ITIL a learning experience for Deakin
Providing technology support in a large university can be a real nightmare, with demanding users -- and a huge number of them -- typically forcing IT organisations into a constant struggle to keep putting out fires. At Victoria's Deakin University, however, a three-year ITIL effort has brought consistency to a smorgasbord of service offerings -- and allowed support staff to handle nearly three time as many support calls as in the past.
With 33,000 students and 4,000 staff spread across five campuses and hundreds of kilometres, Deakin's sheer geographic reach has proved a constant challenge for the 160-strong IT team, which provides tech support from 7am to midnight during the week and 8am to 8pm on weekends.
In the past, Deakin was handling around 23,000 requests per year. However, entrenched inefficiency was causing some very serious problems -- and earning it a score of just two out of five in an external assessment of the organisation's process maturity.
-We did some strategic planning and saw that to really have a good organisation, we needed good people, good products and good processes," explains operational services provisional manager Craig Warren. -We had very good people, and a good range of product offerings and quality -- but we just weren't surrounding them with as good a process as we could have. After initial consulting work with an ITIL company, it made sense that implementing those processes would improve the process performance of our division, and therefore provide better quality services to our customers."
Rough lessons
Over the past three years, Deakin's IT organisation has been embroiled in the midst of a long, protracted and ultimately successful ITIL project that has forced it to reconcile its product suite, improve problem tracking, standardise its service delivery -- and, in so doing, dramatically improve service quality.
A recent follow-up assessment scored the university's service capability at around 3.5 on the same scale, and the volume of service calls being handled every year has increased to 60,000.
Getting to that point, however, has been far from simple. -It hasn't been an easy ride," Warren concedes. -Sometimes it has been a case of two steps forward and one step back."
With such a large organisation to cater for, deciding which steps to take was a consuming issue for Deakin. Early on, a major round of ITIL training seemed a reasonable enough way to kick off the project -- yet the training also heightened those employees' expectations, leading to quick frustration when things didn't improve overnight. -They probably expected to see instant results, and I'd say they had to wait to see the benefits as we matured the processes," Warren says.
More immediate challenges also made the ITIL project relatively complicated. Following the process's guidelines to the letter, for example, university IT staff sat down and documented what Warren says was -a very complex" incident management process.
-After a year, folks were finding it difficult to follow," he recalls. -[The problem was] that we weren't working to try and mature those processes" to match ITIL best practice. In turn, staff were frustrated when the real situation at Deakin didn't match with the guidelines of the ITIL documentation.
Such experiences were a wakeup call for the university, reinforcing the idea that more significant process change was necessary to reap the benefits of ITIL. After some unsuccessful efforts to introduce this change, it also became painfully clear that many of the university's problems could have been avoided by choosing and committing to the organisation's tool set earlier in the game. This would have allowed Deakin to drive process and technology change together, rather than trying to retrofit the tools to processes defined in isolation.
The right tools, the right information
Deakin's tool set -- built around HP OpenView and related service desk, configuration management database (CMDB), incident and problem management, testing and standard operating environment (SOE) provisioning -- proved to be a powerful force in helping the ITIL initiative regain its momentum.
By tailoring its processes to the tools, rather than the other way around, the university was able to see significant improvements in the way trouble tickets and other regular support transactions were handled.
For example, because each and every support request is tracked through the system from inception to closure, it's impossible for customers to be forgotten; if a service request doesn't get acted upon, it is automatically escalated throughout the support hierarchy. -We now know when things are slipping through the cracks," Warren says.
Centralised logging of all service requests has paid off in other ways: namely, by matching service requests against the information in the CMDB, Deakin is able to produce regular reports highlighting the biggest trouble spots -- for example, a printer that seems to get more paper jams than others of a similar model -- across the expansive university. This helps the IT team focus its resources where they're needed the most, reducing overall support expenses and increasing efficiency.
Introduction of a formal change management process -- mandated within the ITIL framework and enforced using the HP platform's change and release capabilities -- has reduced the chance that undocumented configuration changes can cause unexpected problems.
In a similar vein, better tracking of equipment's exact configuration has allowed Deakin to consolidate what used to be multiple operating system patches per month into a single, better managed update process. -We've implemented that for all of our applications," says Warren. -We have big days of change, but we have much more effort put into those big days of change and a much better backout plan."
The productised support team
Overall improvements in Deakin's support capabilities may have increased its readiness rating in the audits, but Warren says the organisation's goal isn't to get top scores in every category; rather, capabilities are being regularly assessed against benchmarks to ensure they're meeting customers' needs.
Because it knows where the university's problem spots are, the IT department has been able to publish long-term schedules of change, outlining planned system upgrades and new services up to six months before they happen.
The team has also been able to produce a comprehensive service catalogue, improving service and customer expectations by standardising the types of services available through the IT department across Deakin's various campuses; available services previously varied between sites depending on the capabilities and inclination of local staff.
-There's a great deal more consistency in how we handle incidents, and customers get much better turnaround time for standard services," says Warren. -And we have a problem management function that is getting rid of some repeatable incidents that were a bit of a bugbear in the past."
Three years on, the cultural change within Deakin's IT department is still continuing -- but the group's determination to succeed has helped it leave behind the inconsistencies of the past and concentrate on capitalising on its newfound process efficiency.
-It was a big cultural change for us because we're used to putting the needs of the business ahead of our own needs," Warren says. -This was one instance where IT actually had to spend some money on itself -- but by doing so, we have helped our customers significantly. Spending time on our processes has made us a much more rounded organisation, and improved the total quality of the IT service offering to the university."
