Lack of engagement with development and project staff

Challenges

Challenges, Critical Success Factors and risks

Type of introduction

A decision is needed on what type of introduction is needed – whether to go for a ‘Big Bang’ introduction or some sort of phased approach. As most organizations will not start from a ‘green field’ situation, and will have live services to keep running during the introduction, a phased approach is more likely to be necessary.

In many cases a new tool will be replacing an older, probably less sophisticated, tool and the switchover between the two is another factor to be planned.

This will often involve deciding what data needs to be carried forward from the old tool to the new one – and this may require significant reformatting to achieve the required results. Ideally this transfer should be done electronically – but in some cases a small amount of rekeying of live data may be inevitable and should be factored into the plan s.

Caution: older tools generally relied on more manual entry and maintenance of data so if electronic data migration is being used, an audit should be performed to verify data quality.

Where data transfer is complicated or time consuming to achieve, an alternative might be to allow a period of parallel running – with the old tool being available for an initial period alongside the new one, so that historical data can be referenced if needed. In such cases it will be prudent to make the old tool ‘read-only’ so that no mistakes can be made by logging new data in the old tool.

Complete details on the Release and Deployment Management process can be found in the Service Transition publication

There are a number of challenges faced within Service Operation that need to be overcome. These include those set out in this section.

Traditionally, there has been a separation between Service Operation staff and those staff involved in developing new application s or running project s that will eventually deliver new functionality into the operational environment.

This separation was originally deliberate and driven by the desire to prevent collusion and avoid potential security risk s (in some organizations it is still a legislative requirement). However, instead of using this separation of duties to create positive contributions, in many organizations it is a source of rivalry and political manoeuvring.

All too often, ITSM is seen as something that has been initiated in the operational areas and is nothing to do with development or projects.

This view is very damaging as the appropriate time to be thinking of Service Operation issues is at the outset of new developments or projects – when there is still time to include these factors in the planning stages.

The Service Design and Service Transition publications describe the steps needed to ensure that IT Operations issues are considered from the outset of new developments and projects.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23