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Achieving IT Service Quality: The Opposite of Luck ReviewIntroduction:There has been a lot of press recently on IT Service Management (ITSM) and its focus on the customer's perspective of IT service delivery. In addition, frameworks like ITIL, Six Sigma and TQM have been espoused as ways to improve the quality of IT services. However, there's a large gap between reading (and understanding) any framework and implementing it's philosophies. This gap is what this book nicely addresses. The title "The Opposite of Luck" is a catchy reference to (the perception of) what is unfortunately common in some shops today.
For anyone that works in IT and is responsible for the quality of systems that the organization delivers, this book is a great handbook on service delivery. It's an easy read, provides many real-world examples, and steps the reader through incremental improvements -- starting with Crisis Management and culminating in Perpetual Motion.
Along the way the authors offer many scenarios that will be familiar to IT practitioners along with analogies in non-IT fields that help the reader relate. There is also pragmatic advice against trying to "do it all", and a noteworthy chapter on how to address the "people" issues that are so often overlooked. In short, a concise, helpful, and practical guide to IT Service Management.
How I came upon the book:
I actually met one of the authors, Christophe DeMoss, at the SIMposium conference earlier this year and was sharing with him some of the difficulties I was facing finding any actionable information related to improving IT service delivery. That's when he showed me a copy of the book. I was hooked when one of the first examples in the book hit close to home because we had just been through the scenario: how a glitch with a WAN compression device caused a service interruption.
What I liked about the book:
Those of us who have had systems in production are all familiar with system outages that impact business operation.
The resulting all-hands-on-deck response and SWAT team mentality not only engenders the "culture of Heroism", but, often what we see is that after the initial problem is resolved, often the team disengages, and, because of limited resources, are soon knee-deep in other projects.
What the book does well is help guide the IT practitioner on how to break the cycle of fire-fighting and be part of world-class Service Delivery Organization. One key component the authors propose is having the right metrics around D-R-E-S: Downtime, Response Time, Error Rate, and Scalability.
I very much enjoyed the analogies used in to equate the contents of the chapter with non-IT fields. Ex. Crisis Management = Fire Departments; Problem Solving = CSI investigations; Prevention = Health Practitioners.
The organization of the book is stellar: in-chapter table of contents at the start and summary checklists at the end of each chapter helped me navigate through the book and retain key learnings.
There are also numerous examples throughout the book: an incident log template, an entire chapter devoted to presenting data (Power of pictures) and a useful appendix with still more sample documents.
Many recognizable topics are also interspersed in the material including SMART goals; the Five Why's and, the ever-present, "It's the Network's Fault."
Summary:
The authors provide a framework for achieving excellent IT Service Quality.
Their own Production Maturity Model (PMM) is similar to the CMM 5 levels; their MPIP - (measure, prevent, improve, publish) is analogous to the Six-Sigma DMAIC process. What I found was a simplified synthesis of industry best-practices, coupled with authors' experiences, resulting in a well-organized, and palatable, handbook for IT professionals.
It's not an easy path to help your organization through all the levels. As someone once said, "Buying the book is not going to help you lose weight. You actually have to GO on the diet to lose weight". Similarly, following up and actually taking the steps to improve the maturity of your organization is going to take some work. At the same time, one has to pace oneself through the entire process.
Suggestions:
1) I think that having an index - in an otherwise very well laid out book - would aid tremendously when using the book as a reference guide.
2) The Business Impact Index could have used a little more exploration. Given that the thrust of ITSM is centered around the business' view of IT, it would behoove us to learn how to better to translate IT terms into business terms. Granted, those translations are going to vary based on the business, but more insight from the authors' would have helped solidify that concept.Achieving IT Service Quality: The Opposite of Luck OverviewMany IT organizations suffer from poor system and service quality with costly consequences. Every day it seems there's a new media report of a system failure damaging a company's bottom line or reputation. Don't let your business be next.Achieving IT Service Quality demonstrates that achieving superior IT system results is the opposite of luck. Whether you currently employ a service quality framework such as ITIL or not, this book can help your organization:-stop relying on expensive Band-Aids to put IT systems back together during a crisis-integrate innovative practices in technology, process, and organizational design-learn a practical and realistic methodology to dramatically improve IT service quality-build a culture of prevention and improvement for the short- and long-termBuilt on the experiences and proven techniques of three IT professionals with a combined 40 years in the industry, this book provides insights on the dos and don'ts of equipping your business with high-performing, competitive IT services.
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