Does any of this seem
familiar to you?

ITIL – a waste of time and money?
You ‘do’ ITIL®! You know that you do ITIL® because the consultants that you engaged to help you implement ITIL® have just completed an updated ‘alignment assessment’, and the result is that you are now 87% aligned to ITIL®. Although you are not really sure what this means, everybody seems pleased as this is an improvement on the situation 9 months ago when you only achieved 53% alignment.

It is good that everybody is pleased because this ITIL® implementation has required a considerable amount of time and effort. In fact it has cost a fortune. Still, at least you know now that you are ‘doing’ ITIL®, and this is a good thing, as it is Best Practice etc.
Except…well except that nothing really seems to have changed.

Yes, you do seem to have an awful lot of processes, a lot more documentation, everybody seems to use a particular vocabulary…but…well nothing seems to have improved. The customer is still unhappy and complains. The number and duration of outages seems to be about the same as before. People seem to be working just as hard getting nowhere just as fast as before!

When you press people to ask what has changed, what has improved all you get is a lot of talk of streamlined processes, but when you ask for details on cost savings, operational performance improvements everybody goes strangely silent.

To be blunt, you do not seem to be getting any tangible benefit whatsoever for your investment in ITIL®. You suspect that the only thing that has really improved is the bank balance of the consultancy that you used. Is this familiar to you?

ITIL - all theory and no practical benefit?
You have spent considerable time and money having all your staff trained in ITIL®, yet they still do not appear to understand what it is, or how to use it. 
Yes, they have all passed the Foundation certificate and are ITIL® qualified, and yes they can tell you about how an Incident is different to a Problem, but…well it all seems so theoretical and abstract. They do not appear to have any clear idea how to use this theory, how to how to implement ITIL®, what do with the knowledge they have.

It is almost as if they know the terms and definitions but do not actually understand what it is all about. Overall you feel that the training has provided no real benefit, and has been a waste of money. Is this familiar to you?

ITIL – What is it really all about?
You have heard of ITIL®. Everybody seems to be talking about it.  Everybody seems to know all about it and understands it…everybody but you.

So you look on the internet, and it is just confusing. There is a lot of material and lots of detail, lots of views and opinions, but you cannot get the big picture of what it is or what it is all about.

So you buy a book, and all this tells you is how to pass an examination in ITIL®. So you buy another book, and this one appears to be written in some absurdly complicated pseudo academic language which is impossible to understand. You ask a colleague who has talked about ITIL® to explain it. But all they can tell you is about the detail, as they also seem to lack an understanding of what is all about, how to use it etc.
So you never get to the bottom it, you never get a simple and clear explanation of what ITIL® is and what it can do. You leave it feeling slightly uneasy and quite annoyed. Is this familiar to you?

If any of the above scenarios are familiar to you then do not worry, as they are very common indeed. Through our experience we have estimated that in excess of 70% of ‘ITIL® implementations’ (this includes training) fail to deliver any meaningful, tangible, discernable or measurable benefits.

We hear the same story over and over again, how organisations have spent large sums of money and thousands of man hours training their staff and implementing ITIL®, and the end result has been no tangible or discernible benefit whatsoever. This gives rise to the feeling that ‘ITIL® is rubbish’, it does not work, it is all part of a con, a money making exercise for training and consultancy organisations.

Contrary to the experience of many organisations this is very wrong. ITIL can and does most definitely work, and can deliver true, measurable, meaningful (and often quite dramatic) business and IT operational benefits. 

We can help in this situation. We can review what you have done and ensure that you do get a real and tangible return from your investment in ITIL®.

 As a consultancy we truly understand both IT Operations and IT Service Management. We have a full understanding of what ITIL® actually is and how to use it. We can explain ITIL® to you in terms you will understand as our consultants all come from a strong IT Operational background (unlike many consultancies that use consultants with paper qualifications but no real experience).

So if you do want to really understand what ITIL® is (and what it is not), when and how to use it to gain real benefits to your organisation, and how to realise a real and tangible return on your present investment in ITIL® then please do not hesitate to contact us at: enquiries@e-quant.co.uk