The Access Group offers a diverse team of qualified engagement managers and consultants capable of providing a wide range of assessment services. Our assessment team members carry an ITIL Foundation, Practitioner and/or Service Manager Certification. They are experienced with typical assessment-oriented skills such as interviewing, analysis of technical and process-oriented documentation and observational skills. In addition, our Engagement Managers and Consultants are well versed in a variety of strategic competencies that either serve as foundations or drivers to an ITSM adoption. These include IT Governance frameworks, the Software Development Lifecycle, Six Sigma and other quality frameworks. A key differentiator is that our consultants typically have many years of hands-on technical and management experience within large corporate environments. Unlike consultants that come from a pure consulting environment, we believe that this enables them to:
- Understand the practical application of ITSM principles in real world environments and apply them in a manner that will increase the likelihood of adoption
- Rapidly build rapport with IT management and technical teams
- Understand political implications of existing processes and the existing cultural drivers and account for them in the development of both the Optimum ITSM Maturity Levels and the Roadmap of recommended activities
- Adapt the assessment process ‘on-the-fly’ to meet the unique needs of each client, while ensuring that the necessary information is collected to complete the assessment
The Access Group follows a structured, two-phase approach to ITSM adoption engagements. Our approach is unique in that we embrace a process-centric view of ITSM assessments and adoption. While many organizations focus on simply completing interviews, we believe that the core driver to any lasting ITSM effort is the adoption and improvement of underlying operating processes. We therefore take great care to model current ‘as-is’ operating processes as well as to utilize metric-driven process improvement methodologies to drive ITSM adoption. Our broad methodology is represented below:
Our methodology utilizes a Six Sigma DMAIC framework to step through the assessment and improvement phases. The first phase of our ITSM Adoption Methodology is the ITSM Maturity Assessment, which encompasses the Define, Measure and Analyze components of the DMAIC framework. While this approach is not fully adherent to Six Sigma principles in that it is often difficult to collect sufficient metrics during the assessment process to immediately move forward with improvement activities (and therefore, detailed metric benchmarking is typically encompassed in Phase II), this framework does ensure that the assessment process delivers actionable findings that can lead to immediate ITSM adoption and process improvement.
Our ITSM Maturity Assessment methodology is represented below:
This methodology ensures that we are assessing both stated operating practices as well as existing processes. While there is much overlap with these areas, by looking at both we ensure that we are looking at what is being done as well as how it is being done to adequately assess adherence to and gaps with the ITIL framework. While this basic methodology is widely used within the industry, there are three unique components to our assessment methodology that provide significant value to the process:
Data Gathering Approach
Rather than simply utilizing interviews, as many organizations do, The Access Group utilizes a five-step approach to data gathering (encompassing the first three steps of the methodology):
- Management Team Interview – We begin each project with an IT management team interview. This ‘round table’ interview brings the entire team together, sets expectations and creates a high-level perspective of their IT operations.
- Individual Interviews – Utilizing the ITIL Maturity Assessment questionnaire as a guide, our team conducts detailed interviews of all IT management and key staff to gain a detailed understanding of current operating practices and processes.
Process Modeling – By creating process models of the ‘As-Is’ state of IT operations, many key areas are reviewed in greater depth than can often be achieved by interviews alone. Creating current state process models forces both our assessment teams and the IT team to look deeper into their current operations. This enable us to get a more complete understanding of current IT practices and to more readily identify gaps and opportunities.
- Documentation Review – In addition to interviews and process modeling, our team will also conduct a review of any existing documentation to further validate identified practices and identify additional gaps.
- Operational Observations – The last component of our data gathering approach involves the observation of actual operations. These ‘over-the-shoulder’ observations enable our team to validate that the practices and processes are occurring as described. It is also during this process that additional activities and processes are identified of which IT management may not be aware. This process also assures that our assessment team gets the perspective of all members of the IT delivery team rather than simply a management or leadership perspective.
Optimum Maturity Level
It is often assumed that every IT organization can and should achieve the highest level of ITSM/ITIL maturity. This is often, however, not the case. ITIL adoption is best viewed from an ‘Adopt and Adapt’ perspective. No two IT organizations are alike and, therefore, each ITIL adoption must be adapted to meet the specific needs of the organization. Company culture, strategic direction, outsourcing or insourcing arrangements and a variety of other factors may result in the inability or undesirability for an IT organization to reach a ‘Level 5’ maturity rating. Because of this, a key component of our assessment process is to assess these factors to create an ‘Optimum Maturity Level.’ This Optimum Maturity Level becomes the organization’s maturity objective and is aligned to the cultural and other factors present within the organization and represents an achievable standard to which the organization can be held. Failure to establish an Optimum Maturity Level can lead to frustration within the IT team, resistance to and the ultimate failure in the adoption process because the team believes the objectives to be unachievable.
ITSM Assessment Workshops
In our view, there are two key objectives to an ITSM Maturity Assessment: (a) to get a ‘point-in-time’ snapshot of the IT organization’s current operating practices as measured against the ITIL framework and to (b) set the stage for the IT organization to routinely assess its ongoing operations as part of a continuous improvement initiative. We believe very strongly that the Maturity Assessments must be completed on a continual basis in order to achieve lasting adoption and drive continued efficiency gains. We also believe that to be most effective, these assessments should be conducted by the IT team itself so that they take ownership of the process. To support these objectives, we include an ITSM Assessment Workshop as part of our assessment methodology. This two-day workshop is designed to educate the IT management team on underlying ITSM principles and the process being utilized during the assessment. Typically conducted at the beginning of the engagement, this enables the team to participate fully with our team during the assessment as well as prepares them to take ownership of the ongoing assessment lifecycle.
IT Governance Consulting -
IT Governance has become one of the hot buzzwords of the day, but it really comes down to this: IT Governance is about defining WHAT IT should be doing. Many people consider this an easy question (run the computers!), but budgets and human resources are limited and the various needs of enterprises are complex and can often compete with one another. IT governance is about taking a strategic view of how IT can both enable the business of the enterprise and provide it with competitive advantage through technology-driven innovations. By taking a strategic, forward-looking view of IT capacity requirements and their underlying information requirements, an IT organization can develop plans, determine future organizational requirements and guide IT initiatives toward meeting these goals. The Access Group can help.
Our IT Governance practice includes the following services:
- IT Organizational Consulting
- IT Strategic Planning
- IT Portfolio/Project Management
