Process Ownership Combinations

Difficult Combinations

Incident & Problem Management At face value, these two processes look ideally suited for joint ownership. However, in practice this is rarely the case. Unlike other processes, the challenge does not lie in an inherent conflict of interest. Typically, the goals of Problem Management are subverted by the urgency of service restoration. Problem Management is responsible for taking a holistic view of the issues around service delivery by identifying systemic IT issues and service degradation trends. Incident Management is primarily concerned with the restoration of service as quickly as possible. The typical result of combining these processes is that Problem Management activities are often overridden by the immediate need of fire fighting. This is even more apparent when the Problem Management coordinators are given the role of managing the major incident or crisis processes and resulting post-incident reviews. The great majority of time is then spent in what is actually an Incident Management role, and the proactive side of Problem Management is largely neglected. Change & Incident Or Problem Management The objective of Change Management is to efficiently handle, assess, approve and coordinate all changes to the IT infrastructure in an efficient manner. At the same time, Incident and Problem Management are raising records that result in requests for changes. To combine ownership of these processes is to invite a conflict of interest around the required due diligence for Change Management.

Strong Combinations

Change & Configuration Management Change Management acts as the primary control mechanism for the updating of the Configuration Management Database (CMDB); likewise, Change Management relies on configuration data for impact analysis. For this reason, the combination of the two processes under a single accountability provides an added value to each process. Change & Release Management Both Change and Release Management deal with minimizing the impact of changes to the IT infrastructure; this shared objective makes this pairing desirable. Availability, Capacity & IT Service Continuity Management Each of these processes is back-office related and deal with the right sizing of the IT environment according to business needs. This combination is often under the control of a tactical or strategic IT planning group. Service Level Management (SLM) & Financial Management For IT Defining IT services, negotiating service levels and the cost associated with these services makes SLM and Financial Management a possible fit; however, most organizations will keep these separated, but aligned, due to the level of work required for each activity. The Last Word Best practices clearly indicate that process ownership should reside with a single individual to ensure clear accountability. The Process Owner's role is critical for the successful design and ongoing management of the processes being implemented. While it is not necessary to designate one Process Owner for each process being implemented, organizations should be aware, during the initial planning phase, of difficult and strong combinations before assigning multi-process ownership. The topic of process ownership is a critical success factor of process implementations. For further reading on this topic I recommend the Harvard Business Review Article “How Process Enterprises Really Work” by Michael Hammer and Stephen Stanton You can also sign into the Pink Elephant website as a member and freely download these discussions as a paper and listen to a Podcast on the same subject. Troy's thoughts what are yours? “The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.” ~Douglas Adams

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In the following situations, keeping workload in mind will be a good idea.

1. Change Manager is usually an IT Manager or a step below who will take decisions day to day, manages risk and other high stress jobs. But Release is equally stressful work: management of projects dealing with rollout, upgrades, bug fixes etc.

2. Availability and Serv. Continuity are complementary but in fast growing organizations Capacity work will be enormous and in organizations living with legacy apps/infra Availability manager has his hands full already.

It all depends on size though, but the point is: while combining roles potential cumulative workload ought to be considered.

Ravi Putcha | December 28, 2006 at 9:04am

Hello Ravi

You have made some good points in this comment and others you have shared on earlier posts. I agree wholeheartedly that cumulative work must be considered when combining process ownerships.

As it they say in the consulting world.

It depends!

Troy

Troy DuMoulin, VP Research & Development | December 28, 2006 at 3:55pm

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