITIL And The SMB Part 3; Incident Management)

Although please note that you do not need to go the ITIL route to become more process oriented.

It can be easy to overlook;

When something fails, there is an associated cost. That cost could be rework, lost time, maybe even lost business. Costs can be soft as well, for example, reduced customer satisfaction.

As an example of improving process efficiency, the large package delivery companies load their trucks in a first-in, last-out manner based on the drivers delivery route. This simple step reduces the amount of time finding the correct packages for offload at each stop, and reduces the risk of missing something. And of course missing packages can negatively affect customer satisfaction.

The More Things Stay The Same

When you start building a process oriented business (not just as an IT function) there are two critical pieces to start with;

1) Define the optimum outcomes. A process is nothing without a business outcome. This defined business outcome is also the measure that you can use to improve and monitor your processes.

2) Continually monitor and improve your processes. There are always opportunities for improvement. There is an old saying in music, that the spaces between the notes are just as important as the notes themselves.

The SMB Takeaway

Like the spaces between the notes, process optimization often comes hidden in the areas as work migrates from one individual or group to another.

Improving them, or identifying why something did not work, you need to understand – you need to look at the what the why and the how of what you are trying to perform.

Was it a person error? a process error? a system error?

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ITIL, Lies, Damn Lies & Statistcs

This blog has covered quite a bit about the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) within the context of the benefits I believe it can provide to the small to medium enterprise.

However, as there is no such thing as a silver bullet in business, I want to point out a post at The ITSkeptic titled; Crap Factoid Alert: Implementing an IT Service Management Solution Can Save a Business More than $500,000

The above post is a goodie and is referencing how dangerous statistics (especially when in software marketing spiels) can be.

While my experience has shown that SME’s can benefit from ITIL, as a ‘C’ level exec, if you are looking for questions and answers on a hard and fast ROI, you will probably be disappointed.

Here’s The Rub

I am going to take a plunge here; Does your General Ledger have charts of accounts titled Frustration or Downtime?

I doubt it.

Moving into an IT Management framework that is ITIL aligned (or any other framework for that matter) deals a lot with the internal processes and roles that improve IT service levels. ITIL is not a Cookbook that forces a business to do things this way. But a road map of best practices.

The point here is that if we have a hypothetical balance sheet that we can call example A, it may show zero CAPEX costs for IT infrastructure, yet it has no means of accounting for hours of lost productivity and frustration as IT infrastructure assets have failed, no way to account for inefficiency in IT service etc.

You then spend dollars and time moving towards ITIL alignment, then a hypothetical balance sheet we can call example B shows costs of  X on replacement IT infrastructure, yet again, it cannot account for the fact that hours of lost productivity and frustration are  no longer there.

THE SMB Takeaway

In my opinion, there is a value in ITIL for SME’s, But most of us have not had the experience with the accounting for softer dollar parts of the balance sheet. The ones that do not directly include operating and capital expenses.

From a pure expense view of your G/L, you may never see a firm return on investment for an ITIL implementation. Simply because accurately accounting for its benefit contains the requirement that we understand the benefits of improved productivity and improved service levels.

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Hands On ITIL Helpdesk

I have written many high level overviews of ITIL on this blog, and to this day it is the most searched for information.

Unfortunately for me, very few of those visitors have left questions on other info they would like to see.

However, if you are someone who stumbled on the ITIL stuff here, Mary Weilage has an excellent post at Techreplublic titled; Implementing help desk software: IT exec offers a firsthand account about Jay Rollins’ search for and implementation of ITIL aligned help desk processes.

It provides an excellent summary of the questions, requirements and trade offs made along the way.

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ITIL: Risks And Rewards

If you are a larger organization looking at ITIL, here is a good overview by Bob Mathers on ITWorld Canada titled; Payback time for ITIL

It dives into risk, metrics, and goals required for process improvement frameworks.

It covers many of the processes I have outlined here, and some of the risks and influences to be aware of.

The one piece that I wanted to highlight is an analogy that Mr. Mathers (you know I like analogies!) on defining metrics that incent actions that you are looking for.

In Mr. Mathers words; (emphasis mine)

And this does not apply only to IT processes. Consider a bank that provides customers a confusing telephone self-service option to change their PINs. Callers quickly become frustrated and abandon the service to talk to a live agent. Because the customer problem is easy to solve, the first-call resolution rate approaches 100 percent. Call center management has no incentive to search out and prevent this type of call, because then the calls could be avoided altogether. Fewer calls would push down the overall resolution rate, which would reflect poorly on management performance. Meanwhile, the customer experience suffers.

This is directly linked to your process governance. Direct causal linkages between your goals and the improvements to meet them.

The SMB Takeaway

As I have stated before – do you need ITIL for improving processes (including IT) No!, but regardless of the framework used or chosen. The governance issues remain.

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Real SMB IT: It Asset Management, On the Cheap

Having a handle on your IT assets is important. Both in the context of ITIL and from the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of your IT assets. 

For larger businesses in the SME space, there are dozens (if not hundreds) of tools that you can purchase.

For smaller businesses, you can do it yourself – and do it pretty cheap as well!

So here is how to start an asset management system on the cheap.

Step 1 The Asset Tags

If you are tracking assets by a name like Jeff’s PC or Printer next to Christine. What happens when Jeff leaves or the printer is moved?

Companies such as Maverick Label  will do Asset Tags in smaller batches, complete with your company name and logo starting at about a buck per tag.

That Asset Tag number becomes the global identifier for that asset. That remote sales rep calls with a laptop or projector problem?

That number will pull up every detail for you.

Step 2 The Asset Data

The exact data that you want to track may vary, but I track the asset number, the device serial number, make, model, manufacturer, purchase and warranty dates, vendor, asset type, who it is assigned to, location, and some general configuration information. I also keep space to document any service and historical information of the asset.

Step 3 The Asset Tracking Tool

Yes, it can be something as simple as a spreadsheet. However I like to use the freely down-loadable Microsoft Sharepoint Team Services.

I used Sharepoints custom list ability to create the asset management tool quickly, and free.

The benefit that I find is that with Sharepoint’s search capability I can pull up any asset by its asset number, or any other criteria.

Who has the projector that Jane used to use? one sec … got it

Which PDA is John using? .. got it.

The SMB Takeaway

Managing the life cycle of your IT assets is the first step in ensuring that you are accounting for both the whereabouts, and status of all IT assets.

It also reduces the time and cost of servicing assets as you have a central repository of each and every asset you own.

It also reduces purchasing assets that you may already have in surplus, and can even identify assets that are beginning to fail to frequently. 

And best of all, for smaller businesses, you can do it cheap!

Larger Image

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Processes Should Be Simple

We have defined processes as where inputs come from, and where they go to in order to get a piece of work completed.

For a simple example, when materials arrive at your loading dock, receiving validates the waybill with the delivery, then gives the way bill to accounts payable, who validates with the purchase order for payment. That way bill is both an output for receiving, and an input for A/P. 

If we were to chart or diagram this, it would be simple one;

Easy Process Flow

Receiving validates bill with Delivery, THEN provides to A/P who validates with PO, THEN pays bill.

Exceptions Can Hurt

But what often happens, is that we try to have our processes handle all possible exceptions. Trying to build that one size fits all type of process gets very complex and more difficult to work with.

For Example

In the example we used above, what could go wrong to cause an exception?

•  The delivery does not match the waybill
•  The delivery quantity does not match purchase order quantity

That is just two obvious exmples.

So our process would then be;

Delivery Arrives; (NOTE: this image is a sample to show complexity – not a true delivery to payment workflow)

Complex Process Flow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IF delivery and waybill match THEN DO….

IF delivery and waybill NOT match THEN DO…

IF Waybill and PO match THEN DO….

IF Waybill and PO NOT match THEN DO….

Now, if we were to chart or diagram this, it is no longer a simple one, it is filled with IF, THEN DO flows and paths.

As more of these pile up- your process gets unweildy and difficult to manage.

The Exceptions Do Count

This is not to state that we ignore those exceptions. You know they exist, you know they will happen.

The key is to not to try and account for them in one huge process flow diagram.

But to separate them out into multiple small and simple sub-processes.

So using our simplistic example, when materials arrive at your dock, one simple process takes place if the delivery and way bill match (ie forward to A/P)

And a separate process gets used if they don’t match. (ie perhaps purchasing needs to reconcile)

The SMB Takeaway

Don’t try and create a process that covers each and every possible exception.

Do create multiple smaller sub-processes. They are easier to use, and easier to update if you change the work flow.

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SMB IT: Consultants and ITIL

Question: Is there anything wrong with using consultants to help you formalize an ITIL strategy?

Absolutely not!

However

Ask yourself if you are renting expertise, or on a lease to own plan.

Renting is a complete knowledge transfer of best practices and processes. The recommendations and roadmap that can get you there.

The lease to own plan is a thick binder on your desk, and then they walk away.

What do you have left?

Well, it will be One of two things;

A nice binder sitting on a shelf

Or the consultants coming back in to do it all for you.

They will love option number two, it is more billable hours!

Here is the rub;

As a SME manager, renting requires more work by you and your team. But then you are driving the car for your ITIL service strategy, not just a passenger in someone elses.

Whenever the word consultant pops up, are you asking if it is a rental or lease to own plan?

My first post on ITIL is way back here. 

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Do I Really Need ITIL To Improve IT?

I write a lot about ITIL on this blog. My reason for that is that I have found that ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) provides a good framework to reduce IT costs and streamline the the processes of managing your technology infrastructure.

ITIL and other formalized frameworks can help provide a baseline on the requirements, inputs, and outputs required to perform a function or supply a deliverable.

But, can you do without ITIL?

In short, Yes.

I wanted to point out a couple of excellent articles that do a much better job at describing this capability than I can.

The first is Dr. John D. Halamka, Chief Information Officer of the CareGroup Health System and his blog post titled; The Broken Window Effect.

In IT organizations the Broken Window Effect can occur when management begins to tolerate downtime, constant workarounds, and broken processes.

In that article, Dr. Halamka does not mention using any framework such as ITIL or COBIT, but he extensively describes their formal change

Broken Windows

review process, and the critical questions asked to ensure continuous improvement and learning.

The second article is titled; Do You REALLY Have Effective IT Processes? by Management Consultant and researcher, Vaughan Merlyn,  which provides excellent guidance on the Charactersitics of Real Process

Processes tell you how work should be done, where inputs come from and outputs go to, what results should look like and how they should be measured and evaluated

The SMB Takeaway

I urge you to read both of those articles.

As both of these examples clarify, if you already have mature internal controls to identify, monitor, and improve your internal processes, then utilizing your existing controls within IT can generate the same improvements as ITIL et al.

The Value of ITIL

If you do not currently have disciplined internal processes and controls, the third party frameworks (including ITIL) can provide  the road map necessary to begin that journey towards continuous improvement, and continuous learning.

Photo Credit phrenologist

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ITIL Configuration Items (CI’s) and The SME Part 2

In the first post on CI’s (Configuration Items)  I mentioned that you must give some thought to how granular you want your CI’s to be. I broke this post into two parts because it is complex and a definite information overload.

Because the more granular you choose your CI’s to be, the more complex managing the environment becomes.

The degree of detail used to describe each CI and its relationships to other CI’s can grow very quickly.

Not An Inventory

Configuration Management is not simply an inventory that you have of hardware and software.

An example I have used on this blog is receiving e-mail on your mobile device. To receive that e-mail many servers, devices, routers etc all must work together to ensure it works.

I also mentioned that I have used less granularity at edge of the network, with more towards the core. This is usually backwards for a larger organization.

Why?

In a larger organization, having very granular details on all workstations and laptops (the edge) can pay dividends several ways as your management tools can identify;

* exact hardware and software specifications – ie you are upgrading to a new program version, which machines are too old or don’t have enough RAM for the new version?

* Support teams have the ability to reduce troubleshooting time (and cost) when calls reach the service desk

So in these scenario’s we have identified issues or solved problems without having to physically visit or touch the device.

As I have worked with strong technology focused organizations, I don’t worry to much about personal computers or notebooks. (software developers change them just about every day as it is!)

And something as simple as a software developer installing an open source piece of software code, changes your CI.

So for these devices I keep it simple, I document my asset number (inexpensive asset tags can be obtained, one example is here), make, model, serial number, support agreements, contracts etc.

The core on the other hand, are the servers, routers, firewalls and other plumbing devices of the network.

On those devices I maintain a very high level of granularity. This lets me answer any detailed question regarding the configuration, specification or capability of these devices.

The CMDB

Large organizations can purchase tools and have full relational database systems that provide this map of all CI’s and the relationships among them.

I was lucky enough to have one of those tools at a previous employer (we made it!) but I have used simple tools such as Microsoft Sharepoint to good effect.

They key takeaway is to define the level that makes sense for your organization.

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ITIL Configuration Items (CI’s) and The SME Part 1

As I wrote in the first post on configuration management here, the Configuration Management process is responsible for ensuring that the IT assets in your environment are properly base lined and documented.

I m going to do this post in two parts as it can get a little complex.

One report stated that 80% of unscheduled IT outages were from changes. And that about 80% of the outage time is just finding out what the change was. And your CI’s are your record of the current state from which any change must be measured.

One of the key challenges for larger organizations is the inventory or discovery of all IT related assets. These larger organizations will use automated discovery tools such as network inventory tools from Centennial Software among many others. These tools will tell you just about everything you want to know about your IT computing assets.

Granularity Level

Depending on your needs, in the small business tech space you may not need to get that fine level of granularity. Defining this granularity level can be more complex than it appears.

As an example, a larger business with multiple clustered database servers, could actually have an individual CI that covers the physical server hardware, the operating system, and the database engine running on each clustered server. The logic being that if one of those CI’s (the full clustered server) fails, replacing the CI is an identically configured server that gets added to the cluster.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, some larger organizations will break down a personal computer asset into many very tiny CI’s, for example, amount of memory, type of disk controller, disk size, BIOS Revision Versions etc. This level of granularity can be valuable as the support organization can know all details about an asset when there is an incident with that asset.

The Granularity Trade Off

The trade off of the level of granularity is complexity, time and cost of maintaining the CI’s within your CMDB (Configuration Management Database)

For the smaller business tech environment, take a realistic look at what information is of value to your environment for each type of IT asset.

I have found that I have a good balance of information with a very high level of granularity in the core, with less granularity as I move to the edge of the network.

The next post will go into the CMDB and more detail on CI’s

If you have implemented CI’s in the SMB space – Please leave a note on the level of granularity you chose!

UPDATE: Part 2 is now here

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