UCISA ITIL Case Study on Sheffield Hallam University

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1 UCISA ITIL Case Study on Sheffield Hallam University 1. Introduction Sheffield Hallam University is a teaching led institution, supported by world class applied research, with approximately 32,000 students, including overseas students and 5,000 staff. The University is recognised as a Centre of Excellence for Teaching and Learning. Information Systems and Technology is part of a Directorate, which also includes the Library and a number of other areas: the Nursery, Chaplaincy, Student Recruitment and the Registry. The structure of the University is divided into four Faculties with a number of Schools. 2. Using ITIL The version of ITIL being used is v2. This has been used since 2000 within the Head of IT Infrastructure s team (the Head of the team has a Service Management background). ITIL started more broadly in There has been a recent recommitment to ITIL, as other alternatives were reviewed and ITIL was still considered the most appropriate in the University environment. ITIL is also supported by the Senior Management across IT. There is a strong service ethos within the University, so ITIL is the most appropriate service management framework for IT within Sheffield Hallam. The drivers for ITIL now are: This is the right thing to be doing implementing service management Best Practice Customer service is paramount adding value to the student experience Using an existing recognised framework (not re-inventing the wheel) Fits with the University commitment to a service culture and increases staff awareness of service management Value for money Historical reason for ITIL: poor availability not an issue now, with a highly resilient infrastructure. 3. The service life cycle service strategy Governance and strategic direction There is a new governance structure in place this was established after a strategic review by the National Computing Centre. The governance structure is made up of a number of committees. There is an overall group, which has a number of senior staff as its members, including Pro Vice Chancellors and Directors. There are then a number of portfolio strands, including one for Infrastructure and a number for different facets of the business. For example, there is one for teaching and learning software, finance and HR. It is expected that these portfolios will change according to the needs of the University, but those like Infrastructure will remain in place all the time. There is also an Information Systems Management Board, which was established approximately four years ago. This includes senior staff from the then newly formed four Faculties. This was set up to look at the strategy for running services and procurement etc. There are a number of technical committees that support this Management Board, which are all currently still in place. There is a review taking place to establish which of these technical committees should stay in place. 1

2 Service portfolio management and project management Service portfolio management is an emerging process driven by the new governance structure and has already been proven. For example, two similar products were put forward for video based collaboration and a strategic decision, through the Governance Committees and portfolio management, established one product as the University strategic direction. A Project Office is in place for IT projects and there is a separate Project Office looking at portfolio management. This is because some of the portfolio management and related projects are not IT driven, but are more related to the change management of University business processes (for which there is sometimes an IT element). The IT Project Office is for specific IT projects only. This is an emerging process as this has only been in place for the last 6 9 months. The University uses a PRINCE2 based methodology. Communications Internally within IT there is a monthly newsletter called Team Brief. Once or twice a year the Directorate produces a magazine about successes, including those from the IT teams. Communications with users (sometimes via corporate communications) are predominantly via: Digital signage Specific intranet pages Notice boards Word of mouth (phone) cascade to federated support teams and management Printed material from knowledge base distributed by service desk and advisory teams Printed and video material from IT training unit Annual IT at SHU conference and exhibition (day event open to any interested staff) Several different student and staff questionnaires each year Account meetings, formal and informal, with Student Union and Faculty and Departmental staff 4. The service life cycle service design Service catalogue management The University is moving towards an understanding of service management and services in general. This has improved through the work that has been undertaken on the service catalogue. A service catalogue is in place with a business catalogue view and a technical catalogue view; it will continue to be developed. A service diagram has been produced, to show how university services are supported by IT Services, so they become meaningful for discussions with stakeholders. This diagram has been shown to Senior Management, Pro Vice Chancellors and Deans, and has been useful in discussion on aspects of service management, for example IT service continuity management. The business service name example would be Student Portal. Most stakeholders recognised 95% of the services that have been documented from a university business point of view. This diagram also shows which IT services support each of these university business services. From a technical service catalogue perspective the Service Definitions are also being reviewed and updated. This is the detailed IT information on each of the technical services that supports a now defined University business process and has been written in technical language. The Head of IT Infrastructure has been involved in the service catalogue development workshops within the HE sector. The service catalogue information from the workshops is available to all and includes the diagram mentioned above. The production of a service catalogue has also allowed work to be taken forward on the costing of IT services. 2

3 Business relationship management/service level management The role A variety of individuals are doing some level of business relationship management. This includes Service Managers, who have direct responsibility for ownership and relationship management for an individual service. Out of trying to create these relationships the Information Systems Management Board was created this enabled relationship management with a collective governing body. However, this has had only limited success, mainly due to the technical focus of its members. It has worked well to enable a much greater degree of joining up of Faculty, central IT support and procurement, but has been less effective at building bridges into business and academic management teams. This is being approached again through revised governance structures and other initiatives. There is recognition that the University is about providing service to students so there is a good service ethos and there is an understanding that business relationship management is an essential part of service provision. Although a considerable amount of business relationship management is taking place, this is still an emerging process for which a cohesive strategy is needed and being developed. The process and documents There are no Service Level Agreements and the University will not have SLAs for IT. There will be service statements. This is more practical for Sheffield Hallam, as they have recognised that it is unlikely that anyone will sign an SLA. However, there is a requirement for service statements based on funding that say for this level of funding this is what can be delivered. These statements will be designed to set stakeholder expectations and will include availability times, costs, maintenance times etc. This will give the University better information to understand where the costs of services are, so they can understand the impact of having to cut or increase service, should they wish to do so. Capacity management There is a capacity plan that is produced annually. This reviews every aspect of the servers, storage and network. There is also an indication if the kit is still fit for purpose. This plan is only done at the resource capacity planning level, and is operationally based, but is very effective. There is also underlying growth information, which is useful as part of the planning process. There is a need for more focus on the tactical planning of capacity at service level rather than systems level, to provide the service capacity planning information, with the hope that the alignment of business service to key University business and teaching processes will enable strategic IT capacity planning to become closer, aligned with business strategic planning and forecasting. Availability management Availability was the original driver for ITIL being established, but with the investment in the infrastructure and in service culture over a number of years, the original availability issues no longer exist. System availability was closely monitored but has ceased to be of interest. However, there is recognition that there needs to be some understanding of availability, as seen from the University perspective, to ensure that all requirements are being met and measured, and that there is not excessive over provision. Information security management There is extensive security technology deployed. There are policies in place including virus protection etc., and all these policies are monitored. There is also a recent policy, which requires that all information taken off site is encrypted, but compliance with this is difficult to manage. There is recognition that information security management needs to be addressed. Ownership needs to be established and a strategic plan put in place. Supplier management There is a joint responsibility between IT Services and Procurement to ensure that the right suppliers are in place. The main role of Procurement is to ensure that the correct policies and processes are followed. They also manage the legal aspects of supplier management, including contract management. 3

4 The ongoing review and relationship management of the IT suppliers is done within IT teams. Selection of suppliers is done jointly by Procurement and IT teams. 5. The service life cycle service transition Change management There is a change management process in place, but this is currently only for the Infrastructure and for the managed desktop image. There is no change management on corporate applications, support of which has only recently been centralised in a newly formed university systems group. There is no full time Change Manager, but this is an established role, carried out by a member of the Infrastructure Service Management Team, using the SHU implementation of BMC Remedy System to manage and approve some types of change, escalating others to the weekly change board or higher to ISMB. A forward schedule of change is produced to ensure that changes are not made during critical times for the University. There is a Change Advisory Board meeting every Monday (all changes that are happening that week are reviewed) to assess risk and ensure that there is a backout plan in place. There is a plan to bring the applications teams under the change management process. There is an emergency change policy and procedure in place based on impact/risk. Release management There is no formal release management, other than for the annual release of the managed desktop build (to around 8,000 desktops). However, the need for this is seen, as there have been a number of issues from unplanned, uncommunicated releases. This is an emerging process. Releases that are managed via projects are better because they are controlled by project methodology the synergies between these have been recognised and will be leveraged moving forward. Configuration management There is currently a lot of configuration data and a lot of tools that are managing configuration data for example: Cisco Works, HP Openview, Altiris and I-tracks. There are also some Configuration Management Database (CMDB) products in use as well. There is data that has been populated into the CMDB, but there are no relationships in place at the moment. There is also no cradle to grave process which means that Configuration Items (CIs) go in at procurement but are never removed when they are retired. There is a Service Dashboard tool supplied by Interlink that builds service views, based on configuration relationships held in its own CMDB, using data linked to and from the Remedy CMDB (which is the service management tool in place). The Interlink tool supports the use of SNMP monitoring, enabling real time monitoring at a service level both by the dashboard interface and by standard period availability report generation. This is an emerging process, and will ultimately provide a federated CMDB, to support configuration management. 6. The service life cycle service operation The Service Desk There is a central Service Desk and a number of federated faculty and departmental help desks. Following a recent merger, the central Service Desk offers a combined Library and IT single point of contact, with telephone aspects of the Service Desk provided by a Telephone Advisory Service. The future plans for the Service Desk are likely to include closer integration of the federated desks. Incident management Incident management is a relatively new process. It was originally call management, but with a recent move to Service Desk, incident management is now being implemented. The process is being developed, along with more defined escalation procedures, but this is a new and evolving process. A major incident management process was established and refined early on as a response to the original infrastructure availability issues. 4

5 Service request/request fulfilment There is an understanding of service requests, but currently they are not being managed separately from incidents at the Service Desk there will be an opportunity for this once the Service Desk matures and the incident management process has become embedded. Request fulfilment is normally (but deliberately not in all cases) managed and handled separately within the second and third line support and delivery teams, in a manner tuned to the nature of service requests received. Remedy workflow tools are tuned to reflect differing routes and priorities. Problem management Problem management is not in place yet, but is being planned. 7. The service life cycle continual service improvement Continual improvement has been inherent in all ITIL activities at Sheffield Hallam since In fact, everything that has been achieved is a commitment to continual service improvement. The original drivers for ITIL were to improve availability which has been achieved. The continual improvement has then taken service management forward to all the activities that are being undertaken at the moment, to underpin the commitment to providing service excellence. Services are measured, but the measures, other than cost, are still really IT focused. This is an area which will continue to be developed over time. 8. Service management software BMC Remedy v7, Interlink Business Service Management suite and Opnet Ace live are the applications currently being used to support the ITIL processes. Previous releases of Remedy have been in place since the mid 1990s, and it was chosen because it was the product of the time and was one of the first Windows products. It remains a leading contender, functionally rich and firmly established in the top right corner of the Gartner magic quadrant. Remedy will continue to be used because of the time and investment that has already been made. All modules currently in use will continue to be used and developed and those that are currently not released into a live support environment will be, as processes are established requiring them, for example, service level management and problem management. There is a knowledge base in Remedy, but this is not being used, as it was felt that this was not a user friendly option. Confluence shareware tools were selected in preference to the bundled Remedy functionality, and this is being used for knowledge management to good effect, both in the Service Desk and the majority of support teams. The current number of users of Remedy is approximately 150. The Interlink software suite enables integration of the data in Remedy asset management and CMDB modules, with SNMP based monitoring tools used in day to day Infrastructure monitoring and a range of business friendly dashboard and similar displays, to provide a business service focussed real time service status dashboard, backed with a range of availability reporting tools. Opnet tools are used to capture network traffic flows between campus networks and data centres and, by design, enable traffic volume to be analysed by service and by customer group. This is being used in our approach to service costing/value. Recommendations on purchasing a software tool Must be ITIL conformant Web based Easy to use user interface Understand what processes you are going to have in place to ensure that the tool will support these process first Inventory and CMDB 5

6 9. ITIL development and qualifications Everyone in Infrastructure holds an ITIL Foundation Certificate. There are four members of staff who hold Practitioners Certificates v2. There are also six qualified ITIL v2 Service Managers and one ITIL v3 Service Manager. Consideration is currently being given to whether to upgrade the v2 Service Manager s Certificate, using the v3 Manager s Bridge, to gain the ITIL v3 Expert Certificate. The training has been carried out by a number of training companies HP, Remark and PinkRoccade. The reason for this is that the training was following individual trainers with exceptional skills the ITIL evangelists, who have actual practical experience of implementing ITIL rather than an arrangement with an individual training company. There is some ITIL training also done through independent trainers, via the Sheffield Hallam IT Foundry, which offers training to the paying public. It is hoped that this will develop over time. 10. ITIL conclusions and recommendations Sheffield Hallam University would recommend ITIL as a service management framework based on: The fact that this is Best Practice and it is a framework that can be adapted This is the right thing to be doing implementing service management Customer service is paramount adding value to the student experience Tangible benefits that have been realised: Reliability of IT services reduced downtime Understanding service delivery Change management control of changes reducing impact and monitoring, after changes to ensure service is available The perception is now that the University have IT services that work, and this is reflected in consistently good feedback IT service continuity that kept all services fully up during major city flooding Significant investment was required, but the ROI has been demonstrated but this needs to be re-articulated as a measure of cost to value now that availability is taken for granted 11. ITIL lessons learned Investment there has to be some budget ITIL training (the common message) and the development of process (backfill for resource). Requires significant investment of staff time particularly from the coalition of the willing. Bring the support teams under central management this leverages synergies and is more cost effective. ITIL is a journey not a destination. Requires commitment as the payback is not immediate and may not be seen for a couple of years. 12. Significant areas of experience Service catalogue management Costing of IT services IT service continuity management Capacity and availability management 6

7 13. Contact information Mark Lee Head of IT Infrastructure Table of ITIL Processes and The Service Desk The Sheffield Hallam University ITIL Process Maturity Matrix Process name Service strategy Financial management for IT services Service portfolio management Demand management Service design Service catalogue management Service level management Capacity management Availability management IT service continuity management Information security management Supplier management Service transition Knowledge management Change management Release management Deployment management Service asset management Configuration management Service validation and service testing Service operation The Service Desk Incident management Request fulfillment Problem management Access management Event management Continual service improvement The 7 Step Improvement Process Implemented/ being improved Partially implemented/ emerging Planned Not planned 1 Subjective rather than objective assessment. 7