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Gilles Marchand of GMar Consulting joins host Jason Kennedy for a 25 minute conversation to discuss a sensible approach to undertaking IT Service transformation.
We discuss in depth what it is, what it isn't, and how to ensure successful outcomes.
Gilles provides some insight into how to gain business sponsor support for IT Service Transformation activities, and how to leverage these principles to improve the efficiency of your IT operations.
Click the link below to download the audio of the podcast:
itManageCast Episode 3 - The IT Service Transformation Talk
To watch the video recording of the podcast on YouTube, click Podcast here or at the top of this page.
For feedback on this or any episode of the itManageCast podcast, or to recommend topics or guests for future shows, please contact us via Twitter @itManageCast or email us at our GMail account.
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You're a great IT project manager. You know it, and more others should. But for some reason, you struggle with the hand-over part at the tail end of the project. The infamous "Transition to Operations."
You have all the deliverables completed & signed off, but the new service just seems to struggle and flail like a fish that just hopped out of the bowl and onto your desk. And while you may have moved on to the next project, the business service owners fighting with the last implementation are now muttering under their breath.
How can this be avoided?
One sure fire way is to be thinking of the "transition to operations" from the outset of the project planning & chartering. And think about how this service will be supported and operated daily by the people who will be responsible for it, and the people who will be using it. Likely, you've already got those considerations on your check-list, and that's great.
But are you making sure that the operational & support documentation delivered through the project reflects this?
Here are, for your consideration and feedback, three simple ideas to ensure that the documentation to support the hand-over of the completed project are both useful, and used!
Build in time for the experts to document their work.
One of the most common concerns a PM will hear from the IT subject matter experts - the technicians, analysts, or engineers on their project team - is that they only have enough time to do the work, not write a story about what they've done.
It is your responsibility as the PM that your project plan and task lists (work breakdown structure. etc) include ample time and clear expectations that any system configurations, support procedures, or operational maintenance tasks are documented clearly.
Communicate this expectation clearly, early, and often. But it won't be enough to tell the team what to do; you need to empower them to do it.
Provide the experts with simple tools to document their work.
It's often not going to be enough to tell people what to do. A true leader will lead them; show them what is expected and support them in getting it done.
Have some simple templates available at the outset of the project to share with the technical experts supporting the project delivery. Don't accept "it is self-documenting" as an answer. Ever. It really isn't.
You should review all the support and operational documentation output of the project. You don't necessarily need to understand every nuance, but you DO need to be able to read it and get the gist.
Technical experts are rarely writers by trade or skill. It's just not what they do. They will take short-cuts in their documentation, and rightly so, as they understand it - they built it!
But what happens in four or five years when the service needs an overhaul and that particular person isn't with the organization any longer?
What happens when the project rolls out and a more junior resource is tasked with operating or supporting the technology aspects of the new service?
Consider these scenarios when reviewing the documentation with the technical authors.
And those tips help get the documentation needed by the technical folks completed - but what about the support model for the service?
Have the end-users of the service contribute to the support model.
The documentation to ensure that the service has a clear model of support, escalation paths, and service expectations should always have input from a small, careful selection of those who will be active end-users of the service once it goes live.
Be selective in who you involve, and bring them "nearly completed" drafts of the support model to review and contribute to in order to respect their time and keep potential re-writing to a minimum.
Following these simple tips should help others see what a great IT PM you really are.
If you have other tips and tricks for IT Project Management, or feedback on these ideas, please share them with me in the blog comments or via my Twitter account - @itManageCast
Thanks for reading, and have an awesome day!
If you are in the process of, or have transitioned servers or applications to a cloud-based or virtualized solution, you have increased your value to the rest of the business. But how do you communicate that effectively?
How do you clarify the value proposition of IT operations leveraging cloud-based solutions for IT service delivery? You make sure that speed and agility are metrics that those who you support understand, by bringing the value proposition to them on their terms.
1. Choose Metrics Wisely
There are three key areas you will most easily be able to measure meaningful business value:
- Economics - what does it cost to run IT
- Quality of Service - in the eyes of the end users of the services
- Agility - velocity of deployment in response to changes in business
This is likely not news to anyone in IT operations roles, but often we struggle with the practical implementation and communication of these metrics. In another article we'll talk about implementation, but here's a few tips to get you started thinking along the lines of "what can we do to help the business understand our value to them?"
At the June 2014 Gartner IT Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit this was one of the hot topics many IT operations managers struggle with. We know how to define the value and performance metrics of the infrastructure in ways that we understand, but does the CFO, CMO, or CxO get that?
2. Know LEARN Your Audience
To make sure those who hold the purse strings get the value delivered to the business by IT operations, we need to communicate with them in terms that matter to them.
The three areas I presented above are great, but meaningless if you just use formulas you've Googled to obtain statistics that you'll put in a Power Point presentation for your upcoming budget review. You need to invest some time in understanding what your audience perceives as value, and then communicating the information to them in that context.
- Identify people in the key business areas served by IT operations who can help you understand what they value most in the IT service you deliver to them. Perhaps they are getting IT services from others that you weren't aware of - understand why. Not so that you can provide those services instead, but so that you can better understand why they see those options as a value. Use your active listening skills, and learn about their part of the business - don't jump in immediately with offers of help for their challenges, but understand them better.
- Leverage your PMO, or if you don't have a PMO, those responsible for business development projects to make sure they understand the services and abilities of the IT operations group, and your willingness to better understand how they seek to deliver business projects. The way forward together may not always seem clear at first, but project managers are vital allies to IT operations; they almost always have the ears of those you most wish to influence.
So if we have defined the metrics, and communicate them effectively, we can now communicate our value proposition to those who determine our financial fate. So the next question is, how can we use these metrics to improve our own ability to deliver services? Sounds like a good topic for an upcoming post...
