Tuesday, 14 May 2013 00:00
| Reader Question: How do we best prioritize incidents to ensure that the most important ones are being resolved first?
Third Sky Expert Answer:
  Kai Holthaus, ITIL Expert & Director of Consulting, Third Sky
ITIL® describes the concept of prioritizing incidents in the Service Operation book. On the generic level, it uses the concepts of urgency (how quickly the business needs a resolution) and level of business impact to derive impact urgency. These two measures are then most commonly put into a matrix that shows priority. Of course, that only moves the question from priority to impact and urgency. How do you ensure that the right levels of impact and urgency are assigned to an incident? On the urgency side, it is common to use the concept of “how is work affected”, for example “Work blocked”, “Work degraded”, “Work not affected”. One common practice for level of business impact is to consider the number of users being affected. For instance, “High” could mean that the entire company is affected, “Medium” could mean that a single function (like Accounting) is affected, an “Low” could indicate that only a single person is affected. However, this type of coding is often too simple, and other factors should be taken into account. For example: |
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| Request Fulfillment in ServiceNow |
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Wednesday, 08 May 2013 00:00
| Reader Question: What is the best strategy for migrating our current request management system into a Service Now implementation? Third Sky Expert Answer:  Gregory Link, Director of Consulting, Third Sky
 Two words – start small. There is a saying that you should not try to boil the ocean - to undertake an impossible task or project or to make a task or project unnecessarily difficult. That applies to a tool migration. By taking one process at a time, in this case Request Fulfillment, you are applying your available resources in one direction and building on subsequent successes.
Most likely, your current tool set has categories which contain similar request types or items. ServiceNow uses the same best practice in their Service Catalog application; which is where users would go to submit service requests. |
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| Streamlining Change Management with Standard Changes |
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Monday, 06 May 2013 00:00
| Reader Question: We have a fairly new implementation of the Change Control Process at my company. In what ways can we streamline the process so that it does not impact daily operations?
Third Sky Expert Answer:
 Kai Holthaus, ITIL Expert & Director of Consulting, Third Sky
It is easy to perceive Change Management as a bureaucratic hurdle in ‘getting things done’. By its very nature, Change Management tends to slow things down, but often we want to slow things down, in order to protect the environment from unintended consequences. So, the question is whether we need to apply the same amount of protection for all different types of changes. |
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Tuesday, 16 April 2013 00:00
| Reader Question: How should my organization set the criteria for standard changes? Is it better to have more or less standard changes?
Third Sky Expert Answer:  Kai Holthaus, ITIL Expert & Director of Consulting, Third Sky
The purpose of standard changes is to serve the business’ needs better by being able to handle changes responsibly with the least amount of bureaucracy. To that end, standard changes are a way of exercising appropriate control without taking more time or resources than are needed to protect business operations.
Standard changes, according to ITIL®, are changes that are pre-authorized, have low risk, are relatively common and follow a procedure or work instruction. This gives us some guidance we can use to determine which changes should be labeled standard changes and implemented using the simplified process for standard changes.The purpose of standard changes is to serve the business’ needs better by being able to handle changes responsibly with the least amount of bureaucracy. To that end, standard changes are a way of exercising appropriate control without taking more time or resources than are needed to protect business operations. |
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| Reducing the Difficulty & Time Associated with New Hire Requests |
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Tuesday, 19 March 2013 00:00
| Reader Question: Setting up new hires is a constant source of trouble for us. The business thinks the process is too complicated and too slow and I can’t say they’re wrong. Any guidance? Third Sky Expert Answer:  Kai Holthaus, ITIL Expert & Director of Consulting, Third Sky
This is a problem we hear a lot. Between computers, phones, accounts and physical workspace, it should be clear that the new hire enablement request is not a simple one. At most organizations, several separate requests have to be submitted, coordinated and fulfilled in order to have everything ready on day one. Wouldn’t it be better to bundle these requests to hide this complexity from the requester as opposed to having the requester submit a series of different forms (with each form potentially being located in different sections of the intranet)? The process should seem like it is simple and easy to the person requesting the new hire set up. The requester does not need to know the complexity that goes on behind the scenes.
So, in order to make this easier for requesters, the following things need to be understood and documented: |
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