Pink’s 7 ITSM Enablers & Constraints 2011 Research Findings

Success requires careful and deliberate management of your enablers & constraints! All IT Service Management (ITSM) projects have seven common key enablers and critical success factors that provide the vision, direction, energy and resources to initiate, sustain and realize their promised benefits. Unfortunately, for many organizations these key enablers can also represent constraints and fatal blockages that paralyze and then terminate their ITSM initiatives prematurely before yielding the expected benefits. Understanding, managing and eliminating these terminal blockages is critical for a successful ITSM transformation program. When we consider the many conversations we have had with distraught ITIL®️ project managers, and the battle stories of many a disillusioned ITSM champion or sponsor, seven themes consistently emerge. These seven themes represent the seven key enablers that provide the energy and lifeblood ITSM initiatives require to kick off and stay alive long enough to make a difference at an enterprise IT level. The following list represents these 7 Critical Enablers:

  1. Leadership: Executive and senior level support and sponsorship
  2. Resources: Access to necessary project and ongoing process resources (time, people, funding)
  3. Knowledge: Your level of information, knowledge and skill related to ITSM
  4. Integrated Tools: Availability of integrated ITSM tools to support process workflow and automation
  5. Ability to Deploy: The organizational capability to deploy new policies, processes and tools across silos
  6. Ability to Affect Behavioral Change: Changing organizational behavior/culture and ensuring compliance to new practices over the long term
  7. ITSM Program Momentum: Maintaining momentum, priority and funding for the ITSM programs

This paper represents an update to research into the critical success factors for ITSM projects Pink Elephant undertook in 2008. Since the findings of 2008 many economic and business drivers have changed and it is important to see how the enablers and constraints have shifted during this three-year period. The findings of this paper examines each of the seven enablers and provides insight into their relative importance and impact on ITSM projects based on Pink Elephant's research over the past 14 years. Top 3 Constraints 2011 — With Projects #1 — Organizational Culture 66% of respondents #2 — Availability of Resources 65% (Time, People, Money) of respondents #3 — Organizational Ability To Deploy 57% of respondents Overall Research Summary: The primary observation of this research is that while not surprisingly the availability of resources is consistently seen as a key constraint, two out of the top three areas of concern in both the 2008 and 2011 survey years are focused on people issues. The ability to translate knowledge into results is highly dependent on how an organization recognizes and deals with the organizational issues related to Attitude, Behavior and Culture.

As IT professionals we prefer to focus on the tangible project elements such the tools and process documentation, which are often considered the primary deliverables of an ITSM improvement project. However, as is demonstrated by this research these are simply enablers to the goal, not the goal itself. While they are important and necessary, they are a means for ensuring that all participants in the IT value chain (internal and external) work together in a common manner to consistently deliver value to the business. Troy's Thoughts What Are Your's In this world there are four kinds of people: 1. Those who make things happen 2. Those who watch things happen 3. Those who have things happen to them 4. Those who wonder what happened Source: Anonymous

 

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