ITIL® Awareness Training: Aligning IT With the Business

Where to Begin When Aligning IT With the Business

Are you beginning to research ITIL and learning what its going to take for your organization to achieve alignment between IT and the business? Have you been wondering how best to bring your peers and executive management up to speed on best practices and, at the same time, pinpoint the business drivers for IT process improvement in your organization? Or do you know what the drivers are and don't know where to begin to address them? And do you have no additional time, resources and specialized expertise to address this challenge? ITIL Awareness Training could be your answer.

ITIL Awareness Training Helps Focus on Business Drivers

An ITIL awareness training gives IT professionals a broad yet detailed enough overview of all ITIL practices areas that they can begin to pinpoint their business drivers for ITIL initiatives. An ITIL awareness class 'surveys' each ITIL discipline and drills down in sufficient detail to give participants enough information to begin to assess their 'ITIL maturity' in each area, and even establish Key Performance Indicators in the areas detailed below, in both Service Delivery and Support.

Service Delivery ITIL Practice Areas

• Configuration Management
• Change Management
• Release Management
• Service Desk
• Service Level Management

Service Support ITIL Practice Areas

• Capacity Management
• Availability Management
• Business Continuity Management
• Financial Management

ITIL Awareness Training Positions ITIL's Value In the 'Real World'

Whereas ITIL certification courses focus on best practices, a good ITIL awareness class applies ITIL to the 'real world' by putting ITIL in the context of the issues that IT deals with in your business. ITIL should be evaluated objectively, via its history, strengths and weaknesses and a thorough review should be covered of what ITIL is and what it isn't. Then each of the 10 core ITIL processes should be presented within the context of the business and analyzed for critical success factors, bottlenecks and potential problems. Sample KPIs should be presented for each core process, and the awareness training should be highly interactive and allow participants to 'simulate' how each practice area might operate within their business.

Good ITIL awareness training should focus on 'aligning' ITIL objectives with the business and give participants tools on how to assess the 'business value' of ITIL. This should be accomplished by developing KPIs for the 10 key ITIL processes, and then benchmarking the organization's maturity in each process using best practice performance standards.

ITIL Maturity Assessment
Oftentimes, organizations require a 'business case' prior to launching ITIL initiatives and this case usually begins with an ITIL 'maturity assessment', which is the first step towards assessing the maturity of your organization within ITIL practices, thus focusing in on IT 'pain points'.

ITIL assessment defines four levels of IT maturity:

• Repeatable
• Defined
• Managed
• Optimized

In ITIL best practices, 'repeatable' is the lowest level of IT maturity and means that the most important best practice processes have been introduced, the effective structure of the processes is predictable and the provision of the IT services associated with these processes are repeatable. An ITIL assessment benchmarks these processes against best practice standards. This is achieved through developing KPIs for each key process, ranking the IT organization's performance against these KPIs and then assessing IT's performance in each area as either reactive (immature), repeatable, defined, managed or optimized. ITIL awareness training is the first step towards understanding and completing an ITIL maturity assessment.

Developing the Business Case for ITIL

ITIL awareness training also establishes the first step towards developing a 'business case' for ITIL initiatives. Once each of the 10 process areas have KPIs developed and maturity assessed, the IT organization can begin to quantify the value of more effective IT processes.

Developing a 'business case' for ITIL then consists of:

• Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for any of the 10 key processes targeted for improvement.
• Benchmarking your organization's performance against those KPIs through an ITIL maturity assessment.
• Quantifying the metrics for measurement of current performance against KPIs.

The business value can then be calculated using defined metrics in process areas where benchmarks do not meet KPIs. KPIs will vary dependent on the process area. For example, incident management KPIs might be developed around areas like detection and recording, classification, diagnosis, resolution, recovery and closure of incidents, whereas problem management KPIs might address the elimination or minimization of the 'root cause' of the problem (that causes continual incidents).

Evergreen ITIL Awareness Training Course Curriculum

Evergreen's ITIL Awareness Training begins with a comprehensive history and overview or ITIL:

• History of ITIL
• ITIL Definition
• The ITIL Model
• Why Use ITIL?
• ITIL's Weaknesses and Strengths
• ITIL Q&A

The awareness training then goes on to cover each of the 10 core process areas, address the following for each area:

• ITIL Model Applied to Core Process
• Introduction to Core Process
• Objectives of Core Process
• Process Positioned as part of all 10 Core Processes
• Activities of Core Process
• Process Control of Core Process
• Critical Success Factors, Bottlenecks, Possible Problems
• Case Studies
• Take Aways

ITIL 'Simulation' in Client Organization

Participants each receive presentation notes and an itSMF Service Management Pocket Guide as part of the training.