ITIL - What were your selling points/benefits?

Bokeh

Those of you who have implemented ITIL from scratch, how did you sell it to the higher ups? I know there's several websites that say how to sell ITIL, I would just like to hear from those who have actually done it. Was there any push back, did they embrace what you were trying to do? What benefits did you see after 6 months, a year?

UncleB

There is not much to sell as ITIL is a framework of best practice principals that you adopt as much as you have the appetite for.

In theory you you decide what is most important to you (eg incident management for a helpdesk, change management for infrastructure, transition management for development etc) and start aligning your working practices to use the principles ITIL promotes.

You do need to make sure everyone understands the basic priciples - at least of the parts you are adopting - so a training session is an obvious place to start. Next make sure your tools support ITIL alignment (eg do they treat incoming calls as incidents or requests) and encourage the team to use them as intended.

There is a common saying in ITIL that you can't improve something until you can measure it, so the starting point needs to have a mechanism for you to measure stuff - even if it is simply how many calls you take a week, how many you resolve in that week and (importantly) how many major incidents are reported.

All your efforts can go to improve the starting point and hopefully demonstrate improvements via a trend - less calls month on month, less major incidents, more calls fixed at first point of contact etc etc.

The selling point is that without something like ITIL you don't know the current situation with any certainty so how can you improve it. The observations you make help focus effort on making the most effective use of resource to improve the benefit of IT for the business (through less downtime perhaps) and how the business sees IT as a value add rather than just a necessary evil.

Most businesses with no framework in IT are going to see initial improvements through increased visibility of their call progress, less downtime and an improved visibility of IT looking out for their use of systems and listening to their gripes. This takes some Service Delivery skills (which are not really a big part of ITIL) but having someone go to the business and ask them things like "does your IT system do what you need it to", "what are you unhappy with", "how can we help you do your job better / easier" will earn you a lot of kudos as soon as you can start demonstrating some progress.

The higher ups need to see that they are going to gain from this reputationally as well as seeing the performance of IT improve under their inspiring leadership. You will need to get their approval for all this but if you are willing to do the heavy lifting and they get the credit then it is unlikely they will stand in your way.

The only times I have had push back from senior managemen was when there was something on the horizon (merger or outsourcing) that made it all a moot point anyway as the team was going to be let go anyway, but they couldn't say so just yet.