Monday, June 29, 2009

ITSM Roles - When is a Manager Not a Manager?

One of the critical tasks in any ITSM implementation is to define roles and responsibilities for the various activities and procedures in a process. These would include roles such as Incident Manager, Problem Manager, Change Manager, Service Level Manager and new roles introduced with ITIL V3 such as Service Catalogue Manager (from ITIL V3), Supplier Manager and Deployment Manager, etc.

Culture and tradition within a company would have to be considered when assigning people to such roles or given such titles within the company. In one of my consulting engagements for a client in Indonesia, such an “issue” did surfaced.

In this project, my colleagues and I were engaged to assist my client define and implement the ITIL Service Support processes. While conducting a workshop to discuss the various roles for the incident, problem and change management processes with various stakeholders in client’s office, we noticed that the participants were looking increasing disturbed when we discussed the various “manager” roles for each of these processes. We called for a tea-break soon after.

During the break, we found out that in this company, staff appointed as Managers are expected to wear a tie and are given special company privileges like car allowance.

Aha!

After the break, we decided that all “manager” roles in ITIL will now be called PIC (person-in-charge) for this client. So, it will be Incident PIC, Problem PIC, instead of Incident Manager, Problem Manager respectively.

The stakeholders in the workshop are happy after that, except those guys in IT who thought they could be getting a new car!

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