In the noble and unending battle to save the world form
shonky IT Service Management , your ITSM
tool can be either your soundest ally or your greatest nemesis. Your Han Solo or
your Darth Vader, your Sancho Panza or your windmill, your Queequeg or Moby Dick or your, well… you
get the picture.
Chances are, if you’re reading this, that your current system falls into the ‘nemesis’ category, or your relationship with your current system or vendor is no longer as rosy as it used to be, and you’re taking a look around to see what else is out there.
Which, inevitably, means dealing with sales people. Now, I have friends, and some family, who work in sales. Now, I understand; it’s a job that needs doing, and someone needs to do it, just like e-coli bacteria are needed to maintain a healthy gastro intestinal system. All the same though, I’d rather reduce my direct contact with both to the bare minimum.
One of the first tired old lines a sales rep is likely to trot out is that their product is Pink Verified for all 10 + ITIL processes. (YAWN! Show me one that isn’t). Next they’ll tell you that you can roll it out to your facilities and HR departments and bandy about Americanism’s like ‘onboarding’. These are just more good things to add to an already long list tactics sales people employ that really piss me off ( see my post ‘tactics sales people employ that really piss me off’ for more). I know they’re just trying to do their jobs in the cut throat market, but there has to be a better way for them to operate, and people need to tell them that.
Unless you’re just looking for a basic ticketing system, and
not a full-on ITSM suite, it’s not really worth considering a toolset whose
developers haven’t bothered to go through the process of getting their system
verified by Pink Elephant as being compliant in at least the core ITIL
processes, or that don’t warrant a rating in the Gartner Magic Quadrant report
for IT Service Support Management Tools. You can find details of the most
recent evaluations
here.
Chances are, if you’re reading this, that your current system falls into the ‘nemesis’ category, or your relationship with your current system or vendor is no longer as rosy as it used to be, and you’re taking a look around to see what else is out there.
Which, inevitably, means dealing with sales people. Now, I have friends, and some family, who work in sales. Now, I understand; it’s a job that needs doing, and someone needs to do it, just like e-coli bacteria are needed to maintain a healthy gastro intestinal system. All the same though, I’d rather reduce my direct contact with both to the bare minimum.
One of the first tired old lines a sales rep is likely to trot out is that their product is Pink Verified for all 10 + ITIL processes. (YAWN! Show me one that isn’t). Next they’ll tell you that you can roll it out to your facilities and HR departments and bandy about Americanism’s like ‘onboarding’. These are just more good things to add to an already long list tactics sales people employ that really piss me off ( see my post ‘tactics sales people employ that really piss me off’ for more). I know they’re just trying to do their jobs in the cut throat market, but there has to be a better way for them to operate, and people need to tell them that.
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| Gartner Magic Quadrant: IT Service Management Tools |
The long and the short of it is that ALL PROPER ITSM
PRODUCTS DO EXACTLY THE SAME THING. (see
above for what qualifies an application as a ‘proper ITSM’ application. What you
need to know is what makes one a better product for your environment for you
than others?
Once you’ve checked out the products that are Pink Verified
in the processes you plan on using, and or appear in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant
Report, it comes down to three key
criteria:
1. Cost
2. Ease of configurability
3. Partnerships
1. Cost
2. Ease of configurability
3. Partnerships
Cost:
You can count on the fact that almost every sales person you
speak to will try do everything in their power
to avoid giving you the price up front. Sharks.
The lot of them. It’s also almost
inevitable that this is the one piece of information you absolutely, unequivocally
need to decide if a products a contender for you. It doesn’t matter if their product comes
‘round to your house, cooks you breakfast and then drives you to work every
morning if your budget doesn’t stretch to the price tag on their
application. The way to get them to give this to up front is to email them
your requirements ( real requirements, like how many licences you need, if you
want them to host it, and how much they charge for implementation. Requirements
like ‘enhanced business process automation’ , ‘increased efficiency’, ‘ITIL
alignment’, ‘improved customer satisfaction’ are red herrings. Why would you
even be looking at their products if it couldn’t deliver these things’) Be
clear that you can’t engage with you further until you have an indicative cost.
Don’t speak to them on the phone, and bar their demo team from your premises
until you have the figures.
If you’re lucky, you work for a company that’s got a clear
IT strategy and will pay head when you
you start talking about return on investment, and you may be able to look at
systems that cost more upfront, but deliver cost benefits after a few years.IF not, you’re probably best of looking at a SAAS option
that may not cost as much up front, but will probably end up costing more over
a five year period.
Scale is also key here. An IT Department upwards of 50
employees is going to fork out a massive amount in licensing anyway, so paying
to host the application in house would only represent a small additional cost.
Hidden Costs:
You need to be absolutely clear about what the configuration
you are paying for will do out of the box.
You don’t want to be paying for additional modules or consultancy fees
straight after you’ve gone live in order to get the application you thought you
were going to get after you saw the demo. You also don’t want to be shelling out extra for a
test/sandpit environment.
Ease of Configurability:
Here’s a real clincher.
I’ve recently had the misfortune to work with a product that represented
good value for money when it was implemented.
The problems was that if didn’t have a few code jockeys sitting around
bone idle that you could set to work every time you wanted to implement a new
business process, your tool would gradually get out of step with the way you
were working. Almost any significant change to the system required a degree of
coding. The company reps always trotted out the fact that their product was
used internally by the Microsoft internal service desk. Anyone that’s ever had the misfortune of
dealing with MS support can vouch for the fact being associated with the
support arm of Microsoft is nothing to brag about. They also skirt around the
fact that MS have an army of coding geniuses available to build their processes
for them.
IF you’re a Service Desk manager or team leader, the chances
are you’re going to be the one tasked with system administration. As if you don’t already have enough to do.
Your ITSM tool is there to make your life easier, and if you’re up to your
elbows in its guts trying to get it to do what you want all the time, then
you’re not going to reap its benefits.
Once you ‘ve specced out a process, documented how it’s
going to work and got all the relevant stakeholders to agree to it, you want to
be able to build it into your ITSM tool as quickly as easily as possible.
Do yourself a favour, and get whoever’s doing the demo for
you to show you how they would go about setting up a new process within the
application. There’s no reason in this day and age why any decent ITSM tool
shouldn’t to do most of what you require pretty much straight out of the box.
Partnerships:
If you’re in service delivery you know how important client\customer relationships are, so look for a vendor that places customer relationships at the centre of their business model.
If you’re in service delivery you know how important client\customer relationships are, so look for a vendor that places customer relationships at the centre of their business model.
A few years back I worked with a product that isn’t
particularly big in the UK, but offered good value for money.
The system was in place when I joined, but luckily the
reseller was small and took really good care of its clients. The benefits we were
able to realise for the business because of the ongoing support and brilliant
relationship management we had with the vendor far outstripped, in my opinion
the benefits we would have reaped from a more expensive ultra deluxe ITSM
product with poorer vendor support .
Be realistic about your needs. Sure, that salesman’s going
to rabbit on about the 11 ITIL processes, but how many to you actually have
implemented in your environment, and how many more are you likely to take on
during the lifecycle of your product? That products isn’t going to create service improvement plans and
implement a CMDB for you while you’re on your lunch break. The temptation to
blow the budget on the most expensive system around is always going to be there,
but unless you have the processes and procedures in place to take advantage of
all the completed level of sophistication of the application, you’re going to
be paying for functionality you don’t use.
Most importantly, don’t rush into any decision. You’re going
to be shelling out a lot of money for a decent application, and it’ll be with
your department for years, and the last thing you want to be doing each day at
work is battling Darth Vader when you could be hanging out in the Mos Eisley Cantina with Han.
