What can ITIL implementations learn from six sigma adoption?
There was a lot of hype and hope when six-sigma was the “thing”. Now ITIL seems to be the “thing” and there is a similar kind of hype associated with it. There was a study couple of years back (I can’t find the link — will post it when I do) which compared what organizations adopted six sigma well and where it did not go anywhere. Jack Welch also talks about the same theme in his book.
What they found that a lot of companies did they following: bring in consultants, and they will tell us our six-sigma strategy. The consultants who were knowledgeable in most cases came and prepared a plan. Then the top management spent a lot of money implementing this plan. Usually most of these implementations stalled and failed to realize benefit for the companies.
The other way of doing six-sigma was to understand the essence of it: how do we drive variability out of a repeatable process. And then ask managers if this was applicable to them. That is did they have repeatable processes and if so how could they reduce variability. This approach was way more effective. One it got buy in from the grass roots and created small success stories, which had direct impact to the top and bottom lines.
I see the same kind of struggle with ITIL. There is industry pressure to do something about ITIL in your companies. What is the essence of ITIL? How do you get buy-in from the grass roots in your company? How do you create the short wins?
Those are the critical questions.
Add comment November 4th, 2006
