Help! No-One Is Following Our Processes!

We did everything by the book and we thought for sure this would work.

1. The CIO stood up and declared that she/he believes
2. We sent everyone to ITIL Training
3. We engaged knowledgeable consultants
4. We developed process design teams with participation from key stakeholders
5. We had creative communication sessions
6. We conducted proof of concept pilots, focus groups, process testing workshops
7. We delivered quick wins and small improvements to show people we were on the right track
8. We designed and executed a brilliant marketing campaign
9. We purchased a great ITSM Service Management Software
10. We trained all key stakeholders on our new processes

Why then is there no real adoption or compliance to the new Process?!!!

Interesting question, can you relate?

Apparently many companies are in the same boat. We often get asked by organisations who have adopted ITIL to come in and, “make the processes real – bring them to life, we’re still doing things the same as we did three years ago”.

Now to be clear, all of the points above are necessary and the right things to do when you are tackling a major transformation project. However all of that is not sufficient to ensure the organisation follows the process after you go live and disband the project team.

To be fair we rarely come across organisations who have actually done all of the above, ITIL is simply treated as a technology change – the most common scenario we see is: “We bought a tool and were told it would give us ITIL”

The item missing from this list comes down to Professor John Kotter’s 8th Step for Managing Organisational Change “Anchoring new approaches in the culture” from his well known books “Leading Change” and the “Heart of Change”

1. Establishing a sense of urgency
2. Creating the guiding coalition
3. Developing a vision and strategy
4. Communicating the change vision
5. Empowering broad-based action
6. Generating short-term wins
7. Consolidating gains and producing more change
8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture

Without that last step in the Kotter model the result of all your work comes to naught leaving you (and the rest of IT management) frustrated and disappointed.

In the end, this last step may well be the most critical to your transformation activities (We find very few organisations that have even attempted any of the early steps). You have to find the courage and organisational will to transcend silos, create new governance/ownership structures, new roles and personal performance measures that will ensure that Executives, Managers and Staff feel personally accountable to actually change their behaviour and practice the new methods.

When you address these critical success factors for anchoring the new approach at a personal level for every individual in your organisation you will get real change. The more positively inclined and cooperative people will get your message and intuitively understand why the new process is better. However, it probably means more work for them and they will willingly follow the process until, during a stressful moment, they are forced to make decisions about what to do and what to drop.

Unless the individuals / departments and organisations believe they are being measured and held accountable for the process in a real and tangible way that actually has consequences, they will resort to the path of least resistance when deciding about how they operate and what work they will prioritise.

This inability to establish the organisational capability to deploy the process is one of the key impediments to success that we hear over and over again.

Designing an ITIL Process is the easy part. Moving people to change their current practices takes effort on many levels. In one sense you need to engineer out of the organisation any potential legitimate excuse for non compliance. A topic we explore in greater depth in the following Pink Elephant White Paper: Employee Compliance A Key Factor For ITIL Process Adoption – we’ll discuss this in the next Newsletter.

So, if you are on an IT Service Management journey and you look back on your efforts and are asking “Why is there no real adoption or compliance to the new Process?”, the chances are that you have not created the necessary organisational structures, governance roles and performance measurement systems to motivate people to believe that this is a change that benefits them as well as the organisation and that they have to follow the processes or suffer the consequences.

Ask yourself, “What are the real consequences of not following that process you worked so hard to establish?”

“Build it and they will come”, only works in fantasy movies like “Field of Dreams”

You can have the world’s best process design and a great IT Service Management tool and people will still not choose to change and follow your process unless you have anchored your new approaches into the culture with personal accountability.

Troy DuMoulin, Pink Elephant