Always budget for Continual Improvement

Lee Healey
Oct 24, 2022
2 min read

Continual Improvement is an essential practice across all businesses.

Speak to any CEO or business leader, and they will agree that without a constant embedded practice and culture of continual improvement, then the business is at a heightened level of risk.

If continual improvement is such a core principal of business, why is it that not many IT organisations have embedded the culture and practice of Continual Improvement of IT Services?

Often, the answer is nearly always because of a lack of time and budget (aka investment) and more often than not, it's not that businesses 'cant afford it', but that it just gets overlooked when budgets are created.

Is Continual Service Improvement (CSI) not deemed ‘hip’ enough; not ‘sexy’ enough; not ‘cool’ enough to warrant the energy, resources and effort?

Is it too broad having a budget line for 'improvements' when we dont yet really understand what the improvements might be, or the ROI they will create?

The arguments for CSI are solid and every standard, framework, best practice and principal has CSI running through it, in one form or another. But in many instances, the arguments are not strong enough to warrant CSI being created as a budget line item.

Perhaps and alternatively, if CSI is originally planned for investment, is it that CSI is considered a soft target, so any budgetary allowance is taken by another project that might be deemed a higher priority?

The questions therefore becomes; what investment do we have for CSI, and is it ring-fenced so that nothing (and we mean nothing) can take that investment away?

It is our opinion that CSI should be baked into all areas of business, especially technology and IT Services. As modern businesses become more and more interwoven with technology that enables, drives and delivers almost every business capability, then surely CSI must become a budget standard?

Of course, there's investments and investments, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be a large investment. For instance, simply having a regular meeting to look at Service Desk data and Customer Satisfaction feedback with a sole focus on 'how can we improve', will always identify quick wins around ITSM tooling tweaks, automation and so on.

In fact, the Japanese even have a word for this - 'Kaizen' - 'an approach to creating continuous improvement based on the idea that small, ongoing positive changes can reap significant improvements'

Of course from time to time, large investments might be needed also, and this of course has to be balanced around budget constraints and the overall strategy (if there is one!), but it doesn’t always need many thousands of pounds allocated to buy shiny things.

Always remember, more often than not, CSI can mean cost savings also.. so this is not exactly money down the drain.

So please please dont overlook budgetting for CSI, and even when the big bucks arent available, 'Kaizen' can reap huge benefits also!

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What is ITSM?

Information Technology Service Management processes include a range of activities designed to deliver and support high-quality IT services for your business. These can include incident management, problem management, change management, and service-level management. Additionally, ITSM involves continuous enhancement processes to improve service delivery, increase efficiency and reduce costs. By adopting strong ITSM practices, your business can improve service quality, customer satisfaction and achieve greater alignment between IT and business objectives. This holistic approach ensures that IT services are effective and integrated with your overall business goals. As ITSM focuses on aligning IT services with your business’s needs, you can ensure that IT processes and services support and enhance business operations. This is achieved through a structured approach to managing IT services, guided by best practices and methodologies such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). These models provide guidance on best practices for delivering and supporting technology and other enterprise services and can help companies align their capabilities with their business goals and strategic objectives.
What is ITIL and how does it underpin ITSM?

We adhere to the ITIL Framework in delivering our ITSM consultancy services. ITIL is a globally recognised set of best practices for ITSM that helps businesses provide consistent, high-quality IT services. By implementing ITIL processes and principles, we ensure that your IT operations are standardised, efficient and aligned with industry standards. ITIL4 is the latest version of ITIL, designed to help enterprises navigate the new technological era known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This version introduces a more flexible, modern approach to ITSM, emphasising its integration with other areas of business management.
What are the core practices and processes in ITSM?

Effective ITSM revolves around a number of processes. Whilst there are 34 practice areas in ITIL4, there are often a core set of practices that many of our clients are particularly interested in optimising. As understanding and implementing these processes can significantly enhance the performance and quality of IT services within your organisation. Incident Management Restores all service operations back to normal as soon as possible, minimising to lessen the impact on your operations. This process might involve logging, categorising, prioritising, and resolving incidents, ensuring which can help mitigate disruption to users and the business. Configuration Management Keeps an updated record of IT infrastructure - hardware, software, and network components - in a centralised configuration management database (CMDB). This database provides accurate data on configuration items (CIs) and their relationships. Change Management Ensures any changes to your IT services are controlled and coordinated. This process evaluates the impact of changes, approving them through a structured workflow, and ensuring successful implementation with minimal risk. Service level Management Defines, negotiates, and monitors service level agreements (SLAs) between the service provider and the customer. This process ensures that agreed-upon service quality and performance levels are consistently met. Asset Management Tracks and manages your IT assets throughout their lifecycle to ensure efficient use and cost control. You maintain an accurate inventory of hardware, software, and other IT resources through this. Problem Management Identifies, analyses and resolves the root causes of incidents. Proactively addressing underlying issues can prevent recurring incidents. This, in turn, provides improved system stability and reduced downtime. Request Management Handles the lifecycle of user service requests, such as access to applications, software installations or information enquiries. It ensures requests are managed efficiently to provide a streamlined approach that fulfils user needs and enhances satisfaction. Knowledge Management Captures, organises and shares knowledge to improve efficiency and support decision-making. By leveraging a centralised knowledge base, your IT teams can quickly resolve incidents and problems, and end-users can find the right solutions to common issues.
Why is ITSM important to organisations and their IT (and Enterprise) teams?

Implementing the right ITSM strategy and optimising your tooling can provide a range of benefits for your company, including: Improved Efficiency and Cost Savings By streamlining processes and automating routine tasks, ITSM can help your enterprise work more efficiently and reduce the time and resources required to deliver and support IT services. Good ITSM is a silent enabler of success across a range of organisational goals. Improved Compliance and Risk Management ITSM can help you ensure that your IT systems and processes comply with industry regulations and standards. It also ensures that you are effectively managing risks associated with your IT operations. This can help you avoid costly disruptions and legal consequences. Increased Productivity Effective ITSM practices can help your business prevent problems and fix them quickly if they do occur. This can help you lower costs—outages cost money—and increase productivity and employee satisfaction. Better Customer Satisfaction You can improve customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships by delivering high-quality IT services that meet customers' needs. Improved Service Quality ITSM ensures that IT services are delivered consistently and meet agreed-upon service levels, leading to higher customer satisfaction and better overall service quality. Business Continuity ITSM processes like incident and problem management ensure that disruptions are minimised and services are quickly restored to ensure business continuity. Strategic Alignment ITSM aligns IT services with business objectives, ensuring that technology initiatives support and drive business growth. This alignment helps you make informed decisions and prioritise projects that add the most value. Enhanced Collaboration ITSM promotes a collaborative environment where IT teams can work together more effectively, sharing knowledge and best practices to improve your delivery of services. Proactive problem-solving Through problem management and a proactive approach, ITSM helps your IT teams identify and address the root causes of incidents to prevent future issues and reduce downtime. Continuous Improvement ITSM encourages continuous monitoring and improvement of IT processes, allowing your IT teams to refine and enhance their service delivery regularly. Better Resource Management With ITSM, IT teams can manage resources more effectively, ensuring that personnel, technology, and budget are allocated optimally to support business requirements.
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The ITSM People are completely agnostic with ITSM tools and not tied to any vendors. Given the close relationship between ITSM related processes and ITSM tools, we often get involved in tool selection projects, or making recommendations on how to improve tools and get the best value from them. We work with tools such as ServiceNow, BMC, Jira, ManageEngine, Fresh, Halo and Xurrent.