What is your ITIL maturity level? At almost every RightStar monthly webinar, we poll the audience on whether they use ITIL as an organizational framework for service management. We’ve found that an ever increasing majority insist that ITIL is their de facto service management standard.

When we arrive on-site for implementation or upgrade services, however, we discover that there is rarely any thought given to the ITIL framework as it applies to the technology tool set, i.e., BMC Service Desk Express or BMC Remedy ITSM. This shows me that ITIL exists in theory more than in practice for most organizations.

It’s understandable that putting ITIL into practice doesn’t always make the “short list” given the demands IT organizations face. However, if an ITIL rollout can be done without a large outlay of time and money, it will quickly enable the organization to better deliver what the business wants and expects. Here are three steps to help jump start ITIL in your organization:

Invest in ITIL training, but don’t go overboard. We have often seen ITIL Foundation training being promulgated from the top to everyone in the IT organization. While the certification is valuable, that on its own does not guarantee service management success. Certification may be an indication that the holder can use the ITIL terminology and understand the processes, but it doesn’t provide the exact steps necessary for process rollout. A better use of your organization’s training dollars might be to begin with a small subset of ITIL champions, and then roll out training to all as an exact ITIL blueprint is defined.

Begin with Incident Management and build from there. Change and Configuration Management should follow, with Problem Management not far behind. Service Level Management is also essential.

Look at “ITIL in a box” solutions such as the Alignability Process Model (APM) for Service Desk Express and BMC Service Management Process Model (SMPM) for Remedy ITSM. These product toolsets allow organizations to quickly roll out an ITIL-based software solution. The process model is based upon a set of field-proven process flows and procedures that have been successfully deployed within numerous organizations.