Charles Fraser Freelance IT Service Excellence Consultant

Process maturity assessments & TIPA

To be polite - if you have implemented ITIL processes and you have not developed an assessment model for each process then you will get no real on-going benefit from your investment in ITIL.

To be a little more direct - if you have implemented ITIL processes and you have not developed an assessment model for each process then you really have no idea what you are doing and you have just wasted your time!

To explain… The primary reason that ITIL fails to deliver any significant long-term benefits in most organisations is the lack of on-going process assessments and improvements.

It is essential that you monitor the on-going effectiveness of the ITIL processes that you have put in place. If you fail to do this then you will fall into the very common trap of having processes simply for the sake of having processes. The ITIL processes that you have put in place will fail to deliver any real on-going benefit, and will cease to be relevant.

The way to prevent this happening and to ensure you get on-going benefit from your ITIL processes is to periodically review the effectiveness of each process. Ideally you should have developed a process assessment model for each ITIL process that you implemented. This however rarely happens.

I can help you to develop your own process assessment model. This will enable you to formally review the effectiveness of each ITIL process that you have implemented – i.e. does it actually work, and does it deliver the intended benefits. For example, your process assessment model for Problem Management should assess whether problem Management is actually effective – does it reduce the number of Incidents in your organisation?

A good assessment model will also enable you to assess your degree of conformance to the defined process – i.e. do people actually follow the process?

By regularly assessing the effectiveness and degree of conformance to the documented process you can identify areas for improvement and you can ensure that your processes remain fit for purpose and deliver real operational benefits on an on-going basis. Without these on-going assessments even the best processes will become an irrelevance over time.

If you are more interested in process maturity than process effectiveness then I can help by showing you how to use TIPA. TIPA (Tudor IT Process Assessment) is rapidly becoming the de-facto standard for ITIL process maturity assessments.

If you want to know more about ITIL process effectiveness assessments, or about ITIL process maturity assessments and TIPA then please contact me at Charles.Fraser@CharlesFraser.net