I would add that not only do most organizations not hire someone as only a "do as you are told" resource, if you adopt that mindset you can get into a lot of trouble. I've been on site at places where people did exactly what management told them to do, which was flawed, then the managers became upset with the consultant for not showing them the better way. Developers have to be skilled at interpreting user requests and requirements into something useful. The same applies for huge, highly-configurable applications like ITSM.
If you are a full-time employee or consultant, you are a subject matter expert on Remedy, ITSM, and to some degree ITIL. Of course you are going to have people above you dictating the direction, but if you don't bring up concerns you have with implementing it you're going to have a lot of problems. I've also found that in many cases, the higher up the food chain a person is, the less they care about the details. You may have a CIO or director telling you "we have to implement ITIL!" but they usually aren't going to focus on specifics. It's not a matter of following orders as much as understanding the best way to interpret them. My current employer really expects me to be aware of what is going on with ITIL and ways other companies are implementing it with ITSM. Whenever I go to my CIO or director and talk to them about the direction I'm going with Remedy, it's not for them to dictate to me who the Owner or Assignee of an Incident should be, it's my job to let them know what I think the best practice is, and what would work best for our company. Anyway, this is just my two cents on this topic. Working in I.T. requires more of us than it used to. We can't be bearded hermits hiding in dark server rooms doing mysterious things all day. We have to be professionals who know how to interact with others and work for the good of our customers. That is, after all, what ITIL is out to help us do. Shawn Pierson -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brian Pancia Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 10:10 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: ITIL Remedy William hit the nail on the head. Most of these issues are people related. Either there was no buy in at levels, all levels were not involved in the decision/definition/implementation process, or the appropriate training was not given. Not knowing who the "Owner" is, is a communication/training issue or the definition is not well defined. It is true that organizations have been doing "Incident Management" since the beginning of time. It's not that by adopting ITIL an organization is implementing ITIL, but moving towards a process improvement strategy and standardize on process/procedures/terminology using ITIL as a guide. That improvement strategy needs to be ongoing. A lot of organizations setup these processes and forget about and force people to follow them. There is always room for improvement. If you don't take the lessons learned and improve the process they will eventually fail. As far as doing as your told, an organization hires people because they add some type of value. Most organizations do not necessarily want a do as your told person. However, it is critical that in order to make recommendations that a person understands the big picture and the why. It is also important that once a person understands that to make suggestions/solutions. There are a lot of people that will state something is wrong and needs to be fixed, but don't provide a viable solution. If you don't agree with "Owner" say why and provide another solution. Not all solutions are excepted but you should also be given a reason why, not ITIL doesn't say that. Not to continue the rant because I know a lot of this is in an ideal situation, but if people spend less time complaining about a problem and more time contributing to a solution more things would get done. -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of William Rentfrow Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 10:44 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: ITIL Remedy Isn't that generally a people issue? Not to start a flamewar but you'll find those individuals in any setting where there's heavy emotional committment + ideology. To name a few... -Religion -Politics -Global warming (both sides quite frequently) -Fishing (often referred to as [EMAIL PROTECTED] fishing!) -Hockey/Football/Etc... The key is to identify the zealot and deal with them accordingly :) Not to digress but I've tasted the ITIL Kool-aid and I think it's OK but I don't preach it. Time and time again I have been at customer sites the first week and been thinking "WHY ON EARTH WOULD ANYONE EVER DO PROCESS ________" only to find out there is usually a VERY good reason for the way people do things. Often those processes can be improved, streamlined, and made more efficient. However, nearly as often those processes were put in place due to legal/regulatory requirements, contractual obligations, union rules, external vendor service contracts, and a myriad of other reasons. Changing those requires lawyers and a budget of astronomical proportions. In one case it literally would have taken an act of Congress. Counter-intuitive non-ITIL stuff happens all the time. One company I was at had individual service teams in each building. These were small teams of 2-8 people depending on the building size. They did not deal with major issues like software debugging but did all of the small standard stuff. When the issue of centralizing was brought up they refused - they'd already done studies showing that the travel time from a central facility out to the customer's desks alone made it too expensive. This particular company did a lot of in-cube service. Some may disagree with their approach but this was their choice and the corporate culture demanded that level of service. This is starting to sound like a ramble. I'm ending it there. William Rentfrow Principal Consultant, StrataCom [EMAIL PROTECTED] O 952-432-0227 C 701-306-6157 ________________________________ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) on behalf of Scott Parrish Sent: Tue 5/6/2008 9:28 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: ITIL Remedy Norm, Have you run into this situation: ". . . But then when you challenge those decisions by asking, "Why are we doing XYZ?" you get a very vocal and forceful, "BECAUSE ITIL SAYS SO!" If so, how did you handle it. If not, how would you handle it? Scott Parrish IT Prophets, LLC (770) 653-5203 www.itprophets.com -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kaiser Norm E CIV USAF 96 CS/SCCE Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 10:19 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: ITIL Remedy Just a few observations on this point...please forgive me if I sound a bit sardonic. First, did anybody really need ITIL to tell them to do what Ben describes in the first paragraph--i.e., Service Desk (I refuse to call it that--it's the HELP Desk) should be the first point of contact for customers, incidents are overseen by the Help Desk, the Help Desk forwards incidents to appropriate groups, and the Help Desk follows up with customers once the ticket is resolved? I mean, come on--we were doing that 15 years ago (or longer). That's, like, Help Desk 101. Second, people repeat over and over again, "ITIL is just a guideline...a framework...some best practices...a guide..." That might be fine if you're the person making all the decisions about what the ITIL processes are going to be and how they will be implemented, but if you're just the *implementer* following the directions of a myriad of bosses who are all gung-ho about ITIL and about being "ITIL certified" you are not at liberty to use ITIL (or any other disciplined process framework flavor of the month) as you so choose. You do what you're told. Other people make the decisions, and oftentimes those decisions make little sense. But then when you challenge those decisions by asking, "Why are we doing XYZ?" you get a very vocal and forceful, "BECAUSE ITIL SAYS SO!" -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brian Pancia Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 8:57 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: ITIL Remedy ** One issue many organizations face is taking ITIL for gospel. ITIL is just a framework/guide for organizations to use to define their own best practices. When you tag positions like Owner or Manager to the process it leads people to believe that these are physical positions when they are really functions of the process. Everyone is correct in saying that the Service Desk should be the central point of contact for customers. A function of the Service Desk is to oversee the Incident Management Process. However, an incident may pass through several support groups and these support groups are also responsible for following the process. The service desk is there to create a ticket (hopefully resolve too), forward to support groups when necessary, be the POC for the customer if the customer needs to call in for additional questions/status updates, and follow-up with the customer once the incident is resolved. Now with Remedy some of these functions may be automated within the system. Once a ticket is resolved an email or survey may be sent out to the customer, which would constitute the service desk contact to the customer. Also, SLAs and OLAs may be put in place to ensure that the incident is handled in a timely manner. This allows the system to take over much of the functionality of the process flow. So as you implement the ITIL processes look at a lot of the things in ITIL as functions that are performed during the process. Every person/group involved in the process needs to understand the functions and may be responsible for doing the function at some point in the process. This was one of the things that ITIL v3 tried to address and one thing that the writers will stress. Remember ITIL is just a framework/guide to help organizations build their own best practices. Just because the sample flow diagrams and functions are in the ITIL books does not mean that organizations have to follow them to a T. Use what works and makes sense for your organization. The more complicated you make a process the less likely it will be followed. From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Benedetto Cantatore Sent: Monday, May 05, 2008 2:01 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: ITIL Remedy ** Here's some examples where you have different owners.... Helpdesk are incident owners for all helpdesk related problems NCC/NOC would be the owner for infrastructure issues (yes, I know some companies combine the helpdesk/NCC into a service desk) In a global environment the local helpdesks would be the incident owner rather than the global helpdesk for local issues. In each of the examples above, those groups would be interested and more importantly responsible for tracking the incident throughout its lifecycle. Ben Cantatore Remedy Manager (914) 457-6209 Emerging Health IT 3 Odell Plaza Yonkers, New York 10701 >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/05/08 1:01 PM >>> ** I understand both concepts - perhaps I need to clarify. Ticket comes in and the ticket is Auto-assigned to the Help Desk (Assigned Group). The Help Desk feels they should be the Incident Owner (Owner Group). The Help Desk then assigns the ticket to a Support Group (now the support group is the Assigned Group). The Support Group believes they should be the incident owner (Owner Group). In a message dated 5/5/2008 9:49:05 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Aren't you, maybe, mixing the concepts of "assignment" and "ownership"? -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kevin Pulsen Sent: Monday, May 05, 2008 11:42 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: ITIL Remedy ** Hi Kathy, The Helpdesk really should be the owner of any incident. It's best that the customer has only one single point of contact -> the helpdesk.. they need to own the incident from cradle to grave.. and they should be able to spawn any change or problem from the given incident. From a user's perspective, they hate being pushed around to 10 different "Support Groups" only to be handed off back to the Helpdesk... incident bouncing it not good. So to recap, Single point of contact -> Helpdesk (Keep your Level II,III from getting calls directly from customers) Incident owner -> Helpdesk (You can still assign it to other support groups) from cradle to grave. This method follows the Incident Process Flow Bar.. Hope this helps. Kevin P. ** Hi, In Remedy ITSM 7.0.1 - who should be the actual "Owner" of the ticket. Should it be the assigned group or the Help Desk? What are the advantages of one over the other. ________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. 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