itSMF Project of the Year 2008

A highlight of the annual itSMF conference is the competition for the best IT Service Management Project of the Year.  It attracts projects from all types and sizes of organisations - from both the UK and overseas.  The 4 short listed projects were presented to a plenary session of the itSMF annual conference in Birmingham on 11th November. In each case the teams were able to deliver real value to their organisations through broad adoption of ITIL techniques. Three of the projects also culminated in ISO/IEC 20000 certification.

Winner

Jean-Luc Gérardy explained how the European Central Bank undertook a 3 year journey to achieve ISO20000.  As a young and fast changing organisation there had been rather more emphasis on design than operations. The start point was to apply ITIL principles to a core set of key services, including the service desk. Maintaining initial enthusiasm was a challenge as the project was broadened out and a systematic approach to continual improvement adopted.  Jean-Luc feels strongly that whilst not the ultimate aim, ISO20000 was important in convincing senior management that world class standards were being achieved - and as a motivator for all the staff involved. 

Runners UpSimon Adams of Lloyds TSB led a project called “Leap into Lean”.  Building on an already structured service management environment, the campaign aimed to develop a culture of continuous improvement.  It was all about doing the small things a little bit better. “Improve 100 things by 1%”.  The project was strongly promoted across the business and a significant increase in employee engagement scores was recorded.  Savings of over £1m have been banked and next year the project will concentrate on the more challenging (but bigger) wins.

Peter Wang of the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan had also adopted ITIL on the way to achieving ISO20000 earlier this year. Innovative aspects of this project included real time monitoring and display of SLAs - including visibility via PDA. The project has transformed IT service quality from “fire fighting” to a situation where there are very few major incidents.

Allied Irish Bank’s Olympus Programme was all about operational excellence through IT Service Management.  ITIL was an important tool and ISO20000 a significant milestone but fundamentally this was a change management programme - which will be continuing.  As such it was vital that the project achieved “buy-in” from both senior management and staff.  The former came easily but it required a major communications initiative to achieve the latter.  One significant measure of success has been a 50% reduction in Service Outages between 2005 and 2008.

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