The Dutch Experience  - part 4 in the series on SMMs – read part 1, part 2, and part 3 -

Traditional ITSM projects often stop after the processes are described, after the tool is configured, and after the staff is trained. An SMM supports organizations until they have developed their capability to improve continually and independently, in a process-, service-, and customer-focused direction.

An SMM is very different from traditional ITIL  approaches (or COBIT, FITS, ASL, BiSL, MOF, IT4IT, … ), because the SMM creates an integrated management system and a management culture for improving service organizations, instead of describing a set of loosely coupled and largely redundant practices that could be applied. Organizations that have a management system and understand how to use it, can focus on any specific local goal, including improving customer satisfaction, reducing cost of IT, improving the quality of services, or achieving an external certification like ISO20000. For the choice of these local goals, organizations can be inspired by popular frameworks, selecting any combination of their best practices, in any order they prefer.

The highly standardized methodological approach was proven to be very successful in the Netherlands - a country that has been on the frontier of IT service management since the early nineties.

A method that is applied as a generic system should be designed as a fundamental method (see blog 3), and as a consequence, the components of the method should be defined in a pure way. The most radical effect of this approach can be found in the term process.

Process definition

Processes are generally defined as logical sequences of activities, with a specific meaningful goal, and with a control mechanism making sure the goal is achieved with the chosen sequence of activities. This definition is the base of ISO standards, and can be found throughout process theory literature. Unfortunately, the term is often applied to practices and not to only logical sequences of activities. Practices are combinations of the three organizational components, people, process and technology, describing a specific practical situation – therefore the term practice. Processes only cover one of these three components: the process, i.e. the activities.

An SMM should be based on a strong architecture, using this pure terminology. This implies that the SMM uses processes as they are defined, and not as practices. Practices can be achieved through the SMM, using the process, the people, and the technology in an integrated way, to manage the aimed result.

Process focus

A second fundament of an SMM is the idea that effective service organizations should be process focused, because processes are the shortest way to their goals. Therefore, processes are central to the method.

As a consequence, projects will always be managed from a process perspective, assuring that the customer’s interest is core, instead of the project manager’s interest.

As another consequence, an organization will explicitly have to decide about the balance between process management and line management , a characteristic that is completely ignored in the popular frameworks of best practices.

Process standardization

A third fundament for an SMM lies in the idea that organizations in a specific domain can differ in the people they have employed and in the technology they apply, but they share the same processes. The only difference in terms of processes will be the depth and detail of how they follow the process, and their ability to execute the activities in the process. A great consequence of this is that organizations can change their organization (the people component) or their technology, but their processes can stay the same.

Of course each organization will differ in terms of procedures - because they differ in the people component, and they will differ in terms of work instructions – because they differ in the technology component, but their process architecture will always be the same. This does not mean that they will apply their processes equally in practice – due to differences in maturity – but it does mean that they share the same process architecture.

Invariant

All three fundaments lead to an important characteristic of the SMM: it is a process based, generic, systematic, reproducible, learnable, and applicable method, with a standardized process model, that can be used in any service domain. Although the method itself is invariant to conditions, it is always localized in terms of people and technology, and in terms of the services generated by the specific organization.

The goals may differ, but the road is the same.

Methods always lead to different results when they are applied in a specific situation: after all, they will be applied in organizations that differ in terms of the people and the technology. But organizations that want to improve can always follow the same methodical road towards these local goals, whatever their nature is: complying to external requirements, enhancing efficiency, improving customer satisfaction, cutting cost or staff, growing from reactive to proactive, or any other local goal. Getting there in the most effective and efficient way – and staying there! - requires a systematic, structured approach. That is what an SMM should provide.

The next column in this series will be on the deployment of an SMM.