TIQETS.ENGINEERING
ITIL and your start-up or scale-up
Incident management for fast growing teams
ITIL is a framework of best practices in IT Service management that has the scope of making sure that tech services are aligned with the business needs.
Where and how does it all fit?
We all know by now that ITIL as a best practice ideology describes a technological utopia where every team is in complete alignment with the other, in sync with the business needs, and nothing can slip between the cracks (as long as your organization is mature enough and your processes are ITIL compliant). As is the case with most utopias, while the principles are sound, execution often becomes impossible due to a varying number of reasons.
So what happens when your company is still growing its legs and going through the associated pains? Do we completely give up the structure or should we go full ITIL and grow into a more developed and mature organization?
This is the biggest dilemma I was facing when joining Tiqets as an Incident Manager. It was as exciting as it was stressful. We are moving towards a more agile mentality in pretty much all the facets of our lives, and having full control over every cog and minutia of a system becomes increasingly harder. This might be scary for some: as the industry slowly veers away from frameworks like ITIL, might this translate to a descent into chaos? It doesn’t have to be this way.
Being fully ITIL oriented is easier for big companies, mature in processes and knowledge and with a stable set of service offerings. It is much harder for a start-up or scale-up company where goals and objectives need to change suddenly and often in order to ensure its continued success before it can become an established brand. For these smaller companies, while implementing ITIL processes will bring a good foundation on which to build the future, it’s even more important to make sure your processes are not, in fact, slowing you down rather than enabling you to achieve those goals.
To give a clearer example, imagine working in a software development company where all significant features need approval from a Change Advisory Board meeting. This would make it impossible for developers to build features around the clock and deploy daily and automatically. In this case, introducing a CAB meeting will drastically reduce the company’s throughput.
How can you avoid your processes becoming a bottleneck for your smaller scale company? You must design processes that are grounded in ITIL and at the same time follow the Agile methodology.
My best advice if you’re looking into implementing ITIL processes into your start-up or scale-up, whether it is for Incident, Change or Problem Management, is:
- Don’t be too strict when building your processes and be ready to tweak them to support company growth. Add value, not hurdles!
- What works for a company might not work for another regardless of size. (It definitely won’t!) Don’t copy-paste processes from your previous work experience under the excuse of being ITIL compliant.
- Don’t tweak a process just because of minor push-backs. Review your decisions and stick to them if the data available shows how the process supports your growth.
Author
Catalin Ciornea is the Incident Manager Coordinator at Tiqets.
