Thinking of outsourcing your Service Desk? What are the key considerations?

When you are considering the above, you are basically trying to make a decision to “BUY” or “BUILD” the service desk. In some cases, you may already have a operational Service Desk but outsourcing the function may still be considered.

Some of the generic considerations that applies to the above are:

• Availability of existing in-house processes and procedures, tools. Maturity of existing Incident and Service Request Management processes, including the availability of  Configuration Management System and CMDB, documentation, defined roles and responsibilities.
• Availability of existing people with necessary skills and knowledge to set up and operate a Service Desk, including the supporting procedures and tools.
• Setting up a Service Desk, with an integrated Incident, Problem, Change and Configuration Management processes with the associated CMDB and knowledge database takes time. It may be easier and faster to outsource the above to an established provider.
• In some cases, intellectual property (IP) and security of know-how within the organisation needs to be properly protected. Outsourcing of the Service Desk to an external party may risk the breach of information security, privacy and confidentiality of information. This could be against existing policies or regulations.
• As in any outsourcing, one of the advantage is that internal IT staff can focus on their core business and leave the day-to-day operation of the Service Desk to the third party. However, high level of management attention and focus may be needed in the beginning to ensure that the third party is meeting contractual obligations.
• The Service Desk is an important touch point by IT to its customers/users. One danger of outsourcing the Service desk to a third party vendor is that vendors may be primarily driven by profits, and less focused on delivering a good customer experience.
• Vendor may have limited knowledge of the internal services, application and culture. This takes time to acquire. So, effectiveness and efficiency plus ability to deliver customer-focused, personalised service may be limited at the beginning.
• Finally, cost will be an important factor. Outsourcing to a third party can be considerably cheaper if the third party vendor can enjoy economies of scale and passes the savings to their customer.

All the above are some valid considerations and there will be other specific factors to consider that are unique and dependent on each organisation’s business needs and strategy. The decision should fit into your overall IT delivery strategy which should be aligned to and/or supportive of the overall business plans.

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More ITIL Intermediate Examination Taking Tips

I have earlier shared some ITIL Intermediate Examination Taking Tips in an earlier post. This is an updated post.

PRE-EXAMINATION PREPARATION

•Study hard but rest well the day before.  Get to the examination venue ahead of time.

•Relax a little and be calm. By the time you get to the examination you will have had the best possible preparation. This is especially if you had signed for ITIL Intermediate courses with a certified and authorised training center.

•Read and be sure to follow the notes for candidates on the front of the examination paper.

TAKING THE EXAMINATION

Since time is short and there is a lot of reading and analysis to do within the 90 minutes given, I suggest the following approach to tackling each Question.

Time Management

•Don't spend more than 11 minutes per question.

•There is a lot to read - 1 page scenario and 4 possible answers (1 paragraph per answer).

•If you feel you are struggling with a particular question, SKIP it first (especially the first one). Come back to it later if you have time at the end. You can still pass the examination if you have answered the remaining 7 questions well.

Reading the Scenarios and Questions and Answers

There will be two booklets issued – a Scenario booklet and a Question booklet.

•Start by making sure you got the right Scenario for that Question! The Scenario to use is stated above the Question in the Question booklet. Sometimes a scenario can be used for more than one question!

•Quickly browse through the Question first (not the Scenario!). This will give you a sense of what to look for when reading the case study scenario.

• Is the question focusing on processes, roles and responsibilities, tools or implementation approach?
• Which Service Management process area?
• What is your role in the scenario?

•Then read the scenario or case study.

Reading the Scenario or Case Study

•Underline or highlight keywords or phrases.

•Underline or highlight issues in the case study. Often the answers will need to address these issues and the best answer is the one that addresses all or most of the issues.

•Underline the business needs and company objectives/priorities/policies. Often the best answer will need to be aligned with these.

•Colour markers may help. I gave my students a set of markers with yellow, orange and green colour for use in mock examinations (and also actual examinations). Use the green colour highlighter to highlight good points, orange to highlight issues and yellow to highlight business needs, priorities, policies, goals and objectives that needs to be fulfilled.

Choosing the BEST answer

To pass this examination, you need to focus on choosing the BEST answer for each question. You risk failing the examinations if you do not have more than 5 BEST answers to the 8 questions asked. Getting the second best answer is NOT good enough! 2 marks may be all it takes to fail or pass your examination.

• Eliminate the obvious wrong answer(s) first, so as to focus your time on the best 2 answers shortlisted. If you can, pick out the distractor answer first, upon first pass through the 4 answers.

•Use process of elimination to further narrow down the answers to the final 2 or final one.

•Differentiating between the best and second best answers may require you to read the Question and Answers again and again. Do it within the time limit allocated.

•Each Answer may be make up by a few statements. As you read each statement, “Score" the answer using a series of + and – or even a ? (if you are unsure). Often, you will find the BEST answer is the one with the all pluses (or ?) and no minuses.  Or use your colour markers. Green for good or correct statements, Orange for not so good or incorrect statements.

• “Spot the Difference” – sometimes, a minor difference in one of the sentence in the Answer is the key between the best and second best.

•Generic vs Specific Answers - Read the Question and understand what the Question is seeking to test you.

• Sometimes, the generic answer containing all the right ITIL statements may seems like the best answer BUT if the question asked for "your recommendation," "what specific actions would you take,"  then the Generic answer may not be the best answer. Also, if your role is that of a consultant, specific answers or solutions to solve issues highlighted in the case study would be the better answer. Remember the colour markers?

•Underline or highlight keywords in the Answers, if appropriate. You should look for the Answer that is more specifically related to the case study or scenario. i.e. addresses issues and objectives (as mentioned earlier).

•In general, Choose Answers that are

• Based on ITIL
• Customer focused - Think Business before IT, Customer before IT
• Focused on improving Quality, mitigating Risk, reducing cost etc.
• Based on systematic approach, not “cowboy” or “shooting from the hip” or gung-ho type of answers.

Good luck and hopefully the above tips will help you score a few more marks in your examination.

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Comparing and Contrasting Availability Management and IT Service Continuity Management

Similarities

•Both processes are concerned with Risk and Risk Management. Both will need to perform risk analysis to determine threats and vulnerability that will affect availability of services and what the It Service provider could do to manage, mitigate or reduce the risks. Both may use CRAMM as a technique to analyse risk.

•Both aims to build resilience in the IT Services and IT Infrastructure. Resilience refers to the  ability to “bounce back” from failure or tolerance to failures. Both works towards ability to recover services quickly to meet agreed service levels, documented in a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

•Both are concerned with the ability to meet business needs and goals, including any regulatory requirements.

•Both are conscious of need to balance between cost and effectiveness of proposed solutions.

• Hence, both are focused or concerned with IT services that support vital business services or processes. Both would also need to determine which are the vital business functions or services and what are the impact of their outages. Both are concerned with the cost and impact of service outages.  and would perform Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to analyse business impact should a IT service failed.

Differences

• Differences in scale

IT Service Continuity Management (ITSCM) looks at large, high profile failures, Availability Management (AM) is concerned with any service outages. ITSCM usually does not cover minor disruptions or faults.

• Differences in impact and timescales

ITSCM concentrates on major or total loss of systems for long durations. This is typically in the event of disaster or crisis scenario.  Availability Management would be interested in partial or single component failures that are likely to have more limited impact and shorter durations.

• Differences in measures and metrics

AM is concerned with Availability, Serviceability, Reliability, Maintainability and security of the IT services based on SLA during normal operational scenarios and within the agreed service time.

ITSCM is concerned with ability and time to recover vital business services on time (Recovery Time Objectives or RTO) and amount of data or services that will be recovered (Recovery Point Objectives or RPO) during disaster or crisis scenarios.

There could be other similarities or differences. Do feel free to leave your comments or add to the list above.

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Does a Change Advisory Board (CAB) authorises Changes?

Those new to ITIL will often think that the role of the CAB is to authorise Changes, especially the major or significant changes. Well, yes and no.

The Change Advisory Board (CAB) is a concept defined in ITIL V2 and V3’s Change Management process and is a body that exists to support the authorization of changes and to assist Change Management in the assessment and prioritization of changes.  The CAB is usually consulted for significant changes that have a broad or major impact to the organisation. The CAB may be asked to consider and recommend the adoption or rejection of changes appropriate for higher level authorization and then recommendations will be submitted to the appropriate Change Authority.

Similar in concept to the CAB is the Emergency Change Advisory Board (ECAB). This is done as part of the Emergency Change procedure which is used to process a change request related to fixing an error in the IT infrastructure that has major impact to the business if it is not fixed quickly, hence the Emergency Change. An ECAB is necessarily formed since there is often not enough time to convene a normal and larger scale CAB meeting. 

So, who authorises changes? ITIL defines the role of Change Authority that, as the name stated, authorises change. This is a role that may be given to a person (e.g. Change Manager, department manager) or a group of people (e.g. CAB or ECAB). The levels of authorization for a particular type of change should be determined by the type, size or risk of the change. A major or significant change in a large enterprise that affects several distributed sites may need to be authorized by a higher-level Change Authority such as the Board of Directors. A lesser change with limited scope and impact to the business or IT infrastructure may be authorised by a person. A simple, low risk change may even be pre-approved or pre-authorised.

Figure 4.5 in the ITIL V3 Service Transition book is misleading when taken out of context and often leads a reader to wrongly believe that the CAB or ECAB’s role is to authorise Change. That figure only shows an example where the CAB or ECAB is given the role as a Change Authority.

In summary, a CAB or ECAB’s main role is an advisory one, which is to support and assist the Change Authority in making to decision as to whether a request for change should be approved or rejected. The CAB or ECAB does not authorise a Change unless they are specifically given the role as a Change Authority as well.

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