Last week we described the confusing world of management frameworks and concluded that the two big approaches are TMN if you are running a carrier network and ITIL if you are running an enterprise network. With carriers now supplying enterprise application-centric services using ADS technologies, even they are entering the world of ITIL by using it as a foundation for their new ADS service offerings. TMN has a well defined set of processes for managing performance called FCAPS. The equivalent subset does not appear in ITIL. You’re left to figure it out for yourself, which is a lot of bother. To save you the trouble we’ve figured it out for you.
First, there are three ground rules that must be met before you can apply ITIL to performance management. The system must be built, operating with production users, and providing business value when running properly. The last point is key. There’s little hope that performance management can ensure satisfactory operation to all users all the time if there is no evidence that the application provided satisfactory performance to some users at least one time. This sounds obvious but it is often missed before plunging into a management process.
If the three ground rule conditions are not met, then the application is simply not ready for prime time – or your company may have rolled out the wrong application for the job. In any case, your company is not ready to apply performance management to such an application.
ITIL defines 24 processes. Before we describe which ITIL processes apply to performance management, let us digress. ITIL is so daunting that a cottage industry of training, consultants, tools and conferences has sprung up in recent years to help you figure them out. One excellent conference, called itSMF Fusion, is organized by the US arm of the IT Service Management Forum – the user group of ITIL with chapters in 46 countries. We recommend that you attend the next Fusion conference, September 7-10 in San Francisco, for a big dose of ITIL mania. If you attend you will learn that most companies are implementing ITIL in a linear fashion as described in the volumes and have only got the first one or two processes working.
Back to the point we want to make here. Delivering performance management using ITIL is not as complex as it first appears. We have determined that practical performance management encompasses a subset of just 4 ITIL processes: Incident, Availability, Capacity and Service Level Management. Yes, performance management is described in only one-eighth of ITIL. However, these processes are sprinkled throughout the ITIL volumes. So it will take you a very long time to get there by implementing the 24 processes in the order presented in the ITIL books.
In our next installment we will describe how these four processes form the performance management building blocks you need for your strategy.
