1.1 Describe who you are and what you do
My name is Kevin Kasunic. I currently work as the Manager of Business Transformation at the Walt Disney Company in Florida, where I lead a team within the Strategic Programme portfolio. My background was traditionally in project management; previously I ran the Project Management Office for the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, where I oversaw the organization’s process improvement and strategic change initiatives, and before that I was a Project Manager for Virgin Holidays. I believe that strong strategic decisions, when combined with an irrepressible work ethic, can deliver real growth and value.
In April 2016, I was a winner of the ITIL® Practitioner Guiding Principle competition.
1.2 How did you come across ITIL?
I came across the ITIL framework back in 2007 when I was working as the Director of Student Management for the local PMI chapter. A professor I was talking to mentioned ITIL, and it caught my interest because it related to IT and was considered best practice. At the time, I was focused on project management but made a point of reading up on ITIL’s benefits and the path to ITIL certification. Eventually I took the Foundation course and realized it was very powerful and could be adopted by pretty much any IT shop, big or small. I passed the Foundation qualification and set myself the goal of becoming an ITIL expert. Over the next 12 months, I studied hard, read the publications, took the training, sat the exams and achieved my goal. I am now an ITIL expert.
The great thing about ITIL is that it stays relevant as IT changes; the framework keeps up with developments. I am also happy to see AXELOS has created the ITIL Practitioner qualification to help with its practical application. This is an important addition to the offering and will help many organizations to adopt ITIL.
When I first joined the company, I was surprised that many of my colleagues in IT had never heard of ITIL and didn’t know it was considered best practice. There is a saying: “If you always do what you have always done, you always get what you always got”; that was the culture of many staff, who had been with the company for over 20 years.
Personally, I approach life and my profession looking for ways to improve things. ITIL does just that. It offers a framework that you can use: fit for purpose, fit for use.
Feeling still relatively new at 18 months in the company, I knew I couldn’t change everything all at once. I had to Start Where We Were.
I needed a more inclusive approach in order to minimize resistance and to take everyone along with me.
I began by creating a very high level presentation on ITIL and its benefits, which I presented first to my
leader, and then to the CIO, who gave me the yellow light to move forward ‘with caution’.
The next step was to ask a local training vendor to present an ITIL Foundation overview to the IT team. I called this ‘dipping our toe in the water’. Feedback was positive and many staff developed a view as to how things could be managed differently in the organization. The momentum was beginning to build…
From there, I developed a plan for an IT service management transformation programme called Project Beehive, to incorporate ITIL and ITSM. I presented the plan to the CIO and, ultimately, to the CEO, and was given full blessing to move forward with the 24-36 month plan.
We started our journey.
We performed an ITIL self-assessment which allowed us to understand the maturity of our IT service management processes and functions. We assessed where we were against the five levels of maturity:
- Initial
- Repeatable
- Defined
- Managed
- Optimized.
We selected incident management, service desk gap closure, followed by change management (CM), to address first.
At the same time, we rolled out an ITIL education programme for all IT staff. The longer term
requirements for a targeted level of self-sufficiency needed to include:
- High level Executive overview (CIO, CEO etc.)
- ITIL Foundation overview (all IT staff)
- Foundation certification for team members (optional but preferred).
We also budgeted for Intermediate and Advanced Training (ITIL Expert) for key members of the team, to be taken at a later date.
We also motivated the IT service desk team to get involved with the ITSM community: conferences, AXELOS online, and other training. The plan was to break the silos in order to encourage people to work together, like worker bees, connecting the departments like a honeycomb, hence the name Project Beehive. The key was to run Project Beehive as a formal project, taking into account the requirements for culture change, personal development, customer input, and measurement and reporting, plus new working practices. The project was run like any other business project, with business sponsorship, a proper set of objectives, a plan, agreed resources, governance and budget.
This was key to persuading the organization to adopt it.
Start slow. A systematic approach is what is needed. Adopt and adapt. ITIL is a framework and needs to be treated as just that. ITIL can be used in any IT shop, or any service management organization, but not all shops are the same. ITIL should be adapted to the shop’s requirements. Gain Executive support. Although this may seem extreme, I recommend getting top down support. If it is part of the company strategy and the executive is also the champion, then people will be more inclined to come together and work towards the goal.
3.1 Top Five ITIL Do's and Don'ts
- Have an open mind. ITIL is not a flavour of the month. It’s been around since the 1980s. It’s here to stay and is a proven framework that works if adopted correctly.
- Don’t try to do it alone or replicate the wheel. Reach out to professional consultancies. They have knowledgeable experts on hand, offer excellent training, and have templates and processes you can follow to help you on your road to adoption.
- Embrace and promote change. ‘If you always do what you have always done, you’ll always get what you always got’. Change this way of thinking.
- Don’t try to boil the ocean. If you try to adopt ITIL in one fell swoop, you’re going to have problems. Choose a phased approach and allow the team/department to see the benefits early on to gain buy-in. Once they are on board, move forward from there.
- Make it a journey, not a destination. Remember this is a framework that will take time to be part of the IT culture. To help motivate everyone, I also played the song from Journey ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ daily to keep us motivated! It’s a classic song that still sounds as cool as it did in the 1980s - just like ITIL.
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