Tackling ITIL Implementation Challenges, presented in EAITSM Sixth Annual Conference, Egypt; Oct. 2014

1. TACKLING ITIL IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES
Mohamed Zohair Fingerprint Consultancy; Cairo, Egypt zohair@eng-tec.net
Abstract
This paper presents in important details the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) implementation. It sheds light on the success factors needed for the ITIL implementation project, and to overcome the major challenges and breakthroughs; emphasizes some of the factors that contributed to the project success; and provides learning opportunity to organizations and ITIL consultancy firms. The paper points out that the commitment of senior management is a critical factor to the success of the project as it is a central implementation factor, and recognizing the essential need to change the management strategy suitable to change the organizational culture to a service-oriented focus. The paper refers to eight critical success factors for any ITIL implantation project such as senior management commitment, managing organizational changes, ITIL implementation scope, organizations’ it staff competency , project management and governance, managing communication, managing project stakeholders, and consultancy firm and implementation team. These eight factors are grouped into main three categories; organization, project management methodology, and consultancy firm and implementation team.
ITIL Overview
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a framework that provides best practices and guidance aid to manage IT processes, functions, roles and responsibilities

2. (ITIL service strategy, 2011). Initially, the UK government agency, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) developed the ITIL in the 1980s responding to the government’s growing needs on information technology (Galup et al., 2009), and proposing efficient IT service delivery and operations within government controlled information centres (Yamakawa et al., 2012). The first version of ITIL contained of 40 volumes covering “best practices” in diverse areas of IT service delivery. In 2000, ITIL version two (ITILv2) combined the practices within an overall framework, focusing on two main components; service delivery and service support, which involve ten essential processes beside service desk function. The ITILv2 was published in seven volumes. In 2007, ITILv2 was improved to become ITIL version three (ITILv3), now consisting of five volumes: Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation and Continual Improvement (ITIL Service Strategy, 2011).
Starting from the first version in the 1980s, the ITIL shared common themes with other process improvement standards and frameworks such as total quality management (TQM), six sigma and CCMI (Galup et al., 2009). Additionally, when the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) had begun developing the first version of ITIL, which provided a body of knowledge, it had rapidly grown up becoming the international standard ISO/IEC 20000 which offers a solid set of best practices for organizations seeking to have information technology service management capabilities audited and certified (ITIL service strategy, 2011; Cervone, 2008).
ITIL Implementation Key Benefits
The ITIL implementation focuses on IT services and associated processes. It is important to mention to that service and products are different from quality perspective, thus it is

3. necessary to count all IT components’ quality in consideration during project implementation. The ITIL implementation should include Information and data quality, infrastructure quality, and staff quality to have full service quality control (Shang and Lin, 2010). On the other hand, many organizations decide to implement ITIL to close the gap between their services and their customers considering increasing customer satisfaction a core objective (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry, 1994). In terms of ITIL implementation benefits for organizations, many academic articles pointed out the common major benefits such as improving an efficiency and transparency of IT services (McNaughton, Ray and Lewis, 2010; Yamakawa et al., 2012), reducing the long-term cost of IT services operation, increasing customer orientation and satisfaction and improving managing and controlling IT operations (Galup et al., 2009; Marquis, 2006), and caring about process continual improvement (Galup et al., 2009; Yamakawa et al., 2012).
ITIL Implementation Main Challenges
No matter whom you talk to, everyone argues to know the best practices (Cervone, 2008). A quick search of Google shows there are more than 93,000,000 results for “best practices”. While most people will think through this a decent thing, the best practices’ problems clearly appear during discovering and implementation, especially for information technology (Ahmed et al., 2013).
Even though the ITIL has been there for more than 30 years, and has significantly become popular among IT practitioners, and it has a comprehensive source of information technology best practices; most recent studies focused on ITIL adoption benefits verifications, and just little academic research focuses on ITIL adoption and implementation itself (Yamakawa et al., 2012). Accordingly, large ITIL implementation

4. success factors are not a technology-based (Ahmed et al., 2013); even some of these factors related to vendor and solution selected to aid the ITIL implementation; and most are related to organization and user acceptance of the ITIL framework. The implementation challenges and a brief way to overcome are described below
(a) Senior Management Commitment (Organizational Factor)
The management commitment is a key success factor not only for ITIL implementation, but for any organizational change initiatives as well (Abraham, Crawford and Fisher, 1999; Yamakawa et al., 2012). Real management support includes “walking the talk”, without it, most senior management priorities and attentions will be placed on other activities (Steinberg, 2005). Course of actions may be required from senior management during implementation such as encouraging staff to attend awareness sessions by attending/delivering them, dictating staff to follow the processes’ steps, participating in steering committee meetings, reviewing the final process documents, deeply reviewing the periodic performance reports and taking corrective actions if needed. On the other hand, Kouzes and Pozner (1990) stressed that managers may be expressive about their vision and commitments, but if their behaviour does not tie rhetoric, employees may lose esteem for them, and let the whole organization without “on ground” vision.
Mehravani, Hajiheydari and Haghighinasab (2011) listed senior management support on top of the ITIL effective success factors list. Especially for large-scale ITIL implementations, which usually required justifiable resource allocations for planning, implementation and monitoring (Abraham, Crawford and Fisher, 1999). Thus, getting senior management involvement is crucial.
(b) Managing Organizational Changes (Organizational Factor)

5. One of the main challenges organizations face during the ITIL implementation is changing organization to be service-oriented culture (Yamakawa et al., 2012). These changes will affect not only the IT staff, but also many non-IT staff. Most organizations have very complex relations and unofficial factions that the consultancy firm/implementation team has to deal with. Addressing the best way to deal with factions and groups inside the organization is one of key success factors in ITIL implementation. It is not a small task and requires effective communication (Steinberg, R., 2005). The organizational change process driven by the strategic vision that aims to convert the organizational culture to be service oriented (Yamakawa et al., 2012). Thus, it is important to confirm that the vision is effectively communicated so it is finally interpreted into a tangible course of actions for the organization staff; even vision creation itself requires communication. Sometimes, significant employees being involved in two-way communication and asked to provide input and feedback on early drafts of the vision (Abraham, Crawford and Fisher, 1999). Steinberg (2005) claimed that over 50% of implementation effort goes to organizational communication and change activities.
(c) Determine Fit ITIL Implementation Scope (Organizational Factor)
Each ITIL process has serious dependencies upon other processes. The organization cannot implement the change management process without fulfilling the asset and configuration management process and vice versa. Similarly, we cannot operate IT service continuity without considering the availability management and financial concerns (Steinberg, 2005). On the contrary, many organizations go to implement all ITIL processes whereas they are not of equal importance and value to the business (Ahmed et al., 2013). To overcome this dilemma, the consultancy firm should meet the organization’s senior

6. management as well as significant members across all teams to understand the main pain points that the organization faces. After that, they decide the right ITIL starting point and the required depth of details for each ITIL process and finally determine the best approach for ITIL implementation. Without that, either all the effort will spent on wrong processes or all processes will take similar effort and time which is not the best value to the organization.
(d) Organization IT Staff Competency (Organizational Factor)
The IT staff who will carry out the ITIL process and make the whole project either a successful or not. Therefore, The IT staff competency, skill set, quality of training them gain and readiness of change to service oriented culture are challengeable success factor (Cater-Steel and Wui-Gee, 2005). Focusing on ITIL awareness sessions is not enough, the organizational behaviour and change management training sessions must be included as well. On the other hand, all of the organization’s staff –not only the IT- should be involved in training and awareness sessions, showing attention in ITIL as a way of overcoming resistance to the new organizational change. Generally, awareness ways may extend to short tutorial videos, printed flyers and any other suitable media based on the organization and its staff culture (Yamakawa et al., 2012).
Especially for the IT staff, the project sponsor and organization senior management should encourage and support significant members across all IT departments to become ITIL certified (Galup et al., 2009; Ahmad et al., 2013). EXIN, the Examination Institute for Information Science reported that over 263,000 exams were administered in 2012 with overall pass rate 90%, whereas just under 54,000 ITIL V3 Intermediate exams were administered in 2012 with overall pass rate 78% (Tucker, 2013)

7. (e) Project Methodology and Governance (Project Management Factor)
Presenting the ITIL implementation as a project rather than usual operations/business activities forces the implementation to go through a business case, presenting benefits, determining cost, schedule, risk and quality standard (Ahmad et al., 2013). In addition, running an ITIL implementation as a business case links its benefits with employees’ interests which provides them with better understanding of benefits of the implementation and their regular duties through ITIL (Cater-Steel and McBride, 2007).
As with any project implementation, the project management methodology is a key project success factor, applying the best project management methodology, including tools and techniques would help the implementation done properly, in time and within the project budget. Especially for ITIL implementation, applying the right project management methodology would help employees realize the benefits of the new system over a short time period (Atkinson, 1999; Pollard and Cater-Steel, 2009).
(f) Managing Project Communication (Project Management Factor)
The ITIL implementation is like any other project that requires day-to-day communication with all parties (Ahmad et al., 2013). The implementation project manager should spend most of his time communicating with the consultancy firm’s team, the organization team, and other project stakeholders either internal or external (Project Management Institute, 2013); thus, Pollard and Cater-Steel (2009) were right when they ranked communication as the sixth CSF of ITIL Implementation projects which emphasize its importance in project implementation. Likely, keeping two-way communication between organizations’ management and staff grants the smooth implementation and valuable results (Mehravani, Hajiheydari and Haghighinasab, 2011).

8. (g) Considering All Project Stakeholders (Project Management Factor)
While it may sound that ITIL concentrates mainly on IT operational activities, this is not usually right. Within the ITIL framework, there are many other processes related to business, security and governance. That include many stakeholders across the organization (Steinberg, 2005).
Cervone (2008) stated that, although, some project stakeholders do not conventionally consider themselves to be part of IT service management implementation activities, even a customer with little understanding of ITIL processes, will use the final IT services. So, the project sponsor has to consider them as stakeholders (sometimes main stakeholders) and whose needs must be considered at service design to grant effective service usage.
(h) The Quality of Consultancy Firm (Consultancy Firm Factor)
One of the implementation success factors here is the performance of the consultancy firm, including the ITIL implementation team themselves. Ahmad et al. (2013) emphasize that either the organization will outsource a third party for ITIL implementation or use the internal team, ITIL consultants’ experience is a core key in the Implementation. Similarly, the project manager who manages the whole project is as well. The more depth and quality of experience they have the more smooth the project will run.
From the governance point of view, the ITIL process documentation should reflect a right and comprehensive understanding of organizational objectives and coping with international standardization (Galup et al., 2009). The organization governance team should ensure that these process documents aligned with proper standard body such as IT Service Management Forum (itSMF) which works with a wide range of governmental

9. bodies to participate in the development and use of IT service management practices. As of June 2014, there were 58 country chapters of itSMF (Anon, 2014)
Conclusion
The study of ITIL implementation challenges directly affects the organisational behaviour and consultancy firm as well that ended up to a great understanding of how to deliver valuable service and maintain it by continual improvements. The author found, in this paper, how the ITIL implementation is not a matter of “the best way to implement”. We listed eight main challenges and breakthroughs that organizations and implementation teams have to work together to overcome. An effective ITIL implementation has to be fixable to deal with different organizations under different circumstances.
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