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Chucking it over the wall

Posted by Cathryn in : Project Management , trackback

Through the life of the project, you involve the people in IT Operations who will be supporting it.  They’re keen to help, and everyone says all the right things.  If things go very well, the right documentation is produced, perhaps someone from the service desk or a service manager is seconded onto the project team for a while, training is timely and thorough, and Operational Acceptance Testing is a wonderful collaborative effort between IT Operations and the Project Team.
Or is it more like this? Throughout the life of the project, you try desperately to involve the people in IT Operations, but they’re constantly pulled away from meetings to deal with the latest crisis.  They’ve no real idea what they want you to produce for handover, and the only time you encounter any rigourous process is when you try to take the project live and meet the dragon known as the Change Manager.

Or worse still, the project is just about done and somehow you forgot to tell IT Operations.  After all, they barely speak the same language and sometimes you’d wonder if they work in the same industry, let alone the same IT department.  Shortly before you’re ready to go live, you call an emergency meeting and tell them its on its way.  Your sponsor is an important person in the company, and they have little choice but to catch the ball as you throw it over the wall.

In my experience, there is normally at least a level of tension between those who create new stuff, and those whose responsibility it is to keep the existing stuff going.  Sometimes, that’s creative and fun, but it can be a nightmare.  One way out of that nightmare is for Project Managers and other project staff to make a move towards that other world, learning about ITIL, the IT Infrastructure Library.  If nothing else, you will learn to speak the language of service management and have a framework for understanding what they do. Even if the IT Operations department you’re dealing with doesn’t really implement the best practice guidelines contained in ITIL they are likely to be aware of it, in the same way that most Project Managers understand Prince2, although they don’t always apply it.

One of the big gaps in ITIL has always been the lack of any good guidance on how to cover exactly the problem I’m talking about - how to take a new service or product out of the project state, and into fully supported live service.  It was with some delight, therefore, that I recently attended a lecture by Aidan Lawes at the British Computer Society about the new version of ITIL which will be released later this year. 

The new ITIL is organised on a ’service lifecycle’ basis, starting with strategy, moving through to design, transition, operations and continuous improvement.  The Service Transition section is expected to deal with the way in which a new service moves into use, and I hope will address this area well.  If that is indeed the case, it will go a long way to breaking down one of the biggest areas of risk in many projects, and make life much easier for both project teams and IT Operations staff.

Technorati Tags: ITIL, British Computer Society

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