In my last blog I mentioned about agile model and its unique features. I also talked about that agile allows for direct customer inclusion, adjustment and even redirection utilizing a type of iterative/incremental approach that deals with the level of uncertainty encountered. Here I would like to elaborate further on critical success factors and challenges. I will focus on some seemingly obvious but mostly ignored concepts. Link to my previous blog Service Matters! ITSM & IT Management: ITSM Implementation best practices part - 2 "Rapid ITSM deployment using an "AGILE" Approach"
ITSM tool deployment is not just a technical concern, many other factors such as organizational, management, people, cost, time etc. can lead the project to success or failure. Here below I tried collating some of the key success factors for agile deployment:
Critical Success Factors:
- Customer Collaboration, requirements can never be fully collected at the beginning of the development cycle therefore continuous customer or stakeholder involvement is very important
- Simplicity, approach baby steps & address one thing at a time, build multiple smaller increments of less complexity. When it comes to making changes, it is often easier to bring people along when they only have to support small changes at one time, remember "Implementing ITIL is really changing behavior and changing people"
- Communication & Coordination continues to be one of the major significant factors. Agile methods promote a team working together from beginning to end, communicating face-to-face (including formal daily meetings) than separate teams communicating through formal requirement documents
- Integrate and test each increment with the end to end project, on addition of a new functionality, new test cases must be added to the regression test suite. Testing team must test and report on incremental builds
- Organizational acceptance of team decisions, top management support in agreement of team decisions
- Continuously measure project progress, metrics like "Schedule Variance" , "Scope Variance, "Planned Requirements vs. Delivered Requirements" etc are recommended to ensure adherence
Challenges:
Let's flip the coin and see other part of the story as wellJ, just like any other methodology agile does pose certain challenges. Here below are some:
- Progress on tool development status is hard to judge due to level & short timelines of increments. For a yearlong end to end ITSM tool deployment project there may be as high as 100 increments with duration of each may varies between 1-4 weeks
- Quality of each increment may not be at highest level, remember focus of Agile is on accelerated delivery and inclusion of continuously changing business requirements. Hence some compromise has to be made between shorter cycle time and quality of product. For e.g. Nonfunctional requirement may not be perfect initially however we can certainly improve with time
- Contractual Issues unlike conventional approaches no single copy of contract is possible in Agile (due to continuously change in requirements)
- Difficult to provide right priority to the changes especially where interest of multiple stakeholders are involved
- Minimal focus on documentation makes difficult to judge what has been done till date
and what is the amount of work remaining to be done
- Validation issues no formal method of validation can be applied due to continuous change in specifications, informal user feedback is the only possible way to validate
Summary:
ITIL version 3 books provide standard set of best practices that needs to be adapted to the organizational requirements. This same reasoning applies to the ITSM tools, all industry leading ITSM toolsets require significant levels of customization for an effective process-led tool implementation. This development cycle needs serious investment on time and money along with the bandwidth of subject-matter experts. In this respect, agile practices of frequent iterations, increments, and focused teams inclusive of users, specialists and customer can surely provide greater value, which further ensures ITIL and Agile as complimentary partners despite of their uncommon characterization of "Agile" being flexible and "ITIL" being composed and directive
