Keep up-to-date with ITIL news. Low volume to-the-point bulletins...
ITIL Governance during a challenging global econom
During the current global economic challenges, expenditure is probably the most important focus of any organization. The governance of the majority of economic expenditure within IT is performed primarily through the Change Management process. For clarity the definition of 'Governance' according to ITIL is:
 
Ensuring that Strategy and Policies are actually implemented, and that required Processes are correctly followed. Governance includes defining Roles and Responsibilities, measuring and reporting, and taking actions to resolve any issues identified.
 
The ITIL Change Management process provides the opportunity to access and ultimately authorize only those Requests For Change (RFCs) that meet the assessment criteria that is defined and enforced at that time by the organization. As part of ITIL all processes are subject to continuous improvement and the Change Management Process is no exception. Consequently the assessment criteria should be reviewed periodically to ensure it remains appropriate and current to the organization.
 
During the current global economic climate it maybe worthwhile to review the assessment criteria and ensure the criteria to review the financial benefit(s) to the organization of implementing the RFC is undertaken for every RFC.
 
Upon assessment of the RFC it is found that the implementation simply provides a 'nice to have' result, then a considered decision to reject the RFC could be made. Every RFC has a financial cost implication associated to it and this is also a primary consideration when assessing the RFC, which is especially important during periods when budgets are being scrutinized and expenditure reduced where possible.
 
ITIL RFC Assessment Criteria
 
The following list provides assessment criteria which can be considered to all Requests For Change:
  • What impact the RFC will make upon the Customer's business operation
  • What effect the RFC will have upon the infrastructure and the Customer service as defined within the Service Level Agreement (SLA)
  • The effect upon the capacity, performance, reliability, resilience, continuity plans and security of the configuration item (CI) to be changed
  • The impact upon other services including any current or planned projects
  • Impact on non-IT infrastructures within the organization (security, office services, transport, business Customer Help Desks)
  • The effect of not implementing the RFC
  • IT, Business and other resources that are required to implement the RFC, the availability of the resources, anticipated costs, elapsed time and any new infrastructure required.
  • Review against the Forward Schedule of Change (FSC)
  • Additional ongoing resources required if the RFC is implemented
Current Projects
 
Another consideration is to review the previously authorized and in-flight 'significant' or 'major' RFCs, more often than not managed as projects, which in reality are simply large and complex changes.
 
Criteria by which the projects were initially assessed may have changed due to the economic climate and therefore consideration should be made to re-access the previously identified benefits of the project and whether or not they are still able to be recognized or achieved. If following the re-assessment the benefits have changed considerably then a decision should be taken as to whether to stop or suspend the project until such time the benefits can be realized.
 
If you have additional advice and guidance to offer and prepared to share then please contact us.
 
 
 
Be the first to leave a comment about the above article...

Please submit any comments you have about this article.

Your feedback will help add value to the content for other ITILnews.com visitors and help us develop the content for the benefit of all.

You will need to provide and verify your e-mail address but your personal information will not be published or passed on to others. To identify each post we take the part of your email address before the @ sign and use that as the identifier, so if you are john.smith@itilnews.com your post will be marked "by john.smith".

NB: We respond personally to every post, if it calls for it.

If you prefer to respond without posting your comment please use our contact form.


Click the REVIEW button below to preview your comments.

 
Tags; ITIL Governance, global economic climate, Roles and Responsibilities, ITIL Change Management process ,Requests For Change,Service Level Agreement
 
This article has been viewed 16721 times.
NB: This page is © Copyright ITILnews.com and / or the relevant publishing author. You may copy this article only in it's entirety, including any author bio and / or credits, and you must link back to www.itilnews.com.

Keeping up-to-date with ITIL...

Keep up-to-date with ITIL news. Low volume to-the-point bulletins...