The 7 Sources Of Problems

I imagine that many of the ITIL readers out there are familiar with Dr ITIL. Some of you may even recall a series he wrote regarding the 7 sources of problems. I found it so useful that I diligently saved the articles to my hard disc for future reference; so when I found out about his first e-book 'The S7ven Sources of Problems: How to eliminate problems before they impact your business' I found myself wondering why I should pay for content that was already out there on the internet. That was until I read it!

The e-book goes far beyond the previous articles; a total of 66 pages. Diagrams are kept to a minimum, the majority of the book is content, content, content. It neatly distills not just what the 7 sources of problems are; but importantly HOW to mitigate and in some cases completely eliminate them. I find the writing style no-nonsense and conversational which makes for an easy read. Admittedly much of what he writes may be common sense to some people; but sometimes you need someone to remind you of what you already know; let alone point out the things you don't know.

In my view this should be mandatory reading for not just problem process owners everywhere, but anyone involved in project or change management, in fact include anyone supporting the IT environment and frustrated with the constant fire-fighting.

Start your journey of problem elimination by opening the door with the golden key (nudge, nudge, wink, wink!).

And the answer is...

In our case we don't have the resources to go for a big bang (and nor would we want to). ITIL is very much about culture change, so it isn't going to happen overnight (more like years, especially in the public sector). Harnessing the support of everyone in IT will be fundamental to the success of the implementation.

To answer my question posed on Tuesday, the service support processes identified to help eliminate our pain areas are:

1. Service Level Management
2. Review maturity of current Service Desk Function and Incident Management
3. Change Management
4. Problem Management
5. Configuration Management

It may be that we can run change and configuration concurrently, I always think they are like the chicken and the egg. You don't want to implement Configuration management with change management otherwise you have no controls over the Configuration items; but if you implement Change with the configuration then you don't have the links to what are you changing... 'A person could go mad thinking about this... (10 points to the person who knows where that is from).

There are of course a lot of things involved from the people side with awareness training and workshops, to benchmarking existing processes, to consideration of the right tools to support those processes.

My intention is to manage the implementation as a 'Programme' of distinct projects, using Prince 2 Lite as the methodology. The high level plan has been drafted, let's see what the coming week holds...

For those of you in the UK - have a good bank holiday weekend!