University ITSM

Our "process management and continual service improvement" role has existed for just under a year now--we were formed in late November 2007. In that time, we've done a fair bit of work, much of which has been documenting our existing processes. Notably, we have created wholly new things, such as our change management process and a service catalog.

Process improvement can "get away" from you. Small pieces of work, such as documenting who's involved when in a routine task, can snowball into large pieces of work taking months. To manage our workload, establish concrete goals, and to set priorities we have been managing our work by calendar quarters.

For example, in Q3 (July-September) we implemented our new service portal, http://help.wfu.edu, re-engineered our change management process, completed implementing this web site, facilitated a semi-annual review of our procedures, held a department "process improvement" review of another process, and drafted several procedures. Now for Q4 we are planning for problem management, elements of knowledge management, and we are rolling out a "best practice reference library" where people in the department can consult reference materials such as the ITIL v3 books, PMBOK, CMMI, and the BABOK.

We then have supporting documents for each quarter, such as our MS Project Plan. We can hold "lessons learned" meetings and reviews for each quarter. We learned for example that we need to gather more requirements for our projects and hold ourselves to these requirements, so this quarter we will establish better risk registers and scope definition documents.

The quarter-by-quarter approach has created "releases," if you will, out of our process improvements. It has allowed us to think more about how we work and have a feedback mechanism to help us get better at process improvement.