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| Going Nowhere |
Paying to have your exercise taken
Turning Service Management into a Cargo Cult
The case for Service Governance & VeriSM
I enjoyed a most excellent lunch this past weekend, during which I was chatting to a senior manager in a retail organisation. I was struck by her comments on the 'Service Management people'. I thought her words summed the problem up well. To paraphrase them:
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I'm not sure what the point of the service management people is. When they come to see us, they either want to tell us what to do, or they want us to take lots of measurements of metrics that don't seem to make much sense. The app development people seem to understand things much better, they talk to the business, and understand what they want.
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I have known this organisation, on an off, for a couple of decades, so this wasn't a surprise to me. I even taught a tailored ITIL foundations course to a team from the organisation a few years back, to help out a friend who was consulting to them, but didn't have ITIL qualification. I was, then, disappointed that they wanted to do everything on the cheap, and those attending were mainly very junior, and inexperienced employees, all in IT.
As far as I can see, the organisation should call it a day, and close down their service management section. It is a tribute to the people in that organisation that they have survived so long, as the organisation has a habit of carrying out Stalinist purges, reorganisations, every two, or three, years, carrying these out with sadistic secrecy and slowness, so the whole organisation is paralysed, for months, with everybody gossiping about the cuts and hoping the axe will fall on another person or department.
More than that, nobody should try using service management there for a long time. The whole idea has been poisoned, so it seem that, rather than poor execution, it is the thing itself that is no good.
To have worked so hard, for so long, surviving these purges, should count for something, at least for the people themselves. However, the result of the decade (or more) of effort is nothing. They are a cargo cult, going through the motions, as if the organisation had adopted service management, when, in fact, as my conversation demonstrates, the organisation may, as with many, use service management techniques, but has no understanding of service management at all.
They are like a person who pays somebody else to do their exercise for them. No matter how good the exerciser, and no matter how hard he works, the benefit is not going to accrue to the person who pays for it, but does no exercise himself.
The reason for the failure is simple: Trying to do Service Management bottom up does not work. It is deeply frustrating, difficult, and futile.
Service management is not a useful end in itself. It is only useful as a tool to help organisations produce value, it might be useful to have a group looking after some of the specifics, but service management is not carried out by one little team, it is carried out by the whole organisation, or not at all.
Unless the governing body of an organisation recognises what service management brings to the business, and decides to adopt it across the organisation, it is usually better not to try introducing it. Yes, you pilot a part of service management to make a business case to the board, but not more than that.
Service Governance, and VeriSM, recognise this, and are aimed at governing organisations through the service metaphor. They gain traction by using governance to set the policy for management restructuring of the positive sort, aimed specifically at those things required to produce organisational value.
