Twenty Five Questions to ask IT Managers

DO you know what value implementing ITIL does for your organization?

1. How do you measure your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for your Service Desk?
2. Do you specific targets on how much to save or how much efficiency that must be incorporated into the existing environment?
3. How do you provide quantifiable business results, such as lower cost, increase productivity, improved revenue and increased efficiency for your IT or Service Desk environment?
4. Please tell me who are the people (person) responsible for making the business case for new initiatives and who is responsible for the results produced by such initiatives?
5. Can you throw some light on ROI results based upon impact on productivity or costs?
6. What is high on Senior Leadership Team (SLT) ; Centralization, Consolidation or Individual (group) accountability?
7. Are there any compliance or regulatory requirements?
8. Does your organization require SOX compliance or any other specific objectives?
9. Can you account for how many licenses your organization need and how to keep the right amount of licenses within the organization?
10. Do you know what is the Mean Time Between Systems Failure (MTTBSF)?
11. How much does each incident cost to the organization?
12. What are the MTTR (Mean Time to Recover) numbers?
13. What is the cost of change for your IT organization?
14. How successful are your projects (below 50%, above 70%)?
15. How do you define your threshold values for number of employees needed at any given time?
16. How do you scale up or down on the number of employees for your IT organization?
17. How satisfied are your customers (consumers) from your IT organization?
18. How well defined are your processors for each discipline; Incident, Problem, Change, Capacity, Security and Availability?
19. Does your organization have a common repository where the documentation on Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) reside?
20. Can you name top three pain areas for your IT organization?
21. Would you say business and IT objectives are well aligned?
22. Can you give me a true success story for your IT department?
23. How satisfied are you or your support staff with the tools your use to provide support?
24. What tools does your IT or support organization use?
25. Does your organization have a full account of all the assets you manage?

ITIL Assessment

What are the deliverables for one week ITIL Assessment? And how long does it take to complete a typical assessment.

My take is: A Matrix Assessment Report that will assess People, Process and Tools for each discipline under assessment.

=Maturity Score
=Score for each process assessed based upon maturity level
=Risk & Implication Report
=Recommendations

Time wise I would say it is an open ended question, one can do two to three disciplines in a week, i.e., Incident, Problem, Change, Service Management or others but in case of V3 Strategy, Design, Transition, Operation and Continous Service Improvement may take one week each.


With The Complete ITIL V3 Readiness Assessments, you can put any or all of the assessments to work in your company:

• Service Management strategy and value planning
• Linking business plans and directions to IT service strategy
• Planning and implementing service strategy

• Service design objectives and elements
• Selecting the service design model
• Cost model
• Benefit/risk analysis
• Implementing service design
• Measurement and control

• Managing organizational and cultural change
• Knowledge management
• Service knowledge management system
• Methods, practices and tools
• Measurement and control
• Companion best practices

• Application Management
• Change Management
• Operations Management
• Control processes and functions
• Scaleable practices
• Measurement and control

• Business and technology drivers for improvement
• Justification
• Business, financial and organizational improvements
• Methods, practices and tools
• Companion best practices