Unlocking the Value of Assessments

IT Service Management (ITSM) maturity assessments have been around for over ten years and many organisations have used them over that time as part of an overall initiative to implement good practice.

However, it is likely that in many cases, the full benefits of maturity assessment are not being realised.

Sometimes there is a view that assessments are just part of the process of service improvement and are undertaken because 'good practice says that they should be' rather than with the objective of using the results of assessment to drive ongoing improvement to maximise benefit.

In a "Green" Paper just released, Michael Davies, Principal Consultant at ProActive Services outlines three different "views" of assessment; ITIL, CobiT, and ISO/IEC 15504: Process Assessment Contexts.  

So what's the value in Maturity Assessments?

Combining the ITIL, CobiT and ISO/IEC 15504 viewpoints, we can say that maturity assessments can be used for any of the following reasons:

  1. To identify areas where an organisation might be lagging behind its peers and/ or accepted good practice that might constitute risks that need to be managed.
  2. To 'draw a line in the sand' to compare and measure ongoing improvement.
  3. To identify specific opportunities for improvement that will eliminate or at least alleviate current pain points.
  4. To assess the capabilities of service providers.

And finally, if we can broaden the assessment scope to look beyond ITSM processes:

  1. To identify broader issues (non-process) that have the potential to constrain or even derail improvement initiatives.

ProActive started to use the Process Maturity Framework as the basis for its ITSM assessment services in 2005 and extended it to include a 6th dimension - interfaces, to the standard 5 dimensions. In late 2008, when we reviewed our ITSM assessment service again, we recognised that, while they were delivering good value to our clients and had been updated to cover ITIL V3, there remained opportunities to make further improvements.

Our focus, in the review, was to capture the knowledge and experience of our top consultants in a form that allowed it to be used by other consultants and potentially for client self-assessment; and to ensure consistency across the team, particularly in the case of a re-assessment.

AssessSM: Unlocks further Value

Since starting to use AssessSM, our automated tool, at the end of 2008 for all our ITIL V3 and ISO/IEC 20000 process assessment services, we have seen the following additional benefits:

  • The knowledge of our most experienced consultants has been captured in an easy to use format
  • Inconsistency between consultants has been removed
  • Improved consistency has enhanced benchmarking capability
  • Assessments can now be undertaken effectively by assessors with less practical experience in ITSM
  • We can now offer our clients self assessment capability, where required
  • Organisations can compare their performance with that of their peers from both ITSM process and E=PMF dimension perspectives.

ProActive's comprehensive assessment model incorporates the four vital elements of people, process, product and partners that can be used to drive ongoing service improvement and unlock real value for an enterprise.

It is essential that improvement activity is linked to business benefits so that focus and resources can be applied to those initiatives that will deliver the greatest return on investment.

Effective maturity assessment can play a key role in prioritising where investment should be made and providing business justification.