Pearls of Wisdom from Pink Elephant

Posted February 28th, 2008 by Dennis Powell

Today’s blog entry has nothing to do with ITIL… yet it has everything to do with the politics of ITIL adoption.

As I sat through a number of interesting sessions and participated in many conversations with attendees last week at the Pink Elephant ITIL conference, one point was clear from nearly every session I attended, and nearly every person that visited our booth… the ITIL acronym could easily stand for It’s Tough to Interest our Leaders…

To be fair, it’s not just the ‘leaders’ whose interest is tough to attract. There are actually two organizational obstacles to ITIL adoption challenges:

Convincing senior management to adopt ITIL
Fitting ITIL adoption into the organizational culture

This is an important point, because more organizations are considering ITIL adoptions for processes like change and release management. Specifically, half of the 400 IT Operations professionals we surveyed last June told us they were planning to adopt ITIL in the next two years.

Source: “IT Operations Research Report: Change Management Maturity,” StackSafe. September 2007.

So, late in the week I made it a point to catch Troy DuMoulin in action. Troy is the Director of Product Strategy at Pink Elephant. He offered a presentation entitled The People, Process, and Technology Flaw, and just as I hoped, this presentation spoke directly to the challenges noted above.

I’m going to pull out a few tidbits from his presentation to start you on your way to ITIL adoption in your organization. All of these insights are Troy’s – so I gladly give him full credit.

Troy’s primary point is that “People, Process, & Technology” is the wrong way to look at introducing and nurturing an adoption of service management. “PEOPLE, PEOPLE, PEOPLE, Process, & Technology” is the right way.

Why, you ask?

As the folks who visited our booth have found out (or are learning now), and as Troy clearly explained, you can expect two-thirds of the effort that drives any and every cultural change (say, adopting ITIL service management) to be spent in gaining buy-in for that change. Yep…that means 66% of the time is spent winning the hearts and minds of the right people, and only one-third spent on the actual design or deployment of the change.

Now for a lot of us “techno nerds”, creating and pitching a sales campaign isn’t exactly the lead value proposition on our resumes. But we should never fear. Troy’s insights to selling the benefits and value of ITIL service management to the masses are in understanding the culture you sell to:

In my opinion, Troy’s best piece of advice was the following: Before you make any pitch, understand clearly who you are pitching to, and how to pitch the message. It may need to be pitched different ways. Know your audience(s) by breaking the organizational culture into primary and secondary cultures.

Start by understanding the cultural methodology of the “top dog” in the organization. He or she (or they) set the primary cultural framework. From there, determine what secondary sub-culture (if any) exists at the “worker bee” level. These are the two primary groups you will need to account for when crafting your pitch.

Next, match your approach to the cultural environment. During his session, Troy explained a few organizational modes of operation (which I have summarized below). You’ll almost certainly recognize one or more of these cultures in your organization:

The military chain of command. Questions go up the chain and decisions come down the chain. It takes longer to sell each level of the chain, but woe be to the person that tries to ‘buck’ the chain… prepare to salute a lot.

The family. The company works for the employee. Prepare to soften the hard edges out of your proposal to achieve consensus (from all). Despite having to sit through the umpteenth committee meeting, fight the urge to… well, let’s just say be Patient… threats don’t work.

The political jungle. Decisions are a contest of will, rather than logic. Power, emotion, and influence mean lots of bargaining, negotiating, and coercing the ‘power concentrations’. Prepare to play power-broker. Meanwhile, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

The symbolic company. The organization follows in the steps of the ‘great leader’ and does what the leader does, did, or would have done. This is an organization who’s decisions are steeped in tradition, rituals, ceremonies… embrace and preach to the symbolic when making your case (just don’t forget the special candles, robes, and skulls of the ancients).

To do justice to Troy’s entire presentation would take a lot more space than I will dedicate here. Please check his and other Pink Elephant blogs for more goodies like the above.

And by the way…ITIL Version 3 makes it easier to demonstrate to senior management and your organization the value and advantage of adopting ITIL for service management, regardless of whether you spend your day saluting, sitting in committee, twisting arms, or paying homage to the great leader.