How To Get The User Buy-In

In continuation of "Getting User Buy-In for ITIL Implementation"

 

Let us focus on how you can answer the questions of my previous post.

 

Organization is because of employees. Any initiative can be beneficial to the organization only if it benefits the employees as well. Benefit need not always mean financial benefit. ITIL processes are meant to:

• Make your life simpler…simpler in terms of doing your day-to-day activity
• Make your professional life better…better in terms of doing quality work
• Make you performance highlighted…highlighted because there will be metrics defined which will give a qualitative and quantitative indication of your performance levels
• Have a clearly defined roles and responsibilities. This will open up additional avenues for growth.

 

Taking an example of incident management, you can highlight how it will help in clear categorization of task/activities to be performed by the resources based on their expertise. How it can prevent the resources from having to answer calls related to incidents when they are actually midway in their effort to resolve one of the incidents.

 

We can take this example a step further…

By defining and implementing a service desk, we have a dedicated team to answer to the user’s calls, logging incidents, taking care of service requests, updating users with the status, etc. Thus, it would free the experienced resources from having to undertake these tasks in parallel to their task of resolving incidents. This would help in improving their performance level.

 

Also, with incident prioritization and categorization only the team with right skill set and expertise will work on that incident. This will help in faster resolution.

 

 

In this way, ITIL consultants need to come out with examples and answered to the questions that trouble the end users. This small exercise on part of the ITIL consultants will surely make the implementation a success.

 

Kindly note that these recommendations are in addition to other activities that are planned to promote the initiative and its awareness.

Getting User Buy-In for ITIL Implementation

Taking a step further from my last post, I will focus now specifically on getting user buy-in for ITIL implementation. The same logic of getting buy-in for process consulting applies to ITIL as well.

Although, the stakeholders are well aware of the business benefits of ITIL implementation, awareness is lacking in end users about the benefits of the same. Moreover end users are more concerned about the benefits which they will drive from the initiative. Following questions trouble them:

ITIL is for the organization and not for me. Why should I follow the process?

• 
  
  What is there in ITIL for me?
• 
  
  How is ITIL going to benefit me?
• 
  
  How will the ITIL process (es) benefit my team?
• 
  
  Is the organization trying to make me replaceable? Am I going to loose my job?

ITIL Consultants should be prepared to answer these questions. Specifically regarding the last question, the consultant should advise the stakeholders to adopt ‘change management’ and take the end users into confidence before trying to roll out the new initiative.

Every ITIL Consultant focuses on benefits of ITIL for the organization. But one should remember that this will just help in getting the ITIL consulting or implementation contract. But in order to make the ITIL initiative a success, one needs to get the buy-in of the end users as well. Consultants should also take out time to answer the above questions which trouble the end users.

(Con’t…)