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: