There are a plethora of really good frameworks or best practices which can be leveraged for service management and you may already be employing one or more of these to accomplish what your specific business needs are. In the background, however, there is still a discussion that is going on that sounds like this:
- “We do this process really well, while this other one, not so much.”
- “We have to do Change and Incident but not Problem.”
- “Release and Configuration management are kinda part of Change, but not always”
How is this in fact impacting the way you are able to deliver service through the processes which you are doing really well. Could these missing components take our services to the next level?
Quite often these adhoc processes are not after thoughts, which are how it may look from the outside in, in some cases there are formalized process that are documented but not managed effectively.
It’s time to take a closer look at these and determine whether the inputs and outputs are impacting your currently managed processes. While yes, it is possible that you may not have a way to institute problem management in the way that you would like right now but leveraging it in a way that currently makes sense to your business today may help to reduce incidents. This might give you the opportunity in the future where you can re-market it to the right stakeholders proving out an ROI analysis that may enable you to formalize the process further.
There is also the voice that says. “We tried putting in configuration management in a few years back and it was an epic failure. I don’t want to bring it up again.”
Just because something didn’t work then does not mean we can’t try it now. First we should look at what went wrong when we attempted it last time. Learn from your (or others) mistakes. It is possible that our current process has had time to mature since then. It is also possible that we approached this process the wrong way or the timing for our organization wasn’t appropriate, do we have any take-away items from then we can action?
Having inconsistent approaches to these less than formalized processes can also cause confusion for those who may be inadvertently associated with them. These need to be dealt with either by formalizing some piece or deciding to shelf it until a time when it can be re-visited later. There should be someone who owns them even if they are less mature.