Call them whatever you like; best practices, guidelines or frameworks, there are a plethora of really good tools which can be used by themselves or in conjunction with one another to enable service delivery in ways which will allow your business to achieve it’s goals. In the background, however, there is still a discussion that is going on that sounds like this:
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- “We do this process really well, while this other one, not so much.”
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- “We have to do Change and Incident but not Problem.”
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- “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. The simple answer is that you are already providing some level of service to your business with current processes and activities. The question then becomes what more could you do from a service delivery perspective. Could these missing components take our services to the next level?
Quite often the processes which are not as well managed as the others are limiting the managed activities in ways which may not be clear to you at the moment. Additionally you may not be able to see the missing components since you are “too close” to the work.
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 be limited in the way that you “implement” problem management in the way that you would like to right now, think about what activities will improve your ability to reduce incidents or emergency changes. Start small to achieve the ripple effect that will have lasting effects down the line. This might give you the opportunity in the future where you can re-market it to the right stakeholders when you are able to substantiate your initial improvements with some statistics to back up your claims.
There is also the voice that says. “We tried putting in asset 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?
To summarize, the key to success overall is to look at what your business needs to achieve. Once you understand what they need you can look at where potential gaps exist in your current method to deliver and support service to understanding what they need will allow you to prioritize what areas you will need to improve.