WOW... what an amazing last month or so in regards to both my personal life and also to the ongoing implementation and acceptance of the ITIL rollout.

Firstly, on a personal note, I have been blessed with the arrival of little Jeromos (born on 29th September 2005 and weighing 3.1kg).... So it has been a very busy time.

On the ITIL front, our change manager has been working hard on documentation and is now presenting to each team regarding the layout of the CAB, CAB EXEC and other roles within change management. He is ready to start on the work practice flow with each team and then mapping this to our toolset.

We have also just had a very succesfull conference which was soley focused on People, Proccess and Technology. Service Management played a huge part with half of the time dedicated to a re-awareness campaign and process overview.

The feedback was very good and everyone can now really see how ITIL will impact them and help improve their working lives. We had some of our clients do some videos explaining how Service Management best practice will be of benefit to them and that was very well taken and regarded.

Everyone worked their butt off for this conference and it was a great win for Service Management.

All of our forums have been held for the first time and the best thing yet is that the first ITIL newsletter was sent out to the IT department. This was a great win and a fantastic result using the main IT communication contact.

We are now building up to our conference and trying to think of some fun ideas to explain ITIL and a process focus. We believe some crazy idea is not too far away. A few things have been brought up and they show promise....

Our IT partner will soon be, at our next drinks, making a statement on the focus of the conference... we need to get people thinking about and understanding that ITIL is not just concentrated on our support centre but crosses all bounds of IT....

Stay tuned....

It has been a while since I have updated this blog... We have now run all workshops on process design and the documents are going through the FINAL proof read before going out...

We have expanded our Service Management forum and starting to really get buy in from all of the IT teams... a communication strategy is being devised and we are starting to work on the IT conference ITIL program... There will be about 4 hours to fill in during the first day....

It is going to be a challenge balancing my new baby and ITIL!!!!

The forums video conferences are now booked for the first two months, and now the flame has been handed to our process owners well and truely.

We have already started on our Change management strategy..... keep an eye on this spot...

WOW it is a great relief to finally have the first lot of workshops completed. I have been spending crazy amounts of time trying to juggle the ITIL work and my other funtion of running my team. My new team leader is doing a fantastic job in helping me...

The documentation is coming along well and we kick off the Sydney workshops tommorow! It is sucha  challenge and the team memeber running our config has been fantastic...

FEEDBACK TIME

Some constructive feedback that I have recieved is that people still feel as if the service department is running/implementing the ITIL process.. this is a challenge as we are rolling it out along side of a toolset upgrade which is very service orientated.... there is still a big split within ITS between delivery and support ..... very difficult to resolve. A great suggestion (put forward by the Config Process Owner) is that we incorporate a communications role into the ITIL Service Management Forum...  So I have contacted our communication specialist and they were excited to be involved in that process. fantastic... another little win.....

All of the little wins will keep adding up and adding up.....

Looking forward to tommorow.....

and more and more people are becoming certified in ITIL wooohooo good to see.....

Well I have flown down to Melbourne and am ready to help facilititate the first lot of the ITIL workshops... Today will be a get together with the process owners and we will discuss what the next two days will hold.

The implementation thus far has been fairly steady with not too many rocky moments, unlike my flight last night which was rocked by 50km cross winds... The landing was very bumpy.

It is exciting, we are counting down to our full launch of configuration management... We are about to have a video conference with the whole team in about 18 minutes!

I am sure it will go well as the config management process owner is very keen and has done a great job. I cannot stress enough how important it is to pick the correct people for these roles.

Although there has been some speedhumps along the way, it has been a resonably well accepted implementation so far...

I will report back and let you know how the meeting  went........

We are getting very close to our implementation.

I have just spent the last week at a conference on the Gold Coast.... after a few days of great workshops, a quick hit of golf, a migrain and some quality time with my colleages I was ready and energised to come out the other side ready to go.

Still trying to organize the workshops for policy and design, had real trouble getting the teams together...a product of a national company. Will now be running in two parts - one in syd and one in mel. Some flights will be needed so i am going to speak to our fearless leader to try and get some $$$.

I have been sending out some ITIL facts, stories and websites as I go along to try and keep the communication stream going. Here is a sample:

Well we are getting closer... The ITIL Forum teams are nearly formed now. The spread across all of our IT internal teams is very good and there are some motivasted people amongst the group.

I am about to send out some more communication regarding ITIL very soon. Our external assesment results and a glossary of terms.

Our intiial forums will concentrate on creating a Policy and a Process document..and then the task of mapping the process to the new tool!

GRRRRR

I cannot get any rooms to run the workshops... I am going to have to break it up into 2 workshops I believe... It is a must that we have them with every member available.

Well to ease the confusion I have presented the vision (yet to be signed off) to two internal IT teams. Not as many questions came forth as I first expected, although some rather positive feedback was recieved. My favorite being this quote, 'This initiative is not before time!'.

Great way to get started!

A workshop in Melbourne talking about config and incident outlined to us all that it would be beneficial to move the rollout of our toolset out another month while defining the ITIL processes and building the forum teams. Lucky that the structure has already been developed.

Well time frames are now in place and the challenge will be having strong teams developed, decided on and motivated by late this month. The time frames are now :

MAY
3rd - TOMMOROW - management sign off proposal
4th - Email to IT team asking for volunteers to be involved.
9th - Response deadline
13th - Fill the teams with people (management to sign off on final teams)
16th-20th - Workshop week - 1 full day for both Incident and Configuration

Is there enough hours in the day???????

Well finally it happened! The company assigned with the task of assesing our ITIL processes presented its final verdict. They also layed out a roadmap of what processes to lay out in what phases. First off the cab is Incident and Config (initial part).

Wow, everyone is chomping at the bit to be involved with the ITIL project, great news for me but hard to keep everyone happy.... expectations are high.

I think many of our people are being confused between our toolset rollout project and the itil project rollout...... So I have been preparing documentation, structures and plans to go to our management team and get them to sign off.. after that it will be all systems go!