#TFT14 Kiran Pabbathi, Top 5 issues in ITSM consulting

Kiran Kumar Pabbathi
Top 5 Issues in ITSM
consulting projects and its
mitigation methods

Top 5 Issues in ITSM consulting
projects and its mitigation methods
Kiran Kumar Pabbathi
(ITILv3 ® Expert, PRINCE2 ® Practitioner, MCP – MS
Sharepoint 2003, MCTS – MS Project 2007, Six SigmaGB, ISO/IEC20K, TMap & Cloud Computing - Foundation)
Author of the books “PDCA for ITIL” (published by TSO,
UK) and “Guidance for ITAM” (published by
Servicemanagers.org)

About the speaker
Kiran is a certified professional in ITIL v3 ® Expert, PRINCE2 ®
(Practitioner), Six Sigma Green Belt, MCP in SharePoint 2003
Customizations, MCTS in MS Project 2007, ISO/IEC20K -F,
Cloud Computing - F, and TMAP – F (Test Management
Professional). I am a BCA (Bachelors in Computer
Applications) and MBA - Information Technology graduate
from the city Hyderabad, located in the southern part of
India.
I have totally 11 years of experience in IT Industry, 2 years in
software development and 9 plus years of hardcore
experience in ITSM domain.
I worked as a service desk analyst, incident analyst, problem analyst, technical writer,
quality assurance analyst, process consultant, project and process manager which gave
me thorough knowledge and understanding on ITSM.

Currently I work as a Quality and Process Manager in Shanghai Bizenit Information
Technology (www.bizenit.com). Our company is focused in developing cost effective and
reliable IAM (Identity and Access Management) solutions, Oracle Identity and Access
management product implementations, ITIL trainings and consulting.

About the speaker
I am also the author of the books:
• “PDCA for ITIL – Metrics, CSFs and workflows for
implementing ITIL practices” published by TSO, UK
(ISBN 9780117082076) which provides a direction for
implementing ITIL processes and designing ITSM
solutions. Published in August 2013

• “Guidance for ITAM – Step by step implementation
guide with workflows, metrics, best practices and
checklists” published by Servicemanagers.org (ISBN
9780991320509) which provides a direction for
implementing ITAM processes and designing ITAM
solutions. Published in February 2014

Agenda
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Introduction to the topic
Back to Basics
Top 5 Issues and its mitigation methods
Guideposts for ITSM consulting teams
Common errors in ITSM consulting projects
Metrics for ITSM Consulting teams
Questions

Introduction to the topic
Today many ITSM consultants, all over the world are facing numerous issues in
ITSM consulting projects (be it process consulting or tool consulting), and the
reasons are:
• Increasing complexity in IT environment (with the evolution of cloud
computing, BYOD, big data, etc)
• Changing requirements from the clients
• Evolution of new best practices, standards, etc
• Increasing compliance requirements from government and legal institutes

Back to basics
What is ITSM (IT Service Management) process consulting?
ITSM process consulting is the activity which involves planning, analyzing,
designing, evaluating, implementing and training of the developed ITSM best
practices. (Also it involves the continuous improvement initiative)

Planning

Implementing
& training

Evaluating

Analyzing

Designing

Back to basics
What is ITSM Process consulting team?
ITSM consulting team generally comprises of:
• Process manager
• Process consultants
• Process developers
• Quality analysts
• Technical writers

Process
manager

Process
consultants

Process
developers

Quality
analysts

Technical
writers

Top 5 issues in ITSM consulting
projects
1. Why process definition and implementation? let’s go for straight away tool
implementation!
2. Understanding the requirements

3. Selection of the best practice
4. ITIL framework implementation is very costly & time consuming
5. Process adherence & awareness

projects
1. Why process definition and implementation? let’s go for straight away tool
implementation!
All organizations primary goal is cost cutting and they are with the approach
“Why process definition and implementation (wasting time and money), let’s go
for straight away tool implementation!”;
Organizations assume that straight away tool implementation would reduce the
complexity, costs, time and efforts, and if this is done it would become the
greatest disaster for organizations (in terms of costs, time and efforts).
So getting the confidence, enlightening and convincing the customer that
‘process definition and implementation pre-dominates the tools implementation’
is the number 1 issue for all ITSM consultants.
Hence consultants should enlighten and make the customers understand that no
ITSM tool can meet all the business requirements (in terms of scope, priorities,

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integration with other applications) in such a way that it can straight away be
deployed in the IT infrastructure and IT staff can utilize and optimize the tools.
Because every individual organization has its own priorities, requirements, goals,
pain points and risks.
Hence, before implementing any tool, an organization has to define a process
addressing and consolidating all the objectives, scope, roles and responsibilities,
risks, issues, and then accordingly tool has to be developed/ purchased and then
deployed.

projects
Mitigation method
1. ITSM consultants should initially begin with simple process diagrams
(without delving into different kinds of process collaterals and consulting
approaches) depicting the ‘as-is’ and ‘would be’ status of IT infrastructure;
highlighting and demarcating the: scope of the work, communication flow,
integrations with other business processes or departments, roles and
responsibilities, interfaces, and etc.
2. ITSM consultants should elucidate the advantages of process definition,
highlighting that: process would act as a baseline and as a backbone for IT
operations, process would provide a previse understanding on the long term
and short term goals, process would provide better clarity in requirements
and information flow, process would identify the risks, issues and
dependencies (giving a better picture), process would provide thorough
awareness on the business operations (to all technical and non-technical
stakeholders), process would provide easily understandable documentation
for all audiences.

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2. Understanding the requirements
Today world class MNC’s & Consulting firms are executing the ITSM consulting
projects in an offshore model, where 1 or 2 process consultants are at customer’s
location (for a while) and the rest of the process development, testing, and
documentation team is at offshore location. (Good for customers or clients – in
consideration with cost savings. Chaotic for process development and testing team
– in consideration with unclear requirements, vague knowledge on customer’s IT
infrastructure, tardy communications and etc).
Understanding the requirements thoroughly and effectively plays the most
important task for any ITSM consulting projects. If the consultants and process
developers are working in customer premises (onsite), most of the discrepancies
in understanding requirements can be eliminated with continuous reviews,
feedbacks and discussions.

projects
Mitigation method
In consideration with discrepancies that can happen while working from offshore
premises, here are some suggestions how to capture and gather detailed,
complete and accurate requirements:
1. Define and demarcate the requirements as Business requirements (defining
the business need and logics), Functional requirements (defining the
functionality of the proposed system), User requirements (requirements in
consideration with different types of users), Design and Technical
requirements (in consideration with the architectures, high level and low level
design, technological aspects like availability, capacity, security, etc), and Non
functional requirements (in consideration with user friendliness, accessibility,
etc)
2. Perform SIPOC (Supplier, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customers) analysis in
consideration with the requirements, objectives, issues, risks, dependencies,
etc.
3. Perform MoSCoW analysis on requirements to identify and understand what
is ‘Must’, ‘Should’, ‘Could’ and ‘Would be in future’.

projects
3. Selection of the best practice
Unfortunately and fortunately there are many best practices available for ITSM,
and that arises an issue for customers which makes them to think profoundly
‘What is the best ITSM practice that I should adopt in my organization?‘
And another issue is ‘Insistence from customers to define processes as per a
specific best practice only’, for example:
• If a customer is an American, he insists that he wants to define ITSM
processes only as per COBIT;
• If a customer is from UK, he insists that he wants to implement the processes
as per ITIL only;
• And another customer says that I want to implement the processes only as
per MOF.
These acute, biased preferences from the customer makes the consultants job
more difficult and takes them to a groove.

projects
Mitigation method
ITSM consultants should educate the clients that adherence and alignment to a
‘specific ITSM best practice’ (only) is not a good idea, as there would be pros and
cons for every individual best practice. So implementing ITSM processes as per a
specific best practice (be it ITIL/ MOF/ COBIT/ etc) would also carry forward the
flaws, misses, risks into the organization’s environment.
Hence the efficacy of an ITSM consultant is to take the best from all best
practices and customize them as per the needs of the business requirements; So
an ITSM consultant should refer and take the guidance from all the best practices
(ITIL, COBIT, MOF and etc), standards (ISO/IEC20K, ISO/IEC27001, ISO/IEC27005,
etc) and previous consulting experiences to develop effective processes and its
respective collaterals.
For example: A consultant can refer the ITIL/ MOF books to define the processes,
process activities, and workflows; COBIT books to define the governance

projects
mechanism, controls, checklists, generic goals, roles and responsibilities etc; and
standards to define standard operating procedures (SOP), guidelines, auditing
checklists, etc.

So the consulting team can refer different best practices, and bring out the best
from all the best practices.

projects
4. Implementing ITIL framework is very costly & time consuming task
Generally customers are afraid, skeptic of ITIL framework implementations and
its positive results, as ITIL is a humungous framework which comprises of 28
processes and 4 functions. Well, obviously this involves great costs, resources
and time.
Mitigation method
Implementing all ITIL framework (all 28 processes and 4 functions) would
evidently cost millions of dollars and 4-5 years of time duration without any
doubts. Hence ITSM consultants should scope the ITSM process development
project into a phased approach. Consultants should enlighten the customers that
the consulting team and organizational IT management would identify the most
critical, prioritized issues first and then they would implement necessary

projects
processes/ functions in a phased approach delivering visible results after every
process implementation.
Consultants should identify the major pain points in infrastructure (prioritizing
them), its root causes, dependencies, then accordingly they should determine
which process would be apt to start with, which process can bring in results for
the IT department and Organization to reach its business goals.
For example:
A company is having issues with its IT, where there are regular outages and also
takes very long time to restore the services. (Let’s assume there are no defined
processes)
Now a consultant would analyze and assess the complete business scenario
(in terms of number of outages on an average per month, time taken to fix the
issue, time taken to restore the services, what was the reference material used to
fix the issues, how many technical members were involved to fix the issues, how

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many of those were recurring issues, what is the root cause of the issues, what is
the business impact of the outages with respect to number of users, costs &
penalizations, what is the strategy of the organization and finally the budget for
IT department) and then he/ she would define a service desk function (with
defined roles, responsibilities, operating procedures, metrics, etc) which will act
as a SPOC for any information, requests, and complaints that will consolidate
accurate information about the issues reported by its end users.
Then the consultant would define the incident management process (with defined
roles, responsibilities, operation and escalation procedures, metrics, etc) and then
problem management process (with defined roles, responsibilities, operating and
escalation procedures, metrics, etc) followed by developing a knowledge base for all
individual teams - service desk, incident management and problem management.
In this way, scoping of ITSM processes demonstrates benefits in short time period and
will also align towards the long-term goals.

projects
5. Process adherence & awareness
In one of my consulting experience, I have understood (after all the process
development and implementation) that some of the key stakeholders were
reluctant to follow the process, and some were not even aware of the process.
Effective process definition is a very vital task for organizations, and strict
adherence, complete awareness on the defined process is explicitly mandatory.
Among the 4P’s (People, Processes, Products and Partners) of ITSM, the first P
‘People’ acts as a main foundation and is also a secret for successful
implementation and to demonstrate positive results.
And this ‘People’ involves IT management, operational managers, administrators
and also other staff including end users; all of these stakeholders should adhere
and have perfect awareness of the developed processes for effective and
efficient management of IT.

projects
Mitigation method
Involvement of all the key stakeholders right from the process planning,
implementation and trainings is very much necessary for the success of process
consulting projects.
Involving the key stakeholders in brainstorming sessions and conducting regular
reviews, will enable in getting frank opinions, important suggestions and their
observations with respect to their previous experiences.
Also it gives them a feeling that the process was developed based on their
opinions and reviews, which makes them to follow and adhere to the process
very strictly.
Not only that it also helps in winning the hearts of stakeholders for better human
relationship and also for further business opportunities.
Process awareness among the stakeholders can be developed by:

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• Conducting regular (monthly/ quarterly) trainings, assessments, quizzes, etc.
• Developing a management initiative that rewards the staff, who scores
maximum in the assessments.
• Creating simple & understandable process diagrams in posters and placing
them in every kiosks and meeting rooms, to propagate the importance of
processes.
• Creating posters highlighting the IT benefits and Business benefits (when the
team adheres to the processes).

ITSM consulting
team should
have real
experience in
ITSM

ITSM process
designing is not
copy-pasting

Risk analysis
and mitigation
must for every
ITSM consulting
project.

Selection of the
right tool

Guidepost 1: ITSM consulting team with real experience and knowledge
I have seen management hiring and promoting staff as process developers/
consultants just because they don’t have technical skills and they have stayed
in a company for long term in an organization. This is a blunder.
Select the ITSM consulting and process designing team who has real
experience in ITSM, who has seen real scenarios, experienced real issues
in ITSM departments. As people who have seen real issues (continuously) can
bring impeccable solutions based on their experiences, technical knowledge
and their innovative thinking.
Having theoretical knowledge from books, certifications (is a must) is good
but not strong enough to develop efficient processes/ solutions in consulting
or process development.

Guidepost 2: ITSM process designing is not copy-pasting
Its so shocking that I have seen some consultants who do copy-pasting from
ITIL books and call it as ‘process development’.
Well, ITSM process designing is not copy-pasting and rephrasing the content
from ITIL or MOF or COBIT books, it is bringing out the practical solutions for
the real issues happening at customer premises. Hence ITSM consulting team
should have people, who have real experience in ITSM departments and ITSM
consulting skills, not people with incompatible experiences.
An excellent ITSM consulting team doesn’t require a group of evangelists
from ITIL or MOF or COBIT; it requires ITSM consultants who are cognizant
about different ITSM best practices who knows the pros and cons of different
best practices, who can bring ‘out of the box’ solutions for the real issues.

Guidepost 3: Risk analysis and mitigation must for every ITSM consulting
project.
Risk analysis and mitigation is the area which is ignored in many of the ITSM
process consulting projects, leading to failures or inappropriate process
developments.
Typical risks in consulting projects are:
• Requirements creep/ changes in requirements
• Schedule lags
• Lack of stakeholders involvement
• Lack of reviews (at regular intervals) while the processes are being
developed
• Ineffective communication among the stakeholders
• Ambiguity in process documentation deliverables
Hence process consultants should always have a constant watch on risks and
plan appropriate mitigation methods.

Guidepost 4: Selection of the right tool
ITSM tools are very necessary as it can:
• eliminate routine human work and human errors
• automate the routine tasks, saving time
• follow a defined workflow without reinventing procedures and taking
approvals again and again
Criteria for tool selection should be primarily based on:
a) organization’s strategy
b) core functionality
c) costs and pricing
d) organization’s infrastructure and architecture
e) usability and visualization

Common errors
Err 1: Consideration of ITSM process implementation program as a typical
IT project
ITSM process implementations should never be treated as a typical IT projects
which has specific start date and end date. Typical IT projects deliver
outcomes, after the project is completed (after the proposed end date) and
the stakeholders would be able to experience the value very clearly.
But ITSM process implementation projects are not like typical IT projects
which show off the outcomes or ROI or VOI right after completing the project,
since process definition & implementation is like the directives or blueprints
which has to be followed by the operations team and then the operations and
management teams would be able to see the difference in outcomes.
Secondly ITSM process development and implementation programs can never
be marked with an acute end date as ITSM process development

Common errors
is always bonded with continuous improvement approach which gives
continuous or periodic feedbacks and with respect to the feedbacks the
process has to be redefined or updated.
Hence organizational top level management should understand that process
definition and implementation is not a typical IT project, it should be
considered as an ongoing program.

Common errors
Err 2: Appointing inappropriate people for the most crucial roles.
Today in many reputed organizations, management presumes that a ‘2’ digit
years of experience in some ‘X’, ‘Y’, ‘Z’ roles is an asset for an organization;
and some management folks assume ‘grey hair’ as a symbol and
exemplification of knowledge.
For example: “A resource having 10-15 years of experience in car driving, is
good enough for driving a car (only) and cannot drive an airplane with the
previous car driving experience and skills”.
Assigning well versed, knowledgeable resources as subordinates and
underdogs for some dumb people will be the greatest err.

Hence organizational management should carefully understand who has the
right knowledge, exposure, experience, skills, etc and accordingly they should
appoint the resources with the respect to the roles.

Common errors
Err 3: No encouragement and support for grooming consultants knowledge
(like trainings and certifications).
ITSM consulting team needs good encouragement and management support
for grooming the staff’s knowledge on evolving, ever changing best practices,
standards, and methodologies. As it is very much evident that the inception
of new best practices, standards and methodologies is happening
continuously, year after year; in the same way consulting team should be
equipped with the updating or evolving knowledge areas.
As discussed above, ITSM consulting team doesn’t require ITIL/ COBIT/ MOF
evangelists it needs consulting team who has knowledge on all of the
contemporary best practices, standards and methodologies for bringing out
the best from all the reference materials.
Hence management should identify the right human resources (‘who wants
to snug in a company’ and ‘who has passion and innovative thinking’) and then

Common errors
support them without showing any bias (based on years of experience in an
organization, nationality, sex, religion, caste, etc).

Metrics for Consulting teams
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

Time taken to develop a process and its collaterals
Number of resources and mandays required for process development
Number of resources and mandays required for process testing
Number of resources and mandays required for technical writing
Number of defects found by process testing team (in all process collaterals)
Number of defects (typo’s, confusions, grammatical errors) found in
process documentation
7. Number of defects found by end users and customer teams
8. Number of documentation deliverables (process guides, standard operating
procedures, work instructions, role & responsibilities) available on a
process
9. Number of NC’s (Non-conformances) found in audits with respect to
process
10.Number of areas where there is no documentation available
11.Number of process trainings provided
12.Customer satisfaction rating on process documentation provided
13.Customer satisfaction rating on process trainings and trainer

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