A post by our guest editor, John Worthington.
It’s clear that the ITIL crowd has not been eating their own dog food, and Kaizen’s a good example.
While I’m not suggesting we throw out decades of proven good practice, with service management now everyone’s business it’s high time we take a good look in the mirror. Continuing to evangelize 34 practice areas that were largely driven by IT to the rest of the enterprise is not continual improvement.
If we applied Kaizen or lean thinking to ITIL some things become clear.
Ambiguity in ITIL’s Definition of Service
ITIL defines a service as "a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks." This definition is difficult to operationalize.
Achieving a common understanding across different business units and stakeholders is crucial for effective service management. A unified and universal definition of a service that enables consistent specifications by everyone provides better internal and external agreements, more consistent service reporting, and more effective linkage to external customers.
Difficulty in Adoption Outside IT
The ITIL framework originated in the IT domain, and its adoption outside of IT is challenging. Simpler, more standardized service management processes are better suited for broader organizational adoption.
ITIL’s transition from processes to practices in ITIL 4 introduced new concepts, but also added complexity, making it less accessible for non-IT business units. Organizations practicing Kaizen favor simpler, standardized processes that align with the philosophy of making incremental improvements over time. Simplifying the language and customizing practices for non-IT business units also enhances adoption.
Lack of Standardization Across Service Supply Chain
The concept of Gemba in Kaizen refers to the actual place where value is created. In a service supply chain, each link is a service provider with its own Gemba. Achieving a standard process model while allowing for localization is crucial.
Different business units or service providers within a complex service supply chain operate in diverse environments. Standardizing processes while allowing for localization requires a unified process model that can flexibly adapt to the unique needs and constraints of each provider.
Beyond processes, standardization can extend to tools, organizational structures, and work instructions as appropriate for localized requirements. This ensures a cohesive approach while allowing for adjustments based on specific contexts.
Balancing Localization and Standardization
Achieving this balance between localizing processes for empowerment and maintaining a common standard for organizational transparency is a challenge.
Empowering local teams involves giving them the autonomy to adapt practices to their specific needs. For example, a customer support team may need different procedures compared to a development team.
A unified and standard process model ensures consistency, transparency, and alignment with organizational goals. It facilitates reporting, compliance, and a unified understanding of how work is conducted across the organization.
Localization does not compromise overall organizational transparency and in fact can enhance it. For example, standardized reporting structures and key performance indicators (KPIs) help maintain transparency while allowing for localized variations in practices.
Understanding the Nature of the Beast
ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and Kaizen are two distinct frameworks with different origins, purposes, and principles. While both are related to improving processes and efficiency, they have evolved independently and are often applied in different contexts.
Students of continuous improvement are students of history to some degree. Each improvement technique tends to build on prior efforts, and to the enterprise it doesn’t really matter who the ‘authoritative source’ is --- as long as the technique works.
But another nature of the improvement beast is that we are constantly abstracting and decomposing both services and processes, which can lead us in many different directions and to many different depths of analysis.
This is the nature of the beast.
As enterprise service management becomes everyone’s business, applying proven continuous improvement techniques to the service management domain itself may be long overdue.
Kaizen, ITIL, and the Unified Service Management (USM) method
The USM method’s non-redundant process model and standard workflows are an application of lean/Kaizen principles and allow for localization with the ITIL guidance (or any other practice framework, standard, or reference model).
The improvement sprints that are described in USM’s standard deployment protocol are fundamentally Kaizen events.
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