ITIL - The Ticket Bouncers !!!!!

Saturday Night, Heavy Music, Metal, Hard Rock what not, With proportion of Alcohol increasing in the veins, as the mind gets Mischievous, Fantasies grow wings, we see a bunch of men who bring us back to the ground, Our very own bouncers. This post is not about them, it's very much about work, the first time I thought that work must be a subject of Blogs, It turned me off. But looking at the Characters you meet, the people you deal with, the challenges you face, might be my perspective ; though presented in a crude way can make life easy for people. Mostly for those who work in IT support, Infrastructure or for those who follow the new Bible of IT organizations ITIL.

Incidents are nothing but the documented agony of a human being who comes to work, the agony when becomes an epidemic becomes severe otherwise remains what it is just another "Incident". Requests I would say is the user filling in forms that would grant him future agonies or agonies before even he gets the service. Imagine a user who runs around with forms, behind his manager, that too in the dark, he tumbles down, falls, gets hurt and at last gets the service. A well managed ticketing system, will get half the job done in an Infrastructure, with leaders believing that Remedy is actually a remedy for their issues, pushing messages to the resolver groups could have been much more easier.

People have their own ways of getting things done, a guy from sales and marketing would always call the desk and talk about getting the job done with in minutes ( Mostly a bargain), where in some one from Quality assurance would ask about what all processes are involved in getting the task done, Some one from IT would explain that it's just about pushing a policy into the firewall and the time taken for that is Excruciatingly high. Customers come with Expectations and these are mainly mapped to their domain and meeting all these without hurting any ones emotion's is the key, key to the business of IT Service Management.

Service Desk, the middleman is always compelled to play a diplomatic role, washing hands off before and after food and while doing the job is a common problem that we face on a daily basis. But that's what keeps us in the job!!!!!. If you sort words that will be used heavily and followed lightly " Ownerhsip" will be a winner, with the Silver Medalist miles and miles away. Incidents assigned to teams would come back to us like a rubber ball on the wall, comments ranging from " Working from my end check from user's end" , " Issue not with our team" , " Check with the network team, might be a connectivity issue" are common.Incidents / Tickets that would say why it is not an issue with ones team will be a rarity, those will go to a museum directly. (Framed and Worshiped)

To manage an Infrastructure right, the only thing the management needs to do is to monitor the health of the Core ITIL Processes. Count of incidents logged, closed, pending, missed SL, Team wise / Manager Wise will tell who is getting the job done and not. A daily call with defaulters would bring down user dissatisfaction to Zero. Incidents reoccurred daily / Weekly and permanent fixes if tracked will lead to Incident reduction. Capacity planning with Dash boards of user base per application, Usage in terms of Bandwidth, Time , Response times within the Lan and over the wan with proper inputs to problem team will tackle those Slow performance Issues. Changes raised by capacity keeping an eye on future incidents will tell us the Quality work done and would show on less number of Incidents,Example(Incidents which cropped up as another application was added to the agony of a already suffering database).SLA without OLA is like an "underwear without elastic", the vendors, internal customers must be accountable to each other, an environment where my job not being done will make me answer to 10 different people will bring Pro-activeness for sure.

ITIL processes are like a chain and a chain is only strong as the weakest link, for an implementation to be Successful, the processes must be reviewed as a whole not Individually. For Example a discussion were the number of Problem Tickets raised by Incident Management is reviewed, Number of Changes raised by Capacity team is taken into account (Capacity Dashboard pointing at peaks and lows of Critical apps), SLA missed is accounted on the basis of OLA's agreed, Changes raised and implemented as part of the Incident Problem Life Cycle are reviewed and evaluated will make an Infrastructure much more healthier. What most Organisations might be missing out will be this holistic view of this new approach , or are we promoting the Hindustani way of building walls between departments with the Slogan " Tu 13 Dekh ".