ITIL and Six Sigma - The Magical Combination

IT Information Library (ITIL) was originally defined by UK Government’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), (now Office Of Government Commerce (OGC)). ITIL defines a framework to deliver and support IT-based services. There are many components of ITIL framework and each component has a set of recommended practices and procedures that can be adopted individually or in total. Customer satisfaction is critical to a successful ITIL – run organization.

Six Sigma, on the other hand, is a quality-management process based on statistical measurements used to drive quality improvement while reducing operational costs. It is a formal approach for evaluating which processes are important to your business, measuring the quality of outputs for those processes statistically, and using the methodology for continuously mapping, measuring, and improving the process and hence the results. Six Sigma focuses on Voice of Customer (VoC) and thus on customer satisfaction.

From the understanding of both the approaches it is very clear that both ITIL and Six Sigma have the same focus i.e. ‘Customer Satisfaction’.

ITIL and Six Sigma are independent approaches. They have their own merits and have been used independently to improve the quality of IT Services. Then a question arises that when these two processes can function without each other then why should we bring them together?

ITIL tells us What should be done but it does not specify How we should do it. For example, ITIL specifies that priority should be allocated for each incident that comes into the service desk. But, it does not specify how we should allocate that priority. So with ITIL, IT staff has to find out the details of process flow and create detailed work instructions on their own as suitable for their organization.

On the other hand Six Sigma tells us How, but it doesn't tell us What. It does not specify any best practices, specifically for IT Service Management.

So we can say that ITIL defines the “what” of service management, and Six Sigma defines the “how” of quality improvement. Together, they can be a perfect fit for improving the quality of IT service delivery and support. But bringing them together is really a challenging task, with the challenge being bringing these two approaches together to implement the optimum combination for any organization.

Six Sigma can be used to work on and improve the existing processes in an organization which is already following ITIL framework and can also be used in an organization which is migrating to ITIL framework. The approach for such an organization would be to analyze the risk, compare existing processes to that what is required in the ITIL compatible state and then using a business case define the solution to migrate the existing processes to ITIL compatible processes which would be usable as well as measurable.

There are number of tools available to manage the workflow as per the ITIL framework. Since ITIL specifies what is expected from a workflow but does not specify how this workflow should be, so it is dependent on the IT staff to decide this workflow. This workflow is nothing but a process. This is where linking Six Sigma and ITIL is very helpful for the business. Six Sigma can help in standardizing the processes, eliminating the defects and then these optimized & standardized processes that is also conforming to the ITIL framework can turn out to provide a greater ROI to the organization along with Happy & Satisfied Customers.

Then the question arises that how should we move about making this combination of ITIL and Six Sigma possible?

To briefly take up this question we assume that we are migrating an existing process to an ITIL – compatible process and thus we’ll be applying the DMAIC model of Six Sigma.

In the Define Phase we focus to understand the ‘real’ requirement of the customer, i.e. Voice of Customer and correspondingly we identify the process that need to be improved and also make sure that resources required for this improvement process are in place. We should always remember that the goal of the define phase is not only to align the Six Sigma strategy to the ITIL strategy but also to the organizations strategy, which is very important for the success and feasibility of the project.

In the Measure Phase we assess the current state of the process. We define the defects, gather data for baseline information about the process, validate the measurement systems and establish more specific improvement goal. Since this phase is based on data and measurements so any source of assumption is eliminated. We determine the issues and Critical To Quality factors (CTQs) of the desired process.

In the Analyze Phase we analyze the data collected during the Measure Phase. We identify the sources of variation and then prioritize these source. We thus separate the “vital few” variables from “trivial many” variables and hence propose a possible pilot solution for the same.

In Improve Phase we confirm whether this proposed pilot solution meets the quality improvement goal of the project. If not then we further refine our pilot process to meet the desired goal.

In the Control Phase we implement this pilot solution at the organization level and ensure that the improvement made is sustained to prevent the process from reverting back to its prior state. At this stage there is a very important role of Knowledge Management so that the lessons learnt from this improvement process is properly documented and made available for process improvements in other areas. So finally the ITIL – compatible process, defined or designed using Six Sigma methodology, is implemented to achieve business goals.

This article has also been published by isixsigma.com