Preparing a company for an ITIL audit

For my current client I came onboard to do some technical documentation - they were being audited by Cisco as they had applied for Gold and Managed Service Partnership status with them.

After joining them I realized many members of their staff were ITIL certified but when it comes to practical use or application they needed some serious help.

They had applied for Managed Service status in the following disciplines;

1. Incident Management
2. Problem Management
3. Change and Release Management
4. Configuration Management
5. Capacity Management
6. Performance & Availability Management
7. Security Management
8. Knowledge Management
9. IT Service Continuity Management

And Cisco would audit them in above disciplines using ITIL best practices framework. They had done some work in Incident and Change but required some major overhaul and they needed someone to come and start the initiative from the scratch.

My biggest challenge was to where to begin?

My initial starting point was to conduct a quick assessment of their documentation and their processes as that gave me a good feel what I am dealing with.

I gave my initial assessment to my client and explained them that this is going to be more than a standard documentation engagement as they need some training, current process mapping and then we will compare current processes with ITL best practices model as that will give an accurate picture of where the gaps are and based upon that we will mutually decide on our solution road map. They realized the importance of what needs to be done and they gave me a green light to go ahead with the plan.

My game plan was to start with the two documentations they already had; Incident and Problem Management. I started by training the relevant staff in these two disciplines, while I was training them I was also inquiring them about their current practices, this gave me a short-cut to gaps documentation.

This made me and my client realize that what they have documented versus what they practice are two poles apart, therefore we started to align are documentation with our practices. This gave us an opportunity to adopt few good practices while letting go bad habbits. Our initial focus was to make each discipline/practice have some degree of accountability also to develop right metrics to gauge are activities. This gave us an opportunity to define some baseline values and criteria to benchmark our progress.

Covering Incident and Problem Management were easy to consider them ready for the audit now came Change and Release Management on which no previous documentation was done. In this case it was bit unique as my client is a Managed Service provider. They manage network, infrastruce and telephone networks for different clients all over the world, so in this case Changes come as a result of any one or combination of scenarios; Request by Customer, underlying root cause of the problem, business policy, technological changes, regulatory requirements, multiple incidents and many more but in any case the Change Advisory Board reside with customer not them while they did execution of the change - Release part.

We started with training internal staff on Change and Release while training we developed our internal change and release policies by marrying our practices, and ITIL best practices framework tharesulted in the templates for these two disciplines. We adopted Release model as our new guideline whilst we made our customers bind by our new change model into their standard practice.

Similar approach was taken to address remaining areas. To find more about our solution approach please contact us via contact information provided in this blog post.

To find out how we can improve effeiciencies into your system please goto: http://www.statera.com