Real World Case Study: Adopting and Adapting ITIL - The Warehouse Way
Achieving Best Practice within extremely tight timeframes
By Shubha Raniga, The Warehouse Group
Who is The Warehouse Group?
The Warehouse Group is an iconic, NZ-listed retail discount group with over 125 stores in New Zealand and 2005 revenues in excess of NZ$2.2 billion.
It consists of two retail businesses - The Warehouse New Zealand, which sells general merchandise, apparel and dried foods through a network of 85 stores across the country and Warehouse Stationery, which sells furniture and stationery through 42 stores in New Zealand.
The group has 11 service desk staff in New Zealand to handle call volumes of between 3,500 to over 4,000 per month. The IS team is made up of about 90 at The Warehouse and about 20 at Warehouse Stationery.
Owen McCall joined the Warehouse Group as CIO in November 2003. On investigation, he found there was no consistent process/approach across the group, there was a 'hero mentality', lack of data to monitor and make improvements and IT was perceived as cost adding not value adding. As a result, he realised the "fire-fighting" mode-of-operating was not going to allow IT to add value to the business.
One of his key priorities became to develop and implement robust IT management processes that would ensure timely support for the business and embed a culture of continuous improvement.
After embarking on an evaluation of its organisational processes in mid-2004, The Warehouse Group decided to address future process improvements using the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practice framework.
Shubha Raniga, IS Services Manager was recruited to drive the introduction of ITIL at The Warehouse Group. As Shubha explains
"With the expiry of the maintenance period on our existing helpdesk tool -we knew that even if we moved to their latest release we'd have to re-implement it, so it was a good opportunity to go out to the market and see what else was out there that allowed for the adoption of ITIL".
There were increasing internal frustrations with the limitations due to the existing tool's implementation, as well as the fact that it only handled incident management in a limited way.
Furthermore, the other processes were being handled using individual Excel spreadsheets in each retail brand. The spreadsheets weren't shared between the different businesses or integrated with the tool. There were no Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and the tool didn't cater for measuring performance against target timeframes.
Without an integrated service level agreement (SLA) module, the Warehouse didn't have the capability to set targets and start understanding how they were performing against them. They couldn't set any expectations for their people about how long it would take to resolve a particular issue because they couldn't measure that in the tool.
Getting Started
The Warehouse started with education and building awareness by engaging ProActive to deliver appropriate ITIL courses to meet selective needs. These ranged from 1 day in-house Awareness courses, Foundation and Practitioner level courses up to Manager's certification for a couple of team members.
ProActive also conducted an independent ITIL process maturity assessment on their processes to provide a baseline, and highlight what could and could not be achieved without use of an effective ITIL-aligned tool.
Process ownership was then assigned followed by process management responsibilities to team members that were already closest to each of the Service Delivery and Service Support processes existing within the company. Only one new role was created that hadn't existed (Service Level Manager) and vacancies allowed for two roles to be restructured to better support new requirements.
The decision was made to contract a Project Manager for 11 months. They were trained in ITIL and they managed the tool implementation activities with business process needs in mind. Specific and specialised consulting expertise was brought in using ProActive from time to time to ensure the Warehouse gained the benefit of previous experience in guiding them as they set-out on new and complex areas such as the Configuration Management Database (CMDB).
"With the CMDB we made the decision to use ProActive as they were ITIL qualified, had project team members with experience in the facilitation of workshops and understood our particular needs. They worked jointly with us and the vendors to implement the tool in a way which best allowed us to adapt to ITIL while adopting some out of the box, best-practice functions", said Shubha.
In parallel. a tool selection exercise, took place based on Group-wide requirements and involvement and the ITSM from Front Range was selected.
Scope
Scope of the Project was:
Stage 1: Service Level Management, Incident, Problem,
Stage 2: Change, Release, Availability and Configuration Management
Stage 3: Knowledgebase and Self-Service facility.
Timelines
Currently The Warehouse is awaiting an upgrade and release of the Knowledgebase and Self-Service modules, scheduled for March 2006.
Results to Date
One of the key measurements for progress was via an independent process maturity assessment using the OGC guidelines. The 2005 assessment was done 1 week after going live with Service Level Management, Incident and Problem Management.
Further improvements are targeted for other processes and act as performance objectives for all staff in Information Systems. A third assessment will be conducted again in August, but in the meantime, internal measures show the Warehouse is on track to achieving these.
Other improvements are in increased and more valuable Management reporting for the Group. The tool's dashboards & searches have been a great improvement. The Group will also
use MicroStrategy for enterprise-wide reporting, and are currently working on integrating it to the ITSM tool.
Process maturity is also translating into increased customer satisfaction - a measure that is calculated independently of ITSM.
The increased level of transparency of activities across the various interconnected processes has been a major benefit. To see an Incident progress seamlessly to a Problem, through to an RFC and then a Release while associating related assets is just great. Having one tool as opposed to multiple spreadsheets and systems, the increased visibility and integration aspects of ITSM has also been a huge gain for the business.
Engaging with the Business for setting expectations & measuring our performance is again a key benefit as this leads automatically into service improvement initiatives and enhanced communications and understanding between IS and the Business.
More significantly, the implementation of SLAs through ITSM signifies a fundamental shift in the way the service desk operates.
The group now have the ability to stop thinking system and have to think and talk service, which has fundamentally changed the way they align themselves to the business.
Rather than increased revenue, the ITIL adoption has been used to drive operational maturity and therefore efficiency and effectiveness. This has started to be reflected in results and the group can then translate that into cost savings by being able to do much more for the same dollar value.
Key Tips from the Warehouse:
- Ensure you have strong, senior sponsorship and support.
- Ensure you have sufficient budget for education and some consulting.
- Don't think or act as if this work sits on-top of or apart from what people already do-integrate it into what they are already doing (no IT shop works without these processes, it's just that they may be immature or unruly).
- Develop realistic targets and roadmaps to keep everyone on track and monitor progress, beyond any go-live date.
- Celebrate reaching milestones (by remembering where you started and where you've got to since then) - acknowledge the contributions of those actively involved in getting there.
- Adapt & Adopt: Remember each organisation is different. The maturity of the organisation itself, the commencement maturity of each ITIL process, person and their capability will determine the approach to use. ITIL is not about prescriptive theory - it's about progressive successes from applying this framework iteratively to the realities of your situation.
