Master the Secrets of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Contracts to Right-Size Your Adobe Spend

Learn the essential steps to avoid overspending and to maximize negotiation leverage with Adobe.

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

Only 18% of Adobe licenses are genuine copies: are yours?

"Adobe has designed and executed the most comprehensive evolution to the subscription model of pre-cloud software publishers with Creative Cloud. Adobe's release of Document Cloud (replacement for the Acrobat series of software) is the final nail in the coffin for legacy licensing for Adobe. Technology procurement functions have run out of time in which to act while they still retain leverage, with the exception of some late adopter organizations that were able to run on legacy versions (e.g. CS6) for the past five years. Procuring Adobe software is not the same game as it was just a few years ago. Adopt a comprehensive approach to understanding Adobe licensing, contract, and delivery models in order to accurately forecast your software needs, transact against the optimal purchase plan, and maximize negotiation leverage. "

Scott Bickley

Research Lead, Vendor Practice

Info-Tech Research Group

Our understanding of the problem

This Research is Designed For:

• IT managers scoping their Adobe licensing requirements and compliance position.
• CIOs, CTOs, CPOs, and IT directors negotiating licensing agreements in search of cost savings.
• ITAM/Software asset managers responsible for tracking and managing Adobe licensing.
• IT and business leaders seeking to better understand Adobe licensing options (Creative Cloud).
• Vendor management offices in the process of a contract renewal.

This Research Will Help You:

• Understand and simplify licensing per product to help optimize spend.
• Ensure agreement type is aligned to needs.
• Navigate the purchase process to negotiate from a position of strength.
• Manage licenses more effectively to avoid compliance issues, audits, and unnecessary purchases.

This Research Will Also Assist:

• CFOs and the finance department
• Enterprise architects
• ITAM/SAM team
• Network and IT architects
• Legal
• Procurement and sourcing

This Research Will Help Them:

• Understand licensing methods in order to make educated and informed decisions.
• Understand the future of the cloud in your Adobe licensing roadmap.

Executive summary

Situation

• Adobe’s dominant market position and ownership of the creative software market is forcing customers to refocus the software acquisition process to ensure a positive ROI on every license.
• In early 2017, Adobe announced it would stop selling perpetual Creative Suite 6 products, forcing future purchases to be transitioned to the cloud.

Complication

• Adobe operates in its own niche in the creative space, and Adobe users have grown accustomed to their products, making switching very difficult.
• With transition to a cloud-based subscription model, organizations need to actively manage licenses, software provisioning, and consumption.
• Without a detailed understanding of Adobe’s various purchasing models, overspending often occurs.
• Organizations have experienced issues in identifying commercial licensed packages with their install files, making it difficult to track and assign licenses.

Resolution

• Gain visibility into license deployments and needs with a strong SAM program/tool; this will go a long way toward optimizing spend.
• Number of users versus number of installs are not the same, and confusing the two can result in overspending. Device-based licensing historically would have required two licenses, but now only one may be required.
• Ensure compliance with internal audits. Adobe has a very high rate of piracy stemming from issues such as license overuse, misunderstanding of contract language, using cracks/keygens, virtualized environments, indirect access, and sharing of accounts.
• A handful of products are still sold as perpetual – Acrobat Standard/Pro, Captivate, ColdFusion, Photoshop, and Premiere Elements – but be aware of what is being purchased and used in the organization.
• Beware of products deployed on server, where the number of users accessing that product cannot easily be counted.

Info-Tech Insight

1. Your user-need analysis has shifted in the new subscription-based model. Determine which products are needed versus nice to have to prevent overspending on the Creative Cloud suite.
2. Examine what you need, not what you have. You can no longer mix and match applications.
3. Compliance is not automatic with products that are in the cloud. Shared logins or computers with desktop installs that can be accessed by multiple users can cause noncompliance.

The aim of this blueprint is to provide a foundational understanding of Adobe

Why Adobe

In 2011 Adobe took the strategic but radical move toward converting its legacy on-premises licensing to a cloud-based subscription model, in spite of material pushback from its customer base. While revenues initially dipped, Adobe’s resolve paid off; the transition is mostly complete and revenues have doubled. This was the first enterprise software offering to effect the transition to the cloud in a holistic manner. It now serves as a case study for those following suit, such as Microsoft, Autodesk, and Oracle.

What to know

Adobe elected to make this market pivot in a dramatic fashion, foregoing a gradual transition process. Enterprise clients were temporarily allowed to survive on legacy on-premises editions of Adobe software; however, as the Adobe Creative Cloud functionality was quickly enhanced and new applications were launched, customer capitulation to the new subscription model was assured.

The Future

Adobe is now leveraging the power of connected customers, the availability of massive data streams, and the ongoing digitalization trend globally to supplement the core Creative Cloud products with online services and analytics in the areas of Creative Cloud for content, Marketing Cloud for marketers, and Document Cloud for document management and workflows. This blueprint focuses on Adobe's Creative Cloud and Document Cloud solutions and the enterprise term license agreement (ETLA).

Info-Tech Insight

Beware of your contract being auto-renewed and getting locked into the quantities and product subset that you have in your current agreement. Determining the number of licenses you need is critical. If you overestimate, you're locked in for three years. If you underestimate, you have to pay a big premium in the true-up process.

Learn the “Adobe way,” whether you are reviewing existing spend or considering the purchase of new products

1. Legacy on-premises Adobe Creative Suite products used to be available in multiple package configurations, enabling right-sized spend with functionality. Adobe’s support for legacy Creative Suites CS6 products ended in May 2017.
2. While early ETLAs allowed customer application packaging at a lower price than the full Creative Cloud suite, this practice has been discontinued. Now, the only purchasing options are the full suite or single-application subscriptions.
3. Buyers must now assess alternative Adobe products as an option for non-power users. For example, QuarkXPress, Corel PaintShop Pro, CorelDRAW, Bloom, and Affinity Designer are possible replacements for some Creative Cloud applications.
4. Document Cloud, Adobe’s latest step in creating an Acrobat-focused subscription model, limits the ability to reduce costs with an extended upgrade cycle. These changes go beyond the licensing model.
5. Organizations need to perform a cost-benefit analysis of single app purchases vs. the full suite to right-size spend with functionality.

As Adobe’s dominance continues to grow, organizations must find new ways to maintain a value-added relationship

Adobe estimates the total addressable market for creative and document cloud to be $21 billion. With no sign of growth slowing down, Adobe customers must learn how to work within the current design monopoly.

Source: Adobe, 2017

"Adobe is not only witnessing a steady increase in Creative Cloud subscriptions, but it also gained more visibility into customers’ product usage, which enables it to consistently push out software updates relevant to user needs. The company also successfully transformed its sales organization to support the recurring revenue model."

– Omid Razavi, Global Head of Success, ServiceNow

Consider your route forward

Consider your route forward, as ETLA contract commitments, scope, and mechanisms differ in structure to the perpetual models previously utilized. The new model shortchanges technology procurement leaders in their expectations of cost-usage alignment and opex flexibility (White, 2016).

☑ Implement a user profile to assign licenses by version and limit expenditures. Alternatives can include existing legacy perpetual and Acrobat classic versions that may already be owned by the organization.

☑ Examine the suitability and/or dependency on Document Cloud functions, such as existing business workflows and e-signature integration.

☑ Involve stakeholders in the evaluation of alternate products for use cases where dependency on Acrobat-specific functionality is limited.

☑ Identify not just the installs and active use of the applications but also the depth and breadth of use across the various features so that the appropriate products can be selected.

Use Info-Tech’s Adobe toolkit to prepare for your new purchases or contract renewal

Info-Tech Insight

IT asset management (ITAM) and software asset management (SAM) are critical! An error made in a true-up can cost the organization for the remaining years of the ETLA. Info-Tech worked with one client that incurred a $600k error in the true-up that they were not able to recoup from Adobe.

Apply licensing best practices and examine the potential for cost savings through an unbiased third-party perspective

Establish Licensing Requirements

• Understand Adobe’s product landscape and transition to cloud.
• Analyze users and match to correct Adobe SKU.
• Conduct an internal software assessment.
• Build an effective licensing position.

Evaluate Licensing Options

• Value Incentive Plan (VIP)
• Cumulative Licensing Program (CLP)
• Transactional Licensing Program (TLP)
• Enterprise Term License Agreement (ETLA)

Evaluate Agreement Options

• Price
• Discounts
• Price protection
• Terms and conditions

Purchase and Manage Licenses

• Learn negotiation tactics to enhance your current strategy.
• Control the flow of communication.
• Assign the right people to manage the environment.

Preventive practices can help find measured value ($)

Time and resource disruption to business if audited

Lost estimated synergies in M&A

Cost of new licensing

Cost of software audit, penalties, and back support

Lost resource allocation and time

Third party, legal/SAM partners

Cost of poor negotiation tactics

Lost discount percentage

Terms and conditions improved

Explore Adobe licensing and optimize spend – project overview

PHASE 1

Manage Your Adobe Agreements

Phase 1 outline

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Adobe’s Cloud – Snapshot of what has changed

1. Since Adobe has limited the procurement and licensing options with the introduction of Creative Cloud, there are three main choices:
1. Direct online purchase at Adobe.com
2. Value Incentive Plan (VIP): Creative Cloud for teams–based purchase with a volume discount (minimal, usually ~10%); may have some incentives or promotional pricing
3. Enterprise Term License Agreement (ETLA): Creative Cloud for Enterprise (CCE)
2. Adobe has discontinued support for legacy perpetual licenses, with the latest version being CS6, which is steering organizations to prioritize their options for products in the creative and document management space.
3. Document Cloud (DC) is the cloud product replacing the Acrobat perpetual licensing model. DC extends the subscription-based model further and limits options to extend the lifespan of legacy on-premises licenses through a protracted upgrade process.
4. The subscription model, coupled with limited discount options on transactional purchases, forces enterprises to consider the ETLA option. The ETLA brings with it unique term commitments, new pricing structures, and true-up mechanisms and inserts the "land and expand" model vs. license reassignment.

Info-Tech Insight

Adobe’s move from a perpetual license to a per-user subscription model can be positive in some scenarios for organizations that experienced challenges with deployment, management of named users vs. devices, and license tracking.

Core concepts of Adobe agreements: Discounting, pricing, and bundling

ETLA

Adobe has been systematically reducing discounts on ETLAs as they enter the second renewal cycle of the original three-year terms.

Adobe Cloud Bundling

Adobe cloud services are being bundled with ETLAs with a mandate that companies that do not accept the services at the proposed cost have Adobe management’s approval to unbundle the deal, generally with no price relief.

Custom Bundling

The option for custom bundling of legacy Creative Suite component applications has been removed, effectively raising the price across the board for licensees that require more than two Adobe applications who must now purchase the full Creative Cloud suite.

Higher and Public Education

Higher education/public education agreements have been revamped over the past couple of years, increasing prices for campus-wide agreements by double-digit percentages (~10-30%+). While they still receive an 80% discount over list price, IT departments in this industry are not prepared to absorb the budget increase.

Info-Tech Insight

Adobe has moved to an all-or-one bundle model. If you need more than two application products, you will likely need to purchase the full Creative Cloud suite. Therefore, it is important to focus on creating accurate user profiles to identify usage needs.

Use Info-Tech’s Adobe deployment tool for SAM: Track deployment and needs

Use Info-Tech’s Adobe deployment tool for SAM: Audit

Use Info-Tech’s Adobe deployment tool for SAM: Cost

Use Info-Tech’s tools to compare ETLA vs. VIP and to document forecasted costs and benefits

Is the ETLA or VIP option better for your organization?

Use Info-Tech’s Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table tool to compare ETLA costs against VIP costs.

Your ETLA contains multiple products and is a multi-year agreement.

Use Info-Tech’s ETLA Forecasted Costs and Benefits tool to forecast your ETLA costs and document benefits.

Adobe’s Creative Cloud Complete offering provides access to all Adobe creative products and ongoing upgrades

Why subscription model?

The subscription model forces customers to an annuity-based pricing model, so Adobe has recurring revenue from a subscription-based product. This increases customer lifetime value (CLTV) for Adobe while providing ongoing functionality updates that are not version/edition dependent.

Key Characteristics:

• Available as a month-to-month or annual subscription license
• Can be purchased for one user, for a team, or for an enterprise
• Subject to annual payment and true-up of license fees
• Can only true-up during lifespan of contract; quantities cannot be reduced until renewal
• May contain auto-renewal clauses – beware!

Key things to know:

1. Applications can be purchased individually if users require only one specific product. A few products continue to have on-premises licensing options, but most are offered by per-user subscriptions.
2. At the end of the subscription period, the organization no longer has any rights to the software and would have to return to a previously owned version.
3. True-downs are not possible (in contrast to Microsoft’s Office 365).
4. Downgrade rights are not included or are limited by default.

Which products are in the Creative Cloud bundle?

Adobe Acrobat® XI Pro

Adobe After Effects® CC

Adobe Audition® CC

Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition

Adobe InDesign® CC

Adobe Dreamweaver® CC

Adobe Edge Animate

Adobe Edge Code preview

Adobe Edge Inspect

Adobe Photoshop CC

Adobe Edge Reflow preview

Adobe Edge Web Fonts

Adobe Extension Manager

ExtendScript Toolkit

Adobe Fireworks® CS6

Adobe Flash® Builder® 4.7 Premium Edition

Adobe Flash Professional CC

Adobe Illustrator® CC

Adobe Prelude® CC

Adobe Premiere® Pro CC

Adobe Scout

Adobe SpeedGrade® CC

Adobe Muse CC

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6

Adobe offers different solutions for teams vs. enterprise licensing

Evaluate the various options for Creative Cloud, as they can be purchased individually, for teams, or for enterprise.

For further information on specific functionality differences, reference Adobe’s comparison table.

A Cloud-ish solution: Considerations and implications for IT organizations

☑ True cloud products are typically service-based, scalable and elastic, shared resources, have usage metering, and rely upon internet technologies. Currently, Adobe’s Creative Cloud and Document Cloud products lack these characteristics. In fact, the core products are still downloaded and physically installed on endpoint devices, then anchored to the cloud provisioning system, where the software can be automatically updated and continuously verified for compliance by ensuring the subscription is active.

☑ Adobe Cloud allows Adobe to increase end-user productivity by releasing new features and products to market faster, but the customer will increase lock-in to the Adobe product suite. The fast-release approach poses a different challenge for IT departments, as they must prepare to test and support new functionality and ensure compatibility with endpoint devices.

☑ There are options at the enterprise level that enable IT to exert more granular control over new feature releases, but these are tied to the ETLA and the provided enterprise portal and are not available on other subscription plans. This is another mechanism by which Adobe has been able to spur ETLA adoption.

☑ Not all CIOs consider SaaS/subscription applications their first choice, but the Adobe’s dominant position in the content and document management marketplace is forcing the shift regardless. It is significant that Adobe bypassed the typical hybrid transition model by effectively disrupting the ability to continue with perpetual licensing without falling behind the functionality curve.

☑ VIP plans do allow for annual terms and payment, but you lose the price elasticity that comes with multi-year terms.

Download Info-Tech’s Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table tool to compare ETLA costs against VIP costs.

When moving to Adobe cloud, validate that license requirements meet organizational needs, not a sales quota

Follow these steps in your transition to Creative Cloud.

Step 1: Make sure you have a software asset management (SAM) tool to determine Adobe installs and usage within your environment.

Step 2: Look at the current Adobe install base and usage. We recommend reviewing three months’ worth of reliable usage data to decide which users should have which licenses going forward.

Step 3: Understand the changes in Adobe packages for Creative Cloud (CC). Also, take into account that the license types are based on users, not devices.

Step 4: Identify those users who only need a single license for a single application (e.g. Photoshop, InDesign, Muse).

Step 5: Identify the users who require CC suites. Look at their usage of previous Adobe suites to get an idea of which CC suite they require. Did they have Design Suite Standard installed but only use one or two elements? This is a good way to ensure you do not overspend on Adobe licenses.

Source: The ITAM Review

Download Info-Tech’s Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast tool to track Adobe installs within your environment and to determine usage needs.

Acquiring Adobe Software

Adobe offers four common licensing methods, which are reviewed in detail in the following slides.

"Customers are not even obliged to manage all the licenses themselves. The reseller partners have access to the cloud console and can manage licenses on behalf of their customers. Even better, they can seize cross and upsell opportunities and provide good insight into the environment. Additionally, Adobe itself provides optimization services."

– B-lay

CLP and TLP

The CLP and TLP are transactional agreements generally used for the purchase of perpetual licenses. For example, they could be used for making Acrobat purchases if Creative Suite products are purchased on the ETLA.

Source: “Adobe Buying Programs Comparison Guide for Commercial and Government Organizations”

VIP and ETLA

The Value Incentive Plan is aimed at small- to medium-sized organizations with no minimum quantity required. However, there is limited flexibility to reduce licenses and limited price protection for future purchases. The ETLA is aimed at large organizations who wish to have new functionality as it comes out, license management portal, services, and security/IT control aspects.

Source: “Adobe Buying Programs Comparison Guide for Commercial and Government Organizations”

ETLA commitments risk creating “shelfware-as-a-service”

The Adobe ETLA’s rigid contract parameters, true-up process, and unique deployment/provisioning mechanisms give technology/IT procurement leaders fewer options to maximize cost-usage alignment and to streamline opex costs.

☑ No ETLA price book is publicly published; pricing is controlled by the Adobe enterprise sales team.

☑ Adobe's retail pricing is a good starting point for negotiating discounted pricing.

☑ ETLA commitments are usually for three years, and the lack of a true-down option increases the risk involved in overbuying licenses should the organization encounter a business downturn or adverse event.

☑ Pricing discounts are the highest at the initial ETLA signing for the upfront volume commitment. The true-up pricing is discounted from retail but still higher than the signing cost per license.

☑ Technical support is included in the ETLA.

☑ While purchases typically go through value-added resellers (VARs), procurement can negotiate directly with Adobe.

"For cloud products, it is less complex when it comes to purchasing and pricing. If larger quantities are purchased on a longer term, the discount may reach up to 15%. As soon as you enroll in the VIP program, you can control all your licenses from an ‘admin console’. Any updates or new functionalities are included in the original price. When the licenses expire, you may choose to renew your subscriptions or remove them. Partial renewal is also accepted. Of course, you can also re-negotiate your price if more subscriptions are added to your console."

– B-lay

ETLA recommendations

1. Assess the end-user requirements with a high degree of scrutiny. Perform an analysis that matches the licensee with the correct Adobe product SKU to reduce the risk of overspending.

• Leverage metering data that identifies actual usage and lack thereof, match to user profile functional requirements, and then determine end users’ actual license requirements.

• Demand price transparency and granularity in the proposal process.
• Validate that volume discounts are appropriate and show through to the true-up line item pricing.

INFO-TECH TIP: For further guidance on ETLAs and pricing, contact your Info-Tech representative to set up a call with an analyst.

Use Info-Tech’s Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast tool to match licensees with Adobe product SKUs.

Prepare for Adobe’s true-up process

How the true-up process works

When adding a license, the true-up price will be prorated to 50% of the license cost for previous year’s usage plus 100% of the license cost for the next year. This back-charging adds up to 150% of the overall true-up license cost. In some rare cases, Adobe has provided an “unlimited” quantity for certain SKUs; these Unlimited ETLAs generally align with FTE counts and limit FTE increases to about 5%. Procurement must monitor and work with SAM/ITAM and stakeholder groups to restrain unnecessary growth during the term of an Unlimited ETLA to avoid the risk of cost escalation at renewal time.

Higher-education specific

Higher-education clients can license under the ETLA based on a prescribed number of user and classroom/lab devices and/or on a FTE basis. In these cases, the combination of Creative Cloud and Acrobat Pro volume must equal the FTE total, creating an enterprise footprint. FTE calculations establish the full-time faculty plus one-third of part-time faculty plus one-half of part-time staff.

Info-Tech Insight

Compliance takes a different form in terms of the ETLA true-up process. The completion of Adobe's transition to cloud-based licensing and verification has improved compliance rates via phone home telemetry such that pirated software is less available and more easily detected. Adobe has actually decommissioned its audit arm in the Americas and EMEA.

Audits and software asset management with Adobe

Watch out for:

• Virtual desktops, freeware, and test and trial licenses
• Adobe products that may be bundled into a suite; a manual check will be needed to ensure the suite isn’t recognized as a standalone license
• Pirated licenses with a “crack” built into the software

Simplify your process – from start to finish – with these steps:

Determine License Entitlements

Obtain documentation from internal records and Adobe to track licenses and upgrades to determine what licenses you own and have the right to use.

Gather Deployment Information

Leverage a software asset management tool or process to determine what software is deployed and what is/is not being used.

Determine Effective License Position

Compare license entitlements with deployment data to uncover surpluses and deficits in licensing. Look for opportunities.

Plan Changes to License Position

Meet with IT stakeholders to discuss the enterprise license program (ELP), short- and long-term project plans, and budget allocation. Plan and document licensing requirements.

Adobe Genuine Software Integrity Service

• This service was started in 2014 to combat non-genuine software sold by non-authorized resellers.
• The service works hand in hand with the cloud movement to reduce piracy.
• Every Adobe product now contains an executable file that will scan your machine for non-genuine software.
• If non-genuine software is detected, the user will be notified and directed to the official Adobe website for next steps.

Detailed list of Adobe licensing contract types

The table below describes Adobe contract types beyond the four typical purchasing models explained in the previous slides:

Insight breakdown

Insight 1

Adobe operates in its own niche in the creative space, and Adobe users have grown accustomed to their products, making switching very difficult.

Insight 2

Adobe has transitioned the vast majority of its software offerings to the cloud-based subscription model. Active management of licenses, software provisioning, and consumption of cloud services is now an ongoing job.

Insight 3

With the vendor lock-in process nearly complete via the transition to a SaaS subscription model, Adobe is raising prices on an annual basis. Advance planning and strategic use of the ETLA is key to avoid budget-breaking surprises.

Summary of accomplishment

Knowledge Gained

• The key pieces of licensing information that should be gathered about the current state of your own organization.
• An in-depth understanding of the required licenses across all of your products.
• Clear methodology for selecting the most effective contract type.
• Development of measurable, relevant metrics to help track future project success and identify areas of strength and weakness within your licensing program.

Processes Optimized

• Understanding of the importance of licensing in relation to business objectives.
• Understanding of the various licensing considerations that need to be made.
• Contract negotiation.

Deliverables Completed

• Adobe ETLA Deployment Forecast
• Adobe ETLA Forecasted Cost and Benefits
• Adobe ETLA vs. VIP Pricing Table

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Optimize Software Asset Management

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Bibliography

“Adobe Buying Programs: At-a-glance comparison guide for Commercial and government organizations.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2014. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

“Adobe Buying Programs Comparison Guide for Commercial and Government Organizations.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2018. Web.

“Adobe Buying Programs Comparison Guide for Education.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2018. Web. 1 Feb 2018.

“Adobe Education Enterprise Agreement: Give your school access to the latest industry-leading creative tools.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2014. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

“Adobe Enterprise Term License Agreement for commercial and government organizations.” Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2016. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

Adobe Investor Presentation – October 2017. Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2017. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

Cabral, Amanda. “Students react to end of UConn-Adobe contract.” The Daily Campus (Uconn), 5 April 2017. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

de Veer, Patrick and Alecsandra Vintilescu. “Quick Guide to Adobe Licensing.” B-lay, Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

“Find the best program for your organization.” Adobe, Web. 1 Feb 2018.

Foxen, David. “Adobe Upgrade Simplified.” Snow Software, 7 Oct. 2016. Web.

Frazer, Bryant. “Adobe Stops Reporting Subscription Figures for Creative Cloud.” Studio Daily. Access Intelligence, LLC. 17 March 2016. Web.

“Give your students the power to create bright futures.” Adobe, Web. 1 Feb 2018.

Jones, Noah. “Adobe changes subscription prices, colleges forced to pay more.” BG Falcon Media. Bowling Green State University, 18 Feb. 2015. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

Mansfield, Adam. “Is Your Organization Prepared for Adobe’s Enterprise Term License Agreements (ETLA)?” UpperEdge,30 April 2013. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

Murray, Corey. “6 Things Every School Should Know About Adobe’s Move to Creative Cloud.” EdTech: Focus on K-12. CDW LLC, 10 June 2013. Web.

“Navigating an Adobe Software Audit: Tips for Emerging Unscathed.” Nitro, Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

Razavi, Omid. “Challenges of Traditional Software Companies Transitioning to SaaS.” Sand Hill, 12 May 2015. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

Rivard, Ry. “Confusion in the Cloud.” Inside Higher Ed. 22 May 2013. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

Sharwood, Simon. “Adobe stops software licence audits in Americas, Europe.” The Register. Situation Publishing. 12 Aug. 2016. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.

“Software Licensing Challenges Faced In The Cloud: How Can The Cloud Benefit You?” The ITAM Review. Enterprise Opinions Limited. 20 Nov. 2015. Web.

White, Stephen. “Understanding the Impacts of Adobe’s Cloud Strategy and Subscriptions Before Negotiating an ETLA.” Gartner, 22 Feb. 2016. Web.

Define a Release Management Process for Your Applications to Deliver Lasting Value

Use your releases to drive business value and enhance the benefits delivered by your move to Agile.

Analyst Perspective

Improving your release management strategy and practices is a key step to fully unlock the value of your portfolio.

As firms invest in modern delivery practices based around product ownership, Agile, and DevOps, organizations assume that’s all that is necessary to consistently deliver value. As organizations continue to release, they continue to see challenges delivering applications of sufficient and consistent quality.

Delivering value doesn’t only require good vision, requirements, and technology. It requires a consistent and reliable approach to releasing and delivering products and services to your customer. Reaching this goal requires the definition of standards and criteria to govern release readiness, testing, and deployment.

This will ensure that when you deploy a release it meets the high standards expected by your clients and delivers the value you have intended.

Dr. Suneel Ghei

Principal Research Director, Application Development

Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

• Your software platforms are a key enabler of your brand. When there are issues releasing, the brand suffers. Client confidence and satisfaction erode.
• Your organization has invested significant capital in creating a culture of product ownership, Agile, and DevOps. Yet the benefits from these investments are not yet fully realized.
• Customers have more choices than ever when it comes to products and services. They require features and capabilities delivered quickly, consistently, and of sufficient quality, otherwise they will look elsewhere.

Common Obstacles

• Development teams are moving faster but then face delays waiting for testing and deployment due to a lack of defined release cycle and process.
• Individual stages in your software development life cycle (SDLC), such as code collaboration, testing, and deployment, have become leaner, but the overall complexity has increased since many products and services are composed of many applications, platforms, and processes.
• The specifics of releasing products is (wrongly) classified as a technical concern and not a business concern, hindering the ability to prioritize improved release practices.

Info-Tech's Approach

• Develop a release management framework that efficiently and effectively orchestrates the different functions supporting a software’s release.
• Use the release management framework and turn release-related activities into non-events.
• Use principles of continuous delivery for converting your release processes from an overarching concern to a feature of a high-performing software practice.

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insights

Turn release-related activities into non-events.

Eliminate the need for dedicating time for off-hour or weekend release activities. Use a release management framework for optimizing release-related tasks, making them predictable and of high quality.

Release management is NOT a part of the software delivery life cycle.

The release cycle runs parallel to the software delivery life cycle but is not tightly coupled with it. The act of releasing begins at the point requirements are confirmed and ends when user satisfaction is measurable. In contrast, the software delivery life cycle is focused on activities such as building, architecting, and testing.

All releases are NOT created equal.

Barring standard guiding principles, each release may have specific nuances that need to be considered as part of release planning.

Your release management journey

1. Optimize Applications Release Management - Set a baseline release management process and organization.
2. Modernize Your SDLC - Move your organization to Agile and increase throughput to feed releases.
3. Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision - Understand the practices that go into delivering products, including articulating your release plans.
4. Automate Testing to Get More Done - Create the ability to do more testing quickly and ensure test coverage.
5. Implement DevOps Practices That Work - Build in tools and techniques necessary for release deployment automation.
6. Define a Release Management Process to Deliver Lasting Value (We Are Here)

Define a Release Management Process for Your Applications to Deliver Lasting Value

Use your releases to drive business value and enhance the benefits delivered by your move to Agile.

Executive Brief

Your software delivery teams are expected to deliver value to stakeholders in a timely manner and with high quality

Software delivery teams must enable the organization to react to market needs and competitive changes to improve the business’ bottom line. Otherwise, the business will question the team’s competencies.

The business is constantly looking for innovative ways to do their jobs better and they need support from your technical teams.

The increased stress from the business is widening the inefficiencies that already exist in application release management, risking poor product quality and delayed releases.

Being detached from the release process, business stakeholders do not fully understand the complexities and challenges of completing a release, which complicates the team’s communication with them when issues occur.

IT Stakeholders Are Also Not Satisfied With Their Own Throughput

• Only 29% of IT employees find application development throughput highly effective.
• Only 9% of organizations were classified as having highly effective application development throughput.
• Application development throughput ranked 37th out of 45 core IT processes in terms of effectiveness.

(Info-Tech’s Management and Governance Diagnostic, N=3,930)

Your teams, however, struggle with core release issues, resulting in delayed delivery (and disappointed stakeholders)

Implementing tools on top of an inefficient pipeline can significantly magnify the existing release issues. This can lead to missed deadlines, poor product quality, and business distrust with software delivery teams.

COMMON RELEASE ISSUES

1. Local Thinking: Release decisions and changes are made and approved without consideration of the holistic system, process, and organization.
2. No Release Cadence: Lack of process governance and oversight generates unpredictable bottlenecks and load and ill-prepared downstream teams.
3. Mismanagement of Releases: Program management does not accommodate the various integrated releases completed by multiple delivery teams.
4. Poor Scope Management: Teams are struggling to effectively accommodate changes during the project.

The bottom line: The business’ ability to operate is dictated by the software delivery team’s ability to successfully complete releases. If the team performs poorly, then the business will do poorly as well. Application release management is critical to ensure business expectations are within the team’s constraints.

“As software becomes more embedded in the business, firms are discovering that the velocity of business change is now limited by how quickly they can deploy.” – Five Ways To Streamline Release Management, J.S. Hammond

Historically, managing releases has been difficult and complicated…

Typically, application release management has been hard to coordinate because…

• Software has multiple dependencies and coordinating their inclusion into a deployable whole was not planned.
• Teams many be spending too much time on features that are not needed any longer.
• Software development functions (such as application architecture, test-first or test-driven design, source code integration, and functional testing) are not optimized.
• There are no agreed upon service-level contracts (e.g. expected details in requirements, adequate testing, source control strategy) between development functions.
• The different development functions are not integrated in a holistic style.
• The different deployment environments have variability in their configuration, reducing the reliability of testing done in different environments.
• Minimum thresholds for acceptable quality of development functions are either too low (leading to adverse outcomes down stream) or too high (leading to unnecessary delays).

…but research shows being effective at application release management increases your throughput

Research conducted on Info-Tech's members shows overwhelming evidence that application throughput is strongly tied to an effective application release management approach.

(Info-Tech Management & Governance Diagnostic, since 2019; N=684 organizations)

An application release management framework is critical for effective and timely delivery of software

A well-developed application release management framework is transformative and changes...

Info-Tech Insight: Your application release management framework should turn a system release into a non-event. This is only possible through the development of a holistic, low-risk and standardized approach to releasing software, irrespective of their size or complexity.

Robust continuous “anything” requires proficiency in five core practices

A continuous anything evaluation should not be a “one-and-done” event. As part of ongoing improvements, keep evolving it to make it a fundamental component of a strong operational strategy.

Continuous Anything

• Automate where appropriate
  • Automation is not a silver bullet. All processes are not created equal; and therefore, some are not worthy of being automated.
• Control system variables
  • Deploying and testing in environments that are apple to apple in comparison reduces the risk of unintended outcomes from production release.
• Measure process outcomes
  • A process not open to being measured is a process bound to fail. If it can be measured, it should be, and insights found should be used for improving the system.
• Select smaller features batches
  • Smaller release packages reduce the chances of cognitive load associated with finding root causes for defects and issues that may result as post-production incidents.
• Reduction of cycle time
  • Identification of waste in each stage of the continuous anything process helps in lowering cost of operations and results in quicker generation of value for stakeholders.

Invest time in developing an application release management framework for your development team(s) with a continuous anything mindset

An application release management framework converts a set of features and make them ready for releasability in a low-risk, standardized, and high-quality process.

A continuous anything (integration, delivery, and deployment) mindset is based on a growth and improvement philosophy, where every event is considered a valid data point for investigation of process efficiency.

Diagram adapted from Continuous Delivery in the Wild, Pete Hodgson, Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2020

Related Info-Tech Research

Streamline Application Maintenance

• Justify the necessity of streamlined maintenance. Gain a grounded understanding of stakeholder objectives and concerns and validate their achievability against the current state of the people, process, and technologies involved in application maintenance.
• Strengthen triaging and prioritization practices. Obtain a holistic picture of the business and technical impacts, risks, and urgencies of each accepted maintenance request to justify its prioritization and relevance within your backlog. Identify opportunities to bundle requests together or integrate them within project commitments to ensure completion.
• Establish and govern a repeatable process. Develop a maintenance process with well-defined stage gates, quality controls, and roles and responsibilities, and instill development best practices to improve the success of delivery.

“Releasability” (or release criteria) of a system depends upon the inclusion of necessary building blocks and proof that they were worked on

There is no standard definition of a system’s releasability. However, there are common themes around completions or assessments that should be investigated as part of a release:

• The range of performance, technical, or compliance standards that need to be assessed.
• The full range of test types required for business approval: unit tests, acceptance tests, security test, data migration tests, etc.
• The volume-criticality mix of defects the organization is willing to accept as a risk.
• The best source and version control strategy for the development team. This is mostly a function of the team's skill with using release branches and coordinating their work artifacts.
• The addition of monitoring points and measures required for evaluations and impact analysis.
• The documentation required for audit and compliance.
• External and internal dependencies and integrations.
• Validations, approvals, and sign-offs required as part of the business’ operating procedure.
• Processes that are currently carried out outside and should be moved into the pipeline.
• Manual processes that may be automated.
• Any waste activities that do not directly contribute to releasability that can be eliminated from the development process.
• Knowledge the team has regarding challenges and successes with similar software releases in the past.

Releasability of a system is different than governing principles for application release management

Governing principles are fundamental ways of doing something, which in this case is application release management, while releasability will generally have governing principles in addition to specific needs for a successful release.

Example of Governing Principles

• Approval from Senior Director is necessary before releasing to production
• Production deployments can only be done in off-hours
• We will try to automate processes whenever it is possible for us to do so
• We will use a collaborative set of metrics to measure our processes

Examples of Releasability Criteria

• For the upcoming release, add performance testing for Finance and Budget Teams’ APIs
• Audit and compliance documentation is required for this release
• Automation of manual deployment
• Use trunk-based source code management instead of feature-based

Regulated industries are not more stable despite being less nimble

A pervasive myth in industry revolves around the misperception that continuous anything and nimble and non-event application release management is not possible in large bureaucratic and regulated organizations because they are risk-averse.

"We found that external approvals were negatively correlated with lead-time, deployment frequency and restore time, and had no correlation with change failure rate. In short, approval by an external body (such as a manager or Change Approval Board) simply doesn’t work to increase the stability of production systems…However, it certainly slows things down. It is in fact worse than having no change approval process at all." – Accelerate by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Nicole Forsgren

Many organizations reduce risk in their product release by adopting a paternalistic stance by:

• Requiring manual sign-offs from senior personnel who are external to the organization.
• Increasing the number and level of authorization gates.
• Staying away from change and preferring to stick with what has worked in the past.

Despite the prevalence of these types of responses to risk, the evidence is that they do not work and are in fact counter-productive because they:

• Create blocks to frequent releases.
• Introduce procedural complexity to each release and in effect make them “bigger.”
• Prefer process over people (and trusting them). Increase non-value-add scrutiny and reporting.

There is a persistent misunderstanding about continuous anything being only an IT engineering practice

01

At the enterprise level, continuous anything focuses on:

• Visibility of final value being provided in a high-quality and expedited manner
• Ensuring efficiency in the organization’s delivery framework
• Ensuring adherence to established governance and risk mitigation strategy

02

Focus of this blueprint

At the product level, continuous anything focuses on:

• Reliability of the product delivery system
• Use of scientific evidence for continuous improvement of the product’s delivery system
• Orchestration of different artifacts into a single whole

03

At the functional level, continuous anything focuses on*:

• Local functional optimization (functions = software engineering, testing, application design)
• Automation of local functions
• Use of patterns for standardizing inputs and functional areas

*Where necessary, practices at this level have been mentioned.

Related Info-Tech Research

Implement DevOps Practices That Work

• Be DevOps, rather than do DevOps. DevOps is a philosophy, not an industry framework. Your organization’s culture must shift toward system-wide thinking, cross-function collaboration, and empathy.
• Culture, learning, automation, integrated teams, and metrics and governance (CLAIM) are all critical components of effective DevOps.

Automate Testing to Get More Done

• Optimize and automate SDLC stages to recover team capacity. Recognize that automation without optimization is a recipe for long-term pain. Do it right the first time.
• Optimization and automation are not one-hit wonders. Technical debt is a part of software systems and never goes away. The only remedy is constant vigilance and enhancements to the processes.

The seeds of a good release are sown even before work on it begins

Pre-release practices such as requirements intake and product backlog management are important because:

• A standard process for documentation of features and requirements helps reduce “cognitive dissonance” between business and technology teams. Clearly articulated and well-understood business needs are fundamental ingredients of a high-quality product.
• Product backlog management done right ensures the prioritized delivery of value to stakeholders. Features can become stale or get a bump in importance, depending upon evolving circumstances. Prioritizing the backlog is, therefore, critical for ensuring time, effort, and budget are spent on things that matter.

Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization

Revamp your business potential to improve agility, security, and user experience while reducing costs.

Analyst Perspective

An old application may have served us reliably, but it can prevent us from pursuing future business needs.

Legacy systems remain well-embedded in the fabric of many organizations' application portfolios. They were often custom-built to meet the needs of the business. Typically, these are core tools that the business leverages to accomplish its goals.

A legacy application becomes something we need to address when it no longer supports our business goals, is no longer supportable, bears an unsustainable ownership cost, or poses a threat to the organization's cybersecurity or compliance.

When approaching your legacy application strategy, you must navigate a complex web of business, stakeholder, software, hardware, resourcing, and financial decisions. To complicate matters, the full scope of required effort is not immediately clear. Years of development are embedded in these legacy applications, which must be uncovered and dealt with appropriately.

IT leaders require a proactive approach for evaluating the current state, developing a legacy application strategy, and executing in an agile manner. When coupled with a business case and communications strategy, the organization will have a clear decision-making framework that will maximize business outcomes and deliver value where needed.

Ricardo de Oliveira
Research Director, Enterprise Applications
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight
Legacy modernization is a process, not a single event. Your modernization approach requires you to understand your landscape and decide on a path that minimizes business continuity risks, keeps investments under control, and is prepared for surprises but always has your final state in mind.

An approach to making the case for legacy application modernization

Understand Assess the challenges, lay out the reasons, define your legacy, and prepare to remove the barriers to modernization.
Assess Determine the benefits by business capability. Leverage APM foundations to select the candidate applications and prioritize.
Define Use the prioritized application list to drive the next steps to modernization.

Legacy application modernization is perceived as necessary to remain competitive

The 2022 State CIO Survey by NASCIO shows that legacy application modernization jumped from fifth to second in state CIO priorities.

"Be patient and also impatient. Patient because all states have a lot of legacy tech they are inheriting and government is NOT easy. But also, impatient because there is a lot to do - make your priorities clear but also find out what the CIO needs to accomplish those priorities."

Source: NASCIO, 2022

US government agencies feel pressured to deal with legacy applications

In fiscal year 2021, the US government planned to spend over $100 billion on information technology. Most of that was to be used to operate and maintain existing systems, including legacy applications, which can be both more expensive to maintain and more vulnerable to hackers. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) identified:

• 10 critical federal IT legacy systems
• In operation between 8 and 51 years
• Collectively cost $337 million per year to operate and maintain

Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2021

Example: In banking, modern platforms are essential

Case Study

Delta takes off with a modernized blend of mainframes and cloud

INDUSTRY: Transportation
SOURCE: CIO Magazine, 2023

Phase 1: Make the Case for Legacy Application Modernization

Phase 1
1.1 Understand your challenges
1.2 Define legacy applications
1.3 Assess your barriers
1.4 Find the impacted capabilities
1.5 Define candidate applications
1.6 Now, Next, Later

This phase will walk you through the following activities:

• Understand your challenges with modernization
• Define legacy applications in your context
• Assess your barriers to modernization
• Find the impacted capabilities and their benefits
• Define candidate applications and dispositions

This phase involves the following participants:

• Application group leaders
• Individual application owners

Create a Service Management Roadmap

Implement service management in an order that makes sense.

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

"More than 80% of the larger enterprises we’ve worked with start out wanting to develop advanced service management practices without having the cultural and organizational basics or foundational practices fully in place. Although you wouldn’t think this would be the case in large enterprises, again and again IT leaders are underestimating the importance of cultural and foundational aspects such as governance, management practices, and understanding business value. You must have these fundamentals right before moving on."

Tony Denford,

Research Director – CIO

Info-Tech Research Group

Our understanding of the problem

This Research Is Designed For:

• CIO
• Senior IT Management

This Research Will Help You:

• Create or maintain service management (SM) practices to ensure user-facing services are delivered seamlessly to business users with minimum interruption.
• Increase the level of reliability and availability of the services provided to the business and improve the relationship and communication between IT and the business.

This Research Will Also Assist

• Service Management Process Owners

This Research Will Help Them:

• Formalize, standardize, and improve the maturity of service management practices.
• Identify new service management initiatives to move IT to the next level of service management maturity.

Executive summary

Situation

• Inconsistent adoption of holistic practices has led to a chaotic service delivery model that results in poor customer satisfaction.
• There is little structure, formalization, or standardization in the way IT services are designed and managed, leading to diminishing service quality and low business satisfaction.

Complication

• IT organizations want to be seen as strategic partners, but they fail to address the cultural and organizational constraints.
• Without alignment with the business goals, services often fail to provide the expected value.
• Traditional service management approaches are not adaptable for new ways of working.

Resolution

• Follow Info-Tech’s methodology to create a service management roadmap that will help guide the optimization of your IT services and improve IT’s value to the business.
• The blueprint will help you right-size your roadmap to best suit your specific needs and goals and will provide structure, ownership, and direction for service management.
• This blueprint allows you to accurately identify the current state of service management at your organization. Customize the roadmap and create a plan to achieve your target service management state.

Info-Tech Insight

Having effective service management practices in place will allow you to pursue activities such as innovation and drive the business forward. Addressing foundational elements like business alignment and management practices will enable you to build effective core practices that deliver business value. Consistent leadership support and engagement is essential to allow practitioners to focus on delivering expected outcomes.

Poor service management manifests in many different pains across the organization

Immaturity in service management will not result in one pain – rather, it will create a chaotic environment for the entire organization, crippling IT’s ability to deliver and perform.

Low Service Management Maturity

These are some of the pains that can be attributed to poor service management practices.

• Frequent service-impacting incidents
• Low satisfaction with the service desk
• High % of failed deployments
• Frequent change-related incidents
• Frequent recurring incidents
• Inability to find root cause
• No communication with the business
• Frequent capacity-related incidents

And there are many more…

Mature service management practices are a necessity, not a nice-to-have

Immature service management practices are one of the biggest hurdles preventing IT from reaching its true potential.

In 2004, PwC published a report titled “IT Moves from Cost Center to Business Contributor.” However, the 2014-2015 CSC Global CIO Survey showed that a high percentage of IT is still considered a cost center.

And low maturity of service management practices is inhibiting activities such as agility, DevOps, digitalization, and innovation.

Source: CSC Global CIO Survey: 2014-2015 “CIOs Emerge as Disruptive Innovators”

39%: Resources are primarily focused on managing existing IT workloads and keeping the lights on.

31%: Too much time and too many resources are used to handle urgent incidents and problems.

There are many misconceptions about what service management is

Misconception #1: “Service management is a process”

Effective service management is a journey that encompasses a series of initiatives that improves the value of services delivered.

Misconception #2: “Service Management = Service Desk”

Service desk is the foundation, since it is the main end-user touch point, but service management is a set of people and processes required to deliver business-facing services.

Misconception #3: “Service management is about the ITSM tool”

The tool is part of the overall service management program, but the people and processes must be in place before implementing.

Misconception #4: “Service management development is one big initiative”

Service management development is a series of initiatives that takes into account an organization’s current state, maturity, capacities, and objectives.

Misconception #5: “Service management processes can be deployed in any order, assuming good planning and design”

A successful service management program takes into account the dependencies of processes.

Misconception #6: “Service management is resolving incidents and deploying changes”

Service management is about delivering high-value and high-quality services.

Misconception #7: “Service management is not the key determinant of success”

As an organization progresses on the service management journey, its ability to deliver high-value and high-quality services increases.

Misconception #8: “Resolving Incidents = Success”

Preventing incidents is the name of the game.

Misconception #9: “Service Management = Good Firefighter”

Service management is about understanding what’s going on with user-facing services and proactively improving service quality.

Misconception #10: “Service management is about IT and technical services (e.g. servers, network, database)”

Service management is about business/user-facing services and the value the services provide to the business.

Service management projects often don’t succeed because they are focused on process rather than outcomes

Service management projects tend to focus on implementing process without ensuring foundational elements of culture and management practices are strong enough to support the change.

1. Aligning your service management goals with your organizational objectives leads to better understanding of the expected outcomes.

Understand your customers and what they value, and design your practices to deliver this value.

2. IT does not know what order is best when implementing new practices or process improvements.

Don't run before you can walk. Fundamental practices must reach the maturity threshold before developing advanced practices. Implement continuous improvement on your existing processes so they continue to support new practices.

3. IT does not follow best practices when implementing a practice.

Our best-practice research is based on extensive experience working with clients through advisory calls and workshops.

Info-Tech can help you create a customized, low-effort, and high-value service management roadmap that will shore up any gaps, prove IT’s value, and achieve business satisfaction.

Info-Tech’s methodology will help you customize your roadmap so the journey is right for you

With Info-Tech, you will find out where you are, where you want to go, and how you will get there.

With our methodology, you can expect the following:

• Eliminate or reduce rework due to poor execution.
• Identify dependencies/prerequisites and ensure practices are deployed in the correct order, at the correct time, and by the right people.
• Engage all necessary resources to design and implement required processes.
• Assess current maturity and capabilities and design the roadmap with these factors in mind.

Doing it right the first time around

You will see these benefits at the end

✓ Increase the quality of services IT provides to the business.

✓ Increase business satisfaction through higher alignment of IT services.

✓ Lower cost to design, implement, and manage services.

✓ Better resource utilization, including staff, tools, and budget.

Focus on a strong foundation to build higher value service management practices

Info-Tech Insight

Focus on behaviors and expected outcomes before processes.

Foundational elements

• Operating model facilitates service management goals
• Culture of service delivery
• Governance discipline to evaluate, direct, and monitor
• Management discipline to deliver

Stabilize

• Deliver stable, reliable IT services to the business
• Respond to user requests quickly and efficiently
• Resolve user issues in a timely manner
• Deploy changes smoothly and successfully

Proactive

• Avoid/prevent service disruptions
• Improve quality of service (performance, availability, reliability)

Service Provider

• Understand business needs
• Ensure services are available
• Measure service performance, based on business-oriented metrics

Strategic Partner

• Fully aligned with business
• Drive innovation
• Drive measurable value

Info-Tech Insight

Continued leadership support of the foundational elements will allow delivery teams to provide value to the business. Set the expectation of the desired maturity level and allow teams to innovate.

Follow our model and get to your target state

Before moving to advanced service management practices, you must ensure that the foundational and core elements are robust enough to support them. Leadership must nurture these practices to ensure they are sustainable and can support higher value, more mature practices.

Each step along the way, Info-Tech has the tools to help you

Phase 1: Launch the Project

Assemble a team with the right talent and vision to increase the chances of project success.

Phase 2: Assess Current State

Understand where you are currently on the service management journey using the maturity assessment tool.

Phase 3: Build Roadmap

Based on the assessments, build a roadmap to address areas for improvement.

Phase 4: Build Communication slide

Based on the roadmap, define the current state, short- and long-term visions for each major improvement area.

Info-Tech Deliverables:

• Project Charter
• Assessment Tools
• Roadmap Template
• Communication Template

CIO call to action

Improving the maturity of the organization’s service management practice is a big commitment, and the project can only succeed with active support from senior leadership.

Ideally, the CIO should be the project sponsor, even the project leader. At a minimum, the CIO needs to perform the following activities:

1. Walk the talk – demonstrate personal commitment to the project and communicate the benefits of the service management journey to IT and the steering committee.

Improving or adopting any new practice is difficult, especially for a project of this size. Thus, the CIO needs to show visible support for this project through internal communication and dedicated resources to help complete this project.

2. Select a senior, capable, and results-driven project leader.

Most likely, the implementation of this project will be lengthy and technical in some nature. Therefore, the project leader must have a good understanding of the current IT structure, senior standing within the organization, and the relationship and power in place to propel people into action.

3. Help to define the target future state of IT’s service management.

Determine a realistic target state for the organization based on current capability and resource/budget restraints.

4. Conduct periodic follow-up meetings to keep track of progress.

Reinforce or re-emphasize the importance of this project to the organization through various communication channels if needed.

Stabilizing your environment is a must before establishing any more-mature processes

CASE STUDY

Industry: Manufacturing

Source: Engagement

Challenge

• The business landscape was rapidly changing for this manufacturer and they wanted to leverage potential cost savings from cloud-first initiatives and consolidate multiple, self-run service delivery teams that were geographically dispersed.

Solution

Original Plan

• Consolidate multiple service delivery teams worldwide and implement service portfolio management.

Revised Plan with Service Management Roadmap:

• Markets around the world had very different needs and there was little understanding of what customers value.
• There was also no understanding of what services were currently being offered within each geography.

Results

• Plan was adjusted to understand customer value and services offered.
• Services were then stabilized and standardized before consolidation.
• Team also focused on problem maturity and drove a continuous improvement culture and increasing transparency.

MORAL OF THE STORY:

Understanding the value of each service allowed the organization to focus effort on high-return activities rather than continuous fire fighting.

Understand the processes involved in the proactive phase

CASE STUDY

Industry: Manufacturing

Source: Engagement

Challenge

• Services were fairly stable, but there were significant recurring issues for certain services.
• The business was not satisfied with the service quality for certain services, due to periodic availability and reliability issues.
• Customer feedback for the service desk was generally good.

Solution

Original Plan

• Review all service desk and incident management processes to ensure that service issues were handled in an effective manner.

Revised Plan with Service Management Roadmap:

• Design and deploy a rigorous problem management process to determine the root cause of recurring issues.
• Monitor key services for events that may lead to a service outage.

Results

• Root cause of recurring issues was determined and fixes were deployed to resolve the underlying cause of the issues.
• Service quality improved dramatically, resulting in high customer satisfaction.

MORAL OF THE STORY:

Make sure that you understand which processes need to be reviewed in order to determine the cause for service instability. Focusing on the proactive processes was the right answer for this company.

Have the right culture and structure in place before you become a service provider

CASE STUDY

Industry: Healthcare

Source:Journal of American Medical Informatics Association

Challenge

• The IT organization wanted to build a service catalog to demonstrate the value of IT to the business.
• IT was organized in technology silos and focused on applications, not business services.
• IT services were not aligned with business activities.
• Relationships with the business were not well established.

Solution

Original Plan

• Create and publish a service catalog.

Revised Plan: with Service Management Roadmap:

• Establish relationships with key stakeholders in the business units.
• Understand how business activities interface with IT services.
• Lay the groundwork for the service catalog by defining services from the business perspective.

Results

• Strong relationships with the business units.
• Deep understanding of how business activities map to IT services.
• Service definitions that reflect how the business uses IT services.

MORAL OF THE STORY:

Before you build and publish a service catalog, make sure that you understand how the business is using the IT services that you provide.

Calculate the benefits of using Info-Tech’s methodology

To measure the value of developing your roadmap using the Info-Tech tools and methodology, you must calculate the effort saved by not having to develop the methods.

A. How much time will it take to develop an industry-best roadmap using Info-Tech methodology and tools?

Using Info-Tech’s tools and methodology you can accurately estimate the effort to develop a roadmap using industry-leading research into best practice.

B. What would be the effort to develop the insight, assess your team, and develop the roadmap?

This metric represents the time your team would take to be able to effectively assess themselves and develop a roadmap that will lead to service management excellence.

C. Cost & time saving through Info-Tech’s methodology

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

Guided Implementation

"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keeps us on track."

Workshop

"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.

Create a Service Management Roadmap – project overview

Workshop overview

Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information

PHASE 1

Launch the Project

Launch the project

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Create a powerful, succinct mission statement based on your organization’s goals and objectives.
• Assemble a project team with representatives from all major IT teams.
• Determine project stakeholders and create a plan to convey the benefits of this project.
• Establish metrics to track the success of the project.

Step Insights

• The project leader should have a strong relationship with IT and business leaders to maximize the benefit of each initiative in the service management journey.
• The service management roadmap initiative will touch almost every part of the organization; therefore, it is important to have representation from all impacted stakeholders.
• The communication slide needs to include the organizational change impact of the roadmap initiatives.

Phase 1 outline

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Use Info-Tech’s project charter to begin your initiative

1.1 Service Management Roadmap Project Charter

The Service Management Roadmap Project Charter is used to govern the initiative throughout the project. It provides the foundation for project communication and monitoring.

The template has been pre-populated with sample information appropriate for this project. Please review this sample text and change, add, or delete information as required.

The charter includes the following sections:

• Mission Statement
• Goals & Objectives
• Project Team
• Project Stakeholders
• Current State (from phases 2 & 3)
• Target State (from phases 2 & 3)
• Target State
• Metrics
• Sponsorship Signature

Use Info-Tech’s ready-to-use deliverable to customize your mission statement

Adapt and personalize Info-Tech’s Service Management Roadmap Mission Statement and Goals & Objectives below to suit your organization’s needs.

Goals & Objectives

• Create a plan for implementing service management initiatives that align with the overall goals/objectives for service management.
• Identify service management initiatives that must be implemented/improved in the short term before deploying more advanced initiatives.
• Determine the target state for each initiative based on current maturity and level of investment available.
• Identify service management initiatives and understand dependencies, prerequisites, and level of effort required to implement.
• Determine the sequence in which initiatives should be deployed.
• Create a detailed rollout plan that specifies initiatives, time frames, and owners.
• Engage the right teams and obtain their commitment throughout both the planning and assessment of roadmap initiatives.
• both the planning and assessment of roadmap initiatives. Obtain support for the completed roadmap from executive stakeholders.

Example Mission Statement

To help [Organization Name] develop a set of service management practices that will better address the overarching goals of the IT department.

To create a roadmap that sequences initiatives in a way that incorporates best practices and takes into consideration dependencies and prerequisites between service management practices.

To garner support from the right people and obtain executive buy-in for the roadmap.

Create a well-balanced project team

The project leader should be a member of your IT department’s senior executive team with goals and objectives that will be impacted by service management implementation. The project leader should possess the following characteristics:

Leader

• Influence and impact
• Comprehensive knowledge of IT and the organization
• Relationship with senior IT management
• Ability to get things done

Team Members

Identify

The project team members are the IT managers and directors whose day-to-day lives will be impacted by the service management roadmap and its implementation. The service management initiative will touch almost every IT staff member in the organization; therefore, it is important to have representatives from every single group, including those that are not mentioned. Some examples of individuals you should consider for your team:

• Service Delivery Managers
• Director/Manager of Applications
• Director/Manager of Infrastructure
• Director/Manager of Service Desk
• Business Relationship Managers
• Project Management Office

Engage & Communicate

You want to engage your project participants in the planning process as much as possible. They should be involved in the current-state assessment, the establishment of goals and objectives, and the development of your target state.

To sell this project, identify and articulate how this project and/or process will improve the quality of their job. For example, a formal incident management process will benefit people working at the service desk or on the applications or infrastructure teams. Helping them understand the gains will help to secure their support throughout the long implementation process by giving them a sense of ownership.

The project stakeholders should also be project team members

When managing stakeholders, it is important to help them understand their stake in the project as well as their own personal gain that will come out of this project.

For many of the stakeholders, they also play a critical role in the development of this project.

Role & Benefits

• CIO

The CIO should be actively involved in the planning stage to help determine current and target stage.

The CIO also needs to promote and sell the project to the IT team so they can understand that higher maturity of service management practices will allow IT to be seen as a partner to the business, giving IT a seat at the table during decision making.

• Service Delivery Managers/Process Owners

Service Delivery Managers are directly responsible for the quality and value of services provided to the business owners. Thus, the Service Delivery Managers have a very high stake in the project and should be considered for the role of project leader.

Service Delivery Managers need to work closely with the process owners of each service management process to ensure clear objectives are established and there is a common understanding of what needs to be achieved.

• IT Steering Committee

The Committee should be informed and periodically updated about the progress of the project.

• Manager/Director – Service Desk

The Manager of the Service Desk should participate closely in the development of fundamental service management processes, such as service desk, incident management, and problem management.

Having a more established process in place will create structure, governance, and reduce service desk staff headaches so they can handle requests or incidents more efficiently.

• Manager/Director –Applications & Infrastructure

The Manager of Applications and Infrastructure should be heavily relied on for their knowledge of how technology ties into the organization. They should be consulted regularly for each of the processes.

This project will also benefit them directly, such as improving the process to deploy a fix into the environment or manage the capacity of the infrastructure.

• Business Relationship Manager

As the IT organization moves up the maturity ladder, the Business Relationship Manager will play a fundamental role in the more advanced processes, such as business relationship management, demand management, and portfolio management.

This project will be an great opportunity for the Business Relationship Manager to demonstrate their value and their knowledge of how to align IT objectives with business vision.

Ensure you get the entire IT organization on board for the project with a well-practiced change message

Getting the IT team on board will greatly maximize the project’s chance of success.

One of the top challenges for organizations embarking on a service management journey is to manage the magnitude of the project. To ensure the message is not lost, communicate this roadmap in two steps.

1. Communicate the roadmap initiative

The most important message to send to the IT organization is that this project will benefit them directly. Articulate the pains that IT is currently experiencing and explain that through more mature service management, these pains can be greatly reduced and IT can start to earn a place at the table with the business.

2. Communicate the implementation of each process separately

The communication of process implementation should be done separately and at the beginning of each implementation. This is to ensure that IT staff do not feel overwhelmed or overloaded. It also helps to keep the project more manageable for the project team.

Continuously monitor feedback and address concerns throughout the entire process

• Host lunch and learns to provide updates on the service management initiative to the entire IT team.
• Understand if there are any major roadblocks and facilitate discussions on how to overcome them.

Articulate the service management initiative to the IT organization

Spread the word and bring attention to your change message through effective mediums and organizational changes.

Key aspects of a communication plan

The methods of communication (e.g. newsletters, email broadcast, news of the day, automated messages) notify users of implementation.

In addition, it is important to know who will deliver the message (delivery strategy). You need IT executives to deliver the message – work hard on obtaining their support as they are the ones communicating to their staff and should be your project champions.

Anticipate organizational changes

The implementation of the service management roadmap will most likely lead to organizational changes in terms of structure, roles, and responsibilities. Therefore, the team should be prepared to communicate the value that these changes will bring.

Communicating Change

• What is the change?
• Why are we doing it?
• How are we going to go about it?
• What are we trying to achieve?
• How often will we be updated?

The Qualities of Leadership: Leading Change

Create a project communication plan for your stakeholders

This project cannot be successfully completed without the support of senior IT management.

1. After the CIO has introduced this project through management meetings or informal conversation, find out how each IT leader feels about this project. You need to make sure the directors and managers of each IT team, especially the directors of application and infrastructure, are on board.
2. After the meeting, the project leader should seek out the major stakeholders (particularly the heads of applications and infrastructure) and validate their level of support through formal or informal meetings. Create a list documenting the major stakeholders, their level of support, and how the project team will work to gain their approval.
3. For each identified stakeholder, create a custom communication plan based on their role. For example, if the director of infrastructure is not a supporter, demonstrate how this project will enable them to better understand how to improve service quality. Provide periodic reporting or meetings to update the director on project progress.

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion between team members

OUTPUT

• Thorough briefing for project launch
• A committed team

Materials

• Communication message and plan
• Metric tracking

Participants

• Project leader
• Core project team

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

1.1

Create a powerful, succinct mission statement

Using Info-Tech’s sample mission statement as a guide, build your mission statement based on the objectives of this project and the benefits that this project will achieve. Keep the mission statement short and clear.

1.2

Assemble the project team

Create a project team with representatives from all major IT teams. Engage and communicate to the project team early and proactively.

1.3

Identify project stakeholders and create a communication plan

Info-Tech will help you identify key stakeholders who have a vested interest in the success of the project. Determine the communication message that will best gain their support.

1.4

Use metrics to track the success of the project

The onsite analyst will help the project team determine the appropriate metrics to measure the success of this project.

PHASE 2

Assess Your Current Service Management State

Assess your current state

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Use Info-Tech’s Service Management Maturity Assessment Tool to determine your overall practice maturity level.
• Understand your level of completeness for each individual practice.
• Understand the three major phases involved in the service management journey; know the symptoms of each phase and how they affect your target state selection.

Step Insights

• To determine the real maturity of your service management practices, you should focus on the results and output of the practice, rather than the activities performed for each process.
• Focus on phase-level maturity as opposed to the level of completeness for each individual process.

Phase 2 outline

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Understand and assess impacting forces – constraints and enablers

Constraints and enablers are organizational and behavioral triggers that directly impact your ability and approach to establishing Service Management practices.

Effective service management requires a mix of different approaches and practices that best fit your organization. There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. Consider the resources, environment, emerging technologies, and management practices facing your organization. What items can you leverage or use to mitigate to move your service management program forward?

Use Info-Tech’s “Organizational Context” template to list the constraints and enablers affecting your service management

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template will help you understand the business environment you need to consider as you build out your roadmap.

Discuss and document constraints and enablers related to the business environment, available resources, management practices, and emerging technologies. Any constraints will need to be addressed within your roadmap and enablers should be leveraged to maximize your results.

Document constraints and enablers

1. Discuss and document the constrains and enablers for each aspect of the management mesh: environment, resources, management practices, or technology.
2. Use this as a thought provoker in later exercises.

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion

OUTPUT

• Organizational context constraints and enablers

Materials

• Whiteboards or flip charts

Participants

• All stakeholders

Build compelling vision and mission statements to set the direction of your service management program

While you are articulating the vision and mission, think about the values you want the team to display. Being explicit can be a powerful tool to create alignment.

A vision statement describes the intended state of your service management organization, expressed in the present tense.

A mission statement describes why your service management organization exists.

Your organizational values state how you will deliver services.

Use Info-Tech’s “Vision, Mission, and Values” template to set the aspiration & purpose of your service management practice

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template will help you document your vision for service management, the purpose of the program, and the values you want to see demonstrated.

If the team cannot gain agreement on their reason for being, it will be difficult to make traction on the roadmap items. A concise and compelling statement can set the direction for desired behavior and help team members align with the vision when trying to make ground-level decisions. It can also be used to hold each other accountable when undesirable behavior emerges. It should be revised from time to time, when the environment changes, but a well-written statement should stand the test of time.

Document your organization’s vision, mission , and values

1. Vision: Identify your desired target state, consider the details of that target state, and create a vision statement.
2. Mission: Consider the fundamental purpose of your SM program and craft a statement of purpose.
3. Values: As you work through the vision and mission, identify values that your organization prides itself in or has the aspiration for.
4. Discuss common themes and then develop a concise vision statement and mission statement that incorporates the group’s ideas.

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion

OUTPUT

• Vision statement
• Mission statement
• Organizational values

Materials

• Whiteboards or flip charts
• Sample vision and mission statements

Participants

• All stakeholders
• Senior leadership

Understanding attitude, behavior, and culture

Attitude

• What people think and feel. It can be seen in their demeanor and how they react to change initiatives, colleagues, and users.

Any form of organizational change involves adjusting people’s attitudes, creating buy-in and commitment. You need to identify and address attitudes that can lead to negative behaviors and actions or that are counter-productive. It must be made visible and related to your desired behavior.

Behaviour

• What people do. This is influenced by attitude and the culture of the organization.

To implement change within IT, especially at a tactical level, both IT and organizational behavior needs to change. This is relevant because people don’t like to change and will resist in an active or passive way unless you can sell the need, value, and benefit of changing their behavior.

Culture

• The accepted and understood ways of working in an organization. The values and standards that people find normal and what would be tacitly identified to new resources.

The organizational or corporate “attitude,” the impact on employee behavior and attitude is often not fully understood. Culture is an invisible element, which makes it difficult to identify, but it has a strong impact and must be addressed to successfully embed any organizational change or strategy.

Culture is a critical and under-addressed success factor

43% of CIOs cited resistance to change as the top impediment to a successful digital strategy.

CIO.com

75% of organizations cannot identify or articulate their culture or its impact.

Info-Tech

“Shortcomings in organizational culture are one of the main barriers to company success in the digital age.”

McKinsey – “Culture for a digital age”

Examples of how they apply

Attitude

• “I’ll believe that when I see it”
• Positive outlook on new ideas and changes

Behaviour

• Saying you’ll follow a new process but not doing so
• Choosing not to document a resolution approach or updating a knowledge article, despite being asked

Culture

• Hero culture (knowledge is power)
• Blame culture (finger pointing)
• Collaborative culture (people rally and work together)

Why have we failed to address attitude, behavior, and culture?

✓ While there is attention and better understanding of these areas, very little effort is made to actually solve these challenges.

✓ The impact is not well understood.

✓ The lack of tangible and visible factors makes it difficult to identify.

✓ There is a lack of proper guidance, leadership skills, and governance to address these in the right places.

✓ Addressing these issues has to be done proactively, with intent, rigor, and discipline, in order to be successful.

✓ We ignore it (head in the sand and hoping it will fix itself).

Avoidance has been a common strategy for addressing behavior and culture in organizations.

Use Info-Tech’s “Culture and Environment” template to identify cultural constraints that should be addressed in roadmap

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template will help you document attitude, behavior, and culture constraints.

Discuss as a team attitudes, behaviors, and cultural aspects that can either hinder or be leveraged to support your vision for the service management program. Capture all items that need to be addressed in the roadmap.

Document your organization’s attitudes, behaviors, and culture

1. Discuss and document positive and negative aspects of attitude, behavior, or culture within your organization.
2. Identify the items that need to be addressed as part of your roadmap.

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion

OUTPUT

• Culture and environment worksheet

Materials

• Whiteboards or flip charts

Participants

• All stakeholders

The relationship to governance

Attitude, behavior, and culture are still underestimated as core success factors in governance and management.

Behavior is a key enabler of good governance. Leading by example and modeling behavior has a cascading impact on shifting culture, reinforcing the importance of change through adherence.

Executive leadership and governing bodies must lead and support cultural change.

Key Points

• Less than 25% of organizations have formal IT governance in place (ITSM Tools).
• Governance tends to focus on risk and compliance (controls), but forgets the impact of value and performance.

Lack of oversight often limits the value of service management implementations

Organizations often fail to move beyond risk mitigation, losing focus of the goals of their service management practices and the capabilities required to produce value.

Risk Mitigation

• Stabilize IT
• Service Desk
• Incident Management
• Change Management

Gap

• Organizational alignment through governance
• Disciplined focus on goals of SM

Value Production

• Value that meets business and consumer needs

This creates a situation where service management activities and roadmaps focus on adjusting and tweaking process areas that no longer support how the organization needs to work.

How does establishing governance for service management provide value?

Governance of service management is a gap in most organizations, which leads to much of the failure and lack of value from service management processes and activities.

Once in place, effective governance enables success for organizations by:

1. Ensuring service management processes improve business value
2. Measuring and confirming the value of the service management investment
3. Driving a focus on outcome and impact instead of simply process adherence
4. Looking at the integrated impact of service management in order to ensure focused prioritization of work
5. Driving customer-experience focus within organizations
6. Ensuring quality is achieved and addressing quality impacts and dependencies between processes

Four common service management process ownership models

Your ownership structure largely defines how processes will need to be implemented, maintained, and improved. It has a strong impact on their ability to integrate and how other teams perceive their involvement.

Most organizations are somewhere within this spectrum of four core ownership models, usually having some combination of shared traits between the two models that are closest to them on the scale.

Info-Tech Insight

The organizational structure that is best for you depends on your needs, and one is not necessarily better than another. The next four slides describe when each ownership level is most appropriate.

Distributed process ownership

Distributed process ownership is usually evident when organizations initially establish their service management practices. The processes are assigned to a specific group, who assumes some level of ownership over its execution.

Info-Tech Insight

This model is often a suitable approach for initial implementations or where it may be difficult to move out of siloes within the organization’s structure or culture.

Centralized process ownership

Centralized process ownership usually becomes necessary for organizations as they move into a more functional structure. It starts to drive management of processes horizontally across the organization while still retaining functional management control.

Info-Tech Insight

This model is often suitable for maturing organizations that are starting to look at process integration and shared service outcomes and accountability.

Federated process ownership

Federated process ownership allows for global control and regional variation, and it supports product orientation and Agile/DevOps principles

Info-Tech Insight

Federated process ownership is usually evident in organizations that have an international or multi-regional presence.

Service management office (SMO)

SMO structures tend to occur in highly mature organizations, where service management responsibility is seen as an enterprise accountability.

Info-Tech Insight

SMOs are suitable for organizations with a defined IT and organizational strategy. A SMO supports integration with other enterprise practices like enterprise architecture and the PMO.

Determine which process ownership and governance model works best for your organization

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template will help you document process ownership and governance model

Example:

Key Goals:

☐ Own accountability for changes to core processes

☐ Understand systemic nature and dependencies related to processes and services

☐ Approve and prioritize improvement and CSI initiatives related to processes and services

☐ Evaluate success of initiative outcomes based on defined benefits and expectations

☐ Own Service Management and Governance processes and policies

☐ Report into ITSM executive or equivalent body

Membership:

☐ Process Owners, SM Owner, Tool Owner/Liaison, Audit

Discuss as a team which process ownership model works for your organization. Determine who will govern the service management practice. Determine items that should be identified in your roadmap to address governance and process ownership gaps.

Use Info-Tech’s “SWOT” template to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats that should be addressed

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template will help you document items from your SWOT analysis.

Brainstorm the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to resources, environment, technology, and management practices. Add items that need to be addressed to your roadmap.

Perform a SWOT analysis

1. Brainstorm each aspect of the SWOT with an emphasis on:

• Resources
• Environment
• Technologies
• Management Practices

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion

OUTPUT

• SWOT analysis
• Priority items identified

Materials

• Whiteboards or flip charts

Participants

• All stakeholders

Indicate desired maturity level for your service management program to be successful

Discuss the various maturity levels and choose a desired level that would meet business needs.

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion

OUTPUT

• Desired state of service management maturity

Materials

• None

Participants

• All stakeholders

Use Info-Tech’s Service Management Process Maturity Assessment Tool to understand your current state

The Service Management Process Maturity Assessment Tool will help you understand the true state of your service management.

Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 tabs

These three worksheets contain questions that will determine the overall maturity of your service management processes. There are multiple sections of questions focused on different processes. It is very important that you start from Part 1 and continue the questions sequentially.

Results tab

The Results tab will display the current state of your service management processes as well as the percentage of completion for each individual process.

Complete the service management process maturity assessment

The current-state assessment will be the foundation of building your roadmap, so pay close attention to the questions and answer them truthfully.

1. Start with tab 1 in the Service Management Process Maturity Assessment Tool. Remember to read the questions carefully and always use the feedback obtained through the end-user survey to help you determine the answer.
2. In the “Degree of Process Completeness” column, use the drop-down menu to input the results solicited from the goals and objectives meeting you held with your project participants.

3. Host a meeting with all participants following completion of the survey and have them bring their results. Discuss in a round-table setting, keeping a master sheet of agreed upon results.

INPUT

• Service Management Process Maturity Assessment Tool questions

OUTPUT

• Determination of current state

Materials

• Service Management Process Maturity Assessment Tool

Participants

• Project team members

Review the results of your current-state assessment

At the end of the assessment, the Results tab will have action items you could perform to close the gaps identified by the process assessment tool.

INPUT

• Maturity assessment results

OUTPUT

• Determination of overall and individual practice maturity

Materials

• Service Management Maturity Assessment Tool

Participants

• Project team members

Use Info-Tech’s OCM Capability Assessment tool to understand your current state

The Organizational Change Management Capabilities Assessment tool will help you understand the true state of your organizational change management capabilities.

Complete the Capabilities tab to capture the current state for organizational change management. Review the Results tab for interpretation of the capabilities. Review the Recommendations tab for actions to address low areas of maturity.

Complete the OCM capability assessment

1. Open Organizational Change Management Capabilities Assessment tool.
2. Come to consensus on the most appropriate answer for each question. Use the 80/20 rule.
3. Review result charts and discuss findings.
4. Identify roadmap items based on maturity assessment.

INPUT

• A collaborative discussion

OUTPUT

• OCM Assessment tool
• OCM assessment results

Materials

• OCM Capabilities Assessment tool

Participants

• All stakeholders

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

2.1

Create a powerful, succinct mission statement

Using Info-Tech’s sample mission statement as a guide, build your mission statement based on the objectives of this project and the benefits that this project will achieve. Keep the mission statement short and clear.

2.2

Complete the assessment

With the project team in the room, go through all three parts of the assessment with consideration of the feedback received from the business.

2.3

Interpret the results of the assessment

The Info-Tech onsite analyst will facilitate a discussion on the overall maturity of your service management practices and individual process maturity. Are there any surprises? Are the results reflective of current service delivery maturity?

PHASE 3

Build Your Service Management Roadmap

Build Roadmap

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Document your vision and mission on the roadmap one-pager.
• Using the inputs from the current-state assessments, identify the key themes required by your organization.
• Identify individual initiatives needed to address key themes.

Step Insights

• Using the Info-Tech thought model, address foundational gaps early in your roadmap and establish the management methods to continuously make them more robust.
• If any of the core practices are not meeting the vision for your service management program, be sure to address these items before moving on to more advanced service management practices or processes.
• Make sure the story you are telling with your roadmap is aligned to the overall organizational goals.

Phase 3 outline

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Focus on a strong foundation to build higher value service management practices

Info-Tech Insight

Focus on behaviors and expected outcomes before processes.

Foundational elements

• Operating model facilitates service management goals
• Culture of service delivery
• Governance discipline to evaluate, direct, and monitor
• Management discipline to deliver

Stabilize

• Deliver stable, reliable IT services to the business
• Respond to user requests quickly and efficiently
• Resolve user issues in a timely manner
• Deploy changes smoothly and successfully

Proactive

• Avoid/prevent service disruptions
• Improve quality of service (performance, availability, reliability)

Service Provider

• Understand business needs
• Ensure services are available
• Measure service performance, based on business-oriented metrics

Strategic Partner

• Fully aligned with business
• Drive innovation
• Drive measurable value

Info-Tech Insight

Continued leadership support of the foundational elements will allow delivery teams to provide value to the business. Set the expectation of the desired maturity level and allow teams to innovate.

Identify themes that can help you build a strong foundation before moving to higher level practices

Before moving to advanced service management practices, you must ensure that the foundational and core elements are robust enough to support them. Leadership must nurture these practices to ensure they are sustainable and can support higher value, more mature practices.

Use Info-Tech’s “Service Management Roadmap” template to document your vision, themes and initiatives

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template contains a roadmap template to help communicate your vision, themes to be addressed, and initiatives

Working from the lower maturity items to the higher value practices, identify logical groupings of initiatives into themes. This will aid in communicating the reasons for the needed changes. List the individual initiatives below the themes. Adding the service management vision and mission statements can help readers understand the roadmap.

Document your service management roadmap

1. Document the service management vision and mission on the roadmap template.
2. Identify, from the assessments, areas that need to be improved or implemented.
3. Group the individual initiatives into logical themes that can ease communication of what needs to happen.
4. Document the individual initiatives.
5. Document in terms that business partners and executive sponsors can understand.

INPUT

• Current-state assessment outputs
• Maturity model

OUTPUT

• Service management roadmap

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Roadmap template

Participants

• All stakeholders

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

3.1

Identify themes to address items from the foundational level up to higher value service management practices

Identify easily understood themes that will help others understand the expected outcomes within your organization.

Document individual initiatives that contribute to the themes

Identify specific activities that will close gaps identified in the assessments.

PHASE 2

Build Communication Slide

Complete your service management roadmap

This step will walk you through the following activities:

• Use the current-state assessment exercises to document the state of your service management practices. Document examples of the behaviors that are currently seen.
• Document the expected short-term gains. Describe how you want the behaviors to change.
• Document the long-term vision for each item and describe the benefits you expect to see from addressing each theme.

Step Insights

• Use the communication template to acknowledge the areas that need to be improved and paint the short- and long-term vision for the improvements to be made through executing the roadmap.
• Write it in business terms so that it can be used widely to gain acceptance of the upcoming changes that need to occur.
• Include specific areas that need to be fixed to make it more tangible.
• Adding the values from the vision, mission, and values exercise can also help you set expectations about how the team will behave as they move towards the longer-term vision.

Phase 4 Outline

Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.

Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.

Use Info-Tech’s “Service Management Roadmap – Brought to Life” template to paint a picture of the future state

The Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template contains a communication template to help communicate your vision of the future state

Use this template to demonstrate how existing pain points to delivering services will improve over time by painting a near- and long-term picture of how things will change. Also list specific initiatives that will be launched to affect the changes. Listing the values identified in the vision, mission, and values exercise will also demonstrate the team’s commitment to changing behavior to create better outcomes.

Document your current state and list initiatives to address them

1. Use the previous assessments and feedback from business or customers to identify current behaviors that need addressing.
2. Focus on high-impact items for this document, not an extensive list.

3. List the initiatives or actions that will be used to address the specific pain points.

INPUT

• Current-state assessment outputs
• Feedback from business

OUTPUT

• Service Management Roadmap Communication Tool, in the Service Management Roadmap Presentation

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Roadmap template

Participants

• All stakeholders

Document your future state

1. For each pain point document the expected behaviors, both short term and longer term.
2. Write in terms that allow readers to understand what to expect from your service management practice.

INPUT

• Current-state assessment outputs
• Feedback from business

OUTPUT

• Service Management Roadmap Communication Tool, in the Service Management Roadmap Presentation Template

Materials

• Whiteboard
• Roadmap template

Participants

• All stakeholders

If you want additional support, have our analysts guide you through this phase as part of an Info-Tech workshop

Book a workshop with our Info-Tech analysts:

• To accelerate this project, engage your IT team in an Info-Tech workshop with an Info-Tech analyst team.
• Info-Tech analysts will join you and your team onsite at your location or welcome you to Info-Tech’s historic Toronto office to participate in an innovative onsite workshop.
• Contact your account manager (www.infotech.com/account), or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.

The following are sample activities that will be conducted by Info-Tech analysts with your team:

4.1

Identify the pain points and initiatives to address them

Identify items that the business can relate to and initiatives or actions to address them.

4.2

Identify short- and long-term expectations for service management

Communicate the benefits of executing the roadmap both short- and long-term gains.

Research contributors and experts

Valence Howden, Principal Research Director, CIO Practice

Info-Tech Research Group

Valence helps organizations be successful through optimizing how they govern, design, and execute strategies, and how they drive service excellence in all work. With 30 years of IT experience in the public and private sectors, he has developed experience in many information management and technology domains, with focus in service management, enterprise and IT governance, development and execution of strategy, risk management, metrics design and process design, and implementation and improvement.

Graham Price, Research Director, CIO Practice

Info-Tech Research Group

Graham has an extensive background in IT service management across various industries with over 25 years of experience. He was a principal consultant for 17 years, partnering with Fortune 500 clients throughout North America, leveraging and integrating industry best practices in IT service management, service catalog, business relationship management, IT strategy, governance, and Lean IT and Agile.

Sharon Foltz, Senior Workshop Director

Info-Tech Research Group

Sharon is a Senior Workshop Director at Info-Tech Research Group. She focuses on bringing high value to members via leveraging Info-Tech’s blueprints and other resources enhanced with her breadth and depth of skills and expertise. Sharon has spent over 15 years in various IT roles in leading companies within the United States. She has strong experience in organizational change management, program and project management, service management, product management, team leadership, strategic planning, and CRM across various global organizations.

Related Info-Tech Research

Build a Roadmap for Service Management Agility

Extend the Service Desk to the Enterprise

Bibliography

• “CIOs Emerge as Disruptive Innovators.” CSC Global CIO Survey: 2014-2015. Web.
• “Digital Transformation: How Is Your Organization Adapting?” CIO.com, 2018. Web.
• Goran, Julie, Laura LaBerge, and Ramesh Srinivasan. “Culture for a digital age.” McKinsey, July 2017. Web.
• The Qualities of Leadership: Leading Change. Cornelius & Associates, 14 April 2012.
• Wilkinson, Paul. “Culture, Ethics, and Behavior – Why Are We Still Struggling?” ITSM Tools, 5 July 2018. Web.

INFO~TECH RESEARCH GROUP

Build an IT Succession Plan

Future-proof your IT team.

Build an IT Succession Plan

Future-proof your IT team.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

Losing employees in key roles without adequate preparation hinders productivity, knowledge retention, relationships, and opportunities. Implement scalable succession planning to mitigate the risks.

Most organizations are unprepared for the loss of employees who hold key roles

Due to the atmosphere of uncertainty.

Not only do they not have the right processes in place, but they are also ill-equipped to deal with the sheer volume of retirees in the future.

Most organizations underestimate the costs associated with ignoring succession planning

Use Info-Tech’s tools and templates

Ignoring succession planning could cause significant costs

Losing knowledge will undermine your strategy in four ways:

Succession planning improves performance by reducing the impact of sudden departures

Info-Tech’s approach

Talent Review Conduct a talent review to identify key roles		Succession Planning Succession planning helps you assess which key roles are most at risk			Knowledge Transfer Utilize methods that make it easy to apply the knowledge in day-to-day practice.
Identify Critical Roles	Assess Talent	Identify Successors	Develop Successors	Select Successors	Identify Critical Knowledge	Select Transfer Methods	Document Role Transition Plans

Info-Tech’s methodology for building an IT succession plan

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

Guided Implementation

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is six to ten calls over the course of four to eight months.

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

Build an IT Succession Plan

Phase 1

Talent Review

This phase will walk you through:

• Identifying your business priorities
• Identifying your critical roles including required skills and knowledge that support achievement of business strategy

Tools and resources used:

• Key Roles Succession Planning Tool
• Key Role Profile
• Individual Talent Profile
• Critical Role Identifier

This phase involves the following participants:

• IT leadership/management team
• HR

Conduct a talent review to identify key roles

1. A talent review ensures that each work unit has the right people, in the right place, at the right time to successfully execute the business strategy.
2. Only 40% of organizations have engaged in some form of workforce planning.
3. The first step is to identify your business focus; with this information you can start to note the key roles that drive your business strategy.

Key roles

Where an organization’s most valued skills and knowledge reside

Organizations should prepare now to mitigate the risk of loss later. Key roles are: Held by the most senior people in the organization, who carry the bulk of leadership and decision-making responsibility. Highly technical or specialized, and therefore difficult to replace. Tied closely to unique or proprietary processes or possess knowledge that cannot be procured externally. Critical to the continuation of business and cannot be left vacant without risking business operations. Info-Tech Insight Losing employees in key roles without adequate preparation for their departure has a direct impact on the bottom line in terms of disrupted productivity, lost knowledge, severed relationships, and missed opportunities.

Identifying key roles is the first step in a range of workforce management activities because it helps establish organizational needs and priorities, as well as focusing planning effort.

Step 1.1

Identify critical roles

Activities

• 1.1.1 Document Business Priorities, Goals, and Challenges
• 1.1.2 Clarify Key Role Criteria and Weighting
• 1.1.3 Evaluate Role Importance
• 1.1.4 Key Role Selection and Comparison
• 1.1.5 Capture Key Elements of Critical Roles

The primary goal of this step is to ensure we have effectively identified key roles based on business priorities, goals, and challenges, and to capture the key elements of critical roles.

Outcomes of this step

• Documented business priorities, goals, and challenges.
• Key elements of critical roles captured.
• Key role criteria and weighting.

Business priorities will determine the knowledge and skills you value most

Note: Most organizations will be a blend of all three, with one predominating

“I’ve been in the position where the business assumes everyone knows what is required. It’s not until you get people into a room that it becomes clear there is misalignment. It all seems very intuitive but in a lot of cases they haven’t made the critical distinctions regarding what exactly the competencies are. They haven’t spent the time figuring out what they know.” (Anne Roberts, Principal, Leadership Within Inc.)

1.1.1 Document business priorities

Input: Business strategic plan

Output: Completed workforce planning worksheet (Tab 2) of the Key Roles Succession Planning Tool

Materials: Key Roles Succession Planning Tool

Participants: IT leadership

Start by identifying your business priorities based on your strategic plan. The goal of this exercise is to blast away assumptions and make sure leadership has a common understanding of your target.

With the questions on the previous slide in mind document your business priorities, business goals, and business challenges in Tab 2 of the Key Roles Succession Planning Tool worksheet.

Get clear answers to these questions:

• Are we customer focused, product focused, or operationally focused? In other words, is your organization known for:
  • Great customer service or a great customer experience?
  • The lowest price?
  • Having the latest technology, or the best quality product?
• What are our organizational/departmental business goals? To improve operational effectiveness, are we really talking about reducing operational costs?
• What are the key business challenges to address within the context of our focus?

Key Roles Succession Planning Tool

Clarify what defines a key role

A key role is crucial to achieving organizational objectives, drives business performance, and includes specialized and rare competencies. Key roles are high in strategic value and rarity – for example, the developer role for a tech company. Look at two dimensions when examining roles: Strategic value refers to the importance of the role in keeping the organization functioning and executing on the strategic objectives. Rarity refers to how difficult it is to find and develop the competencies in the role.

Info-tech insight Traditionally, succession planning has only addressed top management roles. However, until you look at the evidence, you won’t know if these are indeed high-value roles, and you may be missing other critical roles further down the hierarchy. Use the Critical Role Identifier to facilitate the identification of critical roles with your leaders.

1.1.2 Clarify key role criteria & weighting

Input: Business strategic plan

Output: Weighted criteria to help identify critical roles

Materials: Critical Role Identifier

Participants: IT leadership

1. Using Tab 2 of the Critical Role Identifier tool, along with the information on the previous slide, determine the relative importance of four criteria as contributing to the importance of a role within the organization.
2. Rate each of the four criteria: strategic value, rarity, revenue generation, business/operation continuity, and any custom criteria numerically. You might choose only one or two criteria – they all do not need to be included.
3. Document your decisions in Tab 2 of the Critical Role Identifier.

Critical Role Identifier

1.1.3 Evaluate role importance

Input: List of IT roles

Output: Full list of roles and a populated Critical Role Selection sheet (Tab 4)

Materials: Critical Role Identifier

Participants: IT leadership

1. Using Tab 3 of the Critical Role Identifier, collect information about IT roles.
2. Start by listing each role under consideration, and its department or subcategory.
3. For each criteria statement listed across the top of the sheet, select an option from the drop-down menu to reflect the appropriate answer scale rating. Replace the text in grey with information customized to your team. If criteria has a weighting of zero in Tab 2, the questions associated with that criteria will be greyed out and do not have to be answered.

Critical Role Identifier

Identify the key roles that support and drive your business priorities

1.1.4 Key role selection and comparison

Input: Tab 3 of the Critical Role Identifier

Output: List of roles from highest to lowest criticality score, List of key roles entered in Tab 2 of the Key Roles Succession Planning Tool

Materials: Critical Role Identifier, Key Roles Succession Planning Tool

Participants: IT leadership

1. Using tab 4 of the Critical Role Identifier, which displays the results of the role importance evaluation, review the weighted criticality score. To add or remove roles or departments make changes on Tab 3.
2. Use this table to see the scores and roles from highest to lowest based on your weightings and scoring.
3. In column J, classify the roles as critical, core, or supporting based on the weighted overall score and the individual criteria scores.
   1. Critical – is crucial to achieving organizational objectives, drives business performance, and includes specialized and rare skills.
   2. Core – is related to operational excellence. Highly strategically valuable but easy to find or develop.
   3. Supporting – is important in keeping business functioning; however, the strategic value is low. Competencies are easy to develop.
4. Once you’ve selected the key roles, transfer them into Tab 2 of the Key Roles Succession Planning Tool worksheet where you have documented your business priorities.

Critical Role Identifier

Key Roles Succession Planning Tool

1.1.5 Capture key elements of critical roles

Input: Job descriptions, Success profiles, Competency profiles

Output: List of required skills and knowledge for key roles, Role profiles documented for key roles

Materials: Key Roles Succession Planning Tool, Role Profile Template

Participants: IT leadership

1. Document the minimum requirements for critical roles in column E and F of Tab 2 of the Key Roles Succession Planning Tool. Include elements that drive talent decisions, are measurable, and are oriented to future organizational needs.
2. Consider how leadership competencies and technical skills tie to business expansion plans, new service offerings, etc.
3. Use the Role Profile Template to help in this process and to maintain up-to-date information.
4. Role profiles may be informed by existing job descriptions, success profiles, or competency profiles.
5. Conduct regular maintenance on your role profiles. Outdated and inaccurate role-related information can make succession planning efforts ineffective.

Key Roles Succession Planning Tool

Role Profile Template

Step 1.2

Assess talent

Activities

• 1.2.1 Identify Current Incumbents’ Information
• 1.2.2 Identify Potential Successors and Collect Information

The primary goal of this step is to assess departmental talent and identify gaps between potential successors and key roles. This analysis is intended to support departmental access to suitable talent ensuring future business success.

Outcomes of this step

• Collection of current incumbents’ information.
• Collection of potential successor information.
• Gap assessment.

Talent Review

Potential questions to ask during career discussions with key role incumbents

Where do you see yourself in five years? What role would you see yourself in after this one? What gets you excited about coming to work? Describe your greatest strengths. How would you like to use those strengths in the future? What is standing in the way of your career goals? ** Do not ask employees directly about their retirement plans as this can be misconstrued as age discrimination – let them take the initiative.**

1.2.1 Identify current incumbents' information

Input: Key roles list, Employee information

Output: List of key roles with individual incumbent information

Materials: Key Roles Succession Planning Tool – Succession Plan Worksheet (Tab 3)

Participants: IT leadership/management team, HR, Current incumbents if necessary

Identify current incumbents for all key roles and collect information about them.

Using Tab 3 of the Key Roles Succession Planning Tool identify the incumbent (the person currently in the role) for all key roles.

Distribute the worksheet to department managers and team leaders to complete the information below for each key role.

For that incumbent, also document:

1. Their time in that role.
2. Their overall performance in current role (does not meet, meets, or exceeds expectations).
3. Next step in career (target role or retirement).
4. Time until exit from the current role (known or estimated).
5. Development needs for next step in career.
6. Any additional knowledge and skills they possess beyond the role description that is of value to the organization.

Upon completion, managers and team leaders should review the results with the department leader.

Key Roles Succession Planning Tool

Identify potential successors for all key roles

Determine how employees will be identified for talent assessment

Prepare to customize the Individual Talent Profile Template

Ensure the role profile and individual talent profile are synchronized to enable comparing employee qualifications and readiness to critical role requirements.

Role Profile A role profile contains information on the skills, competencies, and other minimum requirements for the critical role. It details the type of incumbent that would fit a critical role.

Use both in conjunction during: Talent assessment Successor identification Successor development Successor selection

Individual Talent Profile A talent profile provides information about a person. In addition to responding to role profile criteria, it provides information on an employee’s past experiences and performance, career aspirations, and future potential.

1.2.2 Identify Potential Successors’ Information

Input: Key roles list, Employee information, Completed role profiles and/or Tab 2 role information.

Output: List of potential successors for key roles that are selected for talent assessment

Materials: Key Roles Succession Planning Tool – Succession Plan Worksheet (Tab 3)

Participants: IT leadership, IT team leads, Employees

Identify potential successors for key roles and collect critical information.

Have managers and team leads complete column I on Tab 3 of the Key Roles Succession Planning Tool and review with the department leader.

There may be more than one potential successor for key roles; this is okay.

Once the list is compiled, complete an individual talent profile for each potential successor. Record an employee’s:

1. Employee information
2. Career goals
3. Experience and education
4. Achievements
5. Competencies
6. Performance
7. Any assessment results

Once the profiles are completed, they can be compared to the role profile to identify development needs.

Key Roles Succession Planning Tool

Individual Talent Profile Template

Build an IT Succession Plan

Phase 2

Succession Planning

This phase will walk you through how to:

• Conduct an assessment to identify “at risk” key role incumbents.
• Identify potential successors for key roles and collect critical information.
• Assess gaps between key role incumbents and potential successors.

Tools and resources used:

• Key Roles Succession Planning Tool
• Key Role Profile
• Individual Talent Profile

This phase involves the following participants:

• IT leadership/management team
• HR

Succession planning helps you assess which key roles are most at risk

Step 2.1

Identify Successors

Activities

• 2.1.1 Conduct Individual Risk Assessment
• 2.1.2 Successor Readiness Assessment

This step highlights the relative positioning of all employees assessed for departure risk compared to the potential successors’ readiness, identifying gaps that create risk for the organization, and need mitigation strategies.

Outcomes of this step

• Individual risk assessment results – mitigate, manage, accept matrix.
• Potential successor readiness ranking.
• Determination on transparency level with successors.

Succession Planning

Decide how to obtain information on employee interest in critical roles

2.1.1 Conduct Individual Risk Assessment

Input: Completed Succession Plan worksheet

Output: Risk assessment of key role incumbents, understanding of which key role departures to manage, mitigate, and accept

Materials: Key Roles Succession Planning Tool – Individual Risk Assessment (Tab 4), Key Roles Succession Planning Tool – Risk Assessment Results (Tab 5)

Participants: IT leadership/management team

Assign values for probability of departure and impact of departure using the Key Roles Succession Planning Tool.

For those in key roles and those over 50, complete the Individual Risk Assessment (Tab 4) of the Key Roles Succession Planning Tool:

1. Assess each key role incumbent’s probability of departure based on your knowledge. If the person is going to another job, is a known flight risk, or faces dismissal, the probability is high.
   • 0-40: Unlikely to Leave. If the employee is new to the role, highly engaged, or a high potential.
   • 41-60: Unknown. If the employee is sending mixed messages about happiness at work, or sending no messages, it may be difficult to guess.
   • 61-100: Likely to Leave. If the employee is nearing retirement, actively job searching, disengaged, or faces dismissal, then the probability of departure is high.
2. Assess the role and the individual’s impact of departure on a scale of 1 (no impact) to 100 (devasting impact).
3. Review the risk assessment results on tab 5 of the planning tool. The employees that appear in the mitigate quadrant are your succession planning priorities.

Key Roles Succession Planning Tool

Define readiness criteria for successor identification

1. Select the types of readiness and the number of levels:

   Readiness by time horizon:

   • Successors are identified as ready based on how long it is estimated they will take to acquire the minimum requirements of the critical role.
   • Levels example: Ready Now, Ready in 1-2 Years, Ready in 3-5 Years.

   Readiness by moves:

   • Successors are identified as ready based on how many position moves they have made or how many developmental experiences they have had.
   • Levels example: Ready Now, Ready after 1 Move, Ready after 2 Moves.
2. Create definitions for each readiness level:

   Example:	Performance	Potential
   Ready Now	Definition: Ability to deliver in current role Requirement: Meets or exceeds expectations	Definition: Ability to take on greater responsibility Requirement: Demonstrates learning agility

   The 9-box is an effective way to map performance and potential requirements and can guide management decision making in talent review and calibration sessions. See McLean & Company’s 9-Box Job Aid for more information.
   “Time means nothing. If you say someone will be ready in a year, and you’ve done nothing in that year to develop them, they won’t be ready. We look at it as moves or experiences: ready now, ready in one move, ready in two moves.” (Amanda Mathieson, Senior Manager, Talent Management, Tangerine)

2.1.2 Successor Readiness Assessment

Input: Individual talent profiles, List of potential successors (Tab 3)

Output: Readiness ranking for each potential successor

Materials: Key Roles Succession Planning Tool

Participants: IT leadership/management team

Assign values for probability of departure and impact of departure using the Key Roles Succession Planning Tool.

Using Tab 6 of the Key Roles Succession Planning Tool, evaluate the readiness of each potential successor that you previously identified.

1. Enter the name, current role, and target role of each potential successor into the spreadsheet.
2. For each employee, fill in a response from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” for the assessment criteria statements listed in column B of Tab 6. This will give you a readiness ranking in row 68.

Key Roles Succession Planning Tool

Decide if and how successors will be told about their status in the succession plan

Step 2.2

Develop Successors

Activities

• 2.2.1 Outline Successor Development Process

The primary goal of this step is to identify the steps that need to be taken to develop potential successors. Focus on training employees for their future role, not just their current one.

Outcomes of this step

• Identified gaps between key role exits and successor readiness.

Succession Planning

2.2.1 Outline Successor Development Process

Input: Role profiles, Talent profiles, Talent assessments

Output: Identified gaps between key role exits and successor readiness

Materials: Key Roles Succession Planning Tool – Successor Identification (Tab 7)

Participants: IT leadership/management team

Prepare successors for their next role, not just their current one.

Use role and talent profiles and any talent assessment results to identify gaps for development.

1. Outline the steps involved in the individual development planning process for successors. Key steps include identifying development timeline, learning needs, learning resources and strategies, and accomplishment metrics/evidence.
2. Identify learning elements successor development will involve based on critical role type. For example, coaching and/or mentoring, leadership training, functional skills training, or targeted experiences/projects.
3. Select metrics with associated timelines to measure the progress of successor development plans. Establish guidelines for employee and manager accountability in developing prioritized competencies.
4. Determine monitoring cadence of successor development plans (i.e. how often successor development plans will be tracked to ensure timely progress). Identify who will be involved in monitoring the process (e.g. steering committee).

Info-Tech insight

Succession planning without integrated efforts for successor development is simply replacement planning. Get successors ready for promotion by ensuring a continuously monitored and customized development plan is in place.

Integrate knowledge transfer in the successor development process

Step 2.3

Select Successors

The goal of this step is to determine how critical roles will be filled when vacancies arise.

Outcomes of this step

• Agreement with HR on the process to fill vacancies when key roles exit.

Succession Planning

Determine how critical roles will be filled when vacancies arise

Build an IT Succession Plan

Phase 3

Knowledge Transfer

This phase will show you to:

• Identify critical knowledge risks.
• Select appropriate transfer methods.
• Document knowledge transfer initiatives for key role transition plans.

Tools and resources used:

• Role Transition Plan Template

This phase involves the following participants:

• IT leadership/management team
• HR
• Incumbent & successor managers

Mitigate risk – formalize knowledge transfer

Use Info-Tech’s Mitigate Key IT Employee Knowledge Loss blueprint to build and implement your knowledge transfer plan.

Effective knowledge transfer allows organizations to: Maintain or improve speed and productivity by ensuring the right people have the right skills to do their jobs well. Increase agility because knowledge is more evenly distributed amongst employees. Multiple people can perform a given task and no one person becomes a bottleneck. Capture and sustain knowledge; creating a knowledge database provides all employees access to the information, now and in the future.

Knowledge transfer between those in key roles and potential successors yields the highest dividends for: Senior level successions. External hires. Senior expatriate transfers. Developmental stretch assignments. Internal cross-divisional transfers and promotions. High organizational dependency on unique expert knowledge. Critical function/project/team transitions. Large scale reorganizations and mergers & acquisitions. (Source: Piktialis and Greenes, 2008)

Mitigate Key IT Employee Knowledge Loss

Knowledge transfer is complex and must be both multi-faceted and well supported

Knowledge transfer is the capture, organization, and distribution of knowledge held by individuals to ensure that it is accessible and usable by others.

Knowledge transfer is not stopping, learning, and returning to work. Nor is it simply implementing a document management system.

Knowledge transfer is a wide range of methods that must be carefully selected and integrated into daily work in order to meet the needs of the knowledge to be transferred and the people involved.

Step 3.1

Identify Critical Knowledge to Transfer

The goal of this step is to understand what knowledge and skills much be transferred, keeping in mind the various types of knowledge.

Outcomes of this step

• Critical knowledge and skills for key roles documented in the Key Role Transition plans.

Knowledge Transfer

Understand what knowledge and skills must be transferred

There are two basic types of knowledge: Explicit knowledge: Easily explained and codified, e.g. facts and procedures. Tacit knowledge: Accumulates over years of experience and is hard to verbalize. You should already have a good idea of what knowledge and skills are valued from the worksheets completed earlier. Focus on identifying the knowledge, skills, and relationships essential to the specific incumbent in a key role and what it is he or she does to perform that key role well. Document critical knowledge and skills for key roles in the: Role Transition Plan Template

Identify key knowledge areas. These include: Specialized technical knowledge and research and development process. Unique design capabilities/methods/models. Special formulas/algorithms/techniques. Proprietary production processes. Decision-making criteria. Innovative sales methods. Knowledge about key customers. Relationships with key stakeholders. Company history and values. Ask questions of both sources and receivers of knowledge to help determine the best knowledge transfer methods to use. What is the nature of the knowledge? Explicit or tacit? Why is it important to transfer? How will the knowledge be used? What knowledge is critical for success? How will the users find and access it? How will it be maintained and remain relevant and usable? What are the existing knowledge pathways or networks connecting sources to recipients?

Step 3.2

Select Knowledge Transfer Methods

Activities

• 3.2.1 Select Knowledge Transfer Methods

This step helps you identify the knowledge transfer methods that will be the most effective, considering the knowledge or skill that needs to be transferred and the individuals involved.

Outcomes of this step

• Knowledge transfer methods chosen documented in the Key Role Transition Plans.

Knowledge Transfer

Knowledge transfer methods available

Be prepared to use various methods to transfer knowledge and use them all liberally.

3.2.1 Select Knowledge Transfer Methods

Input: Role profiles, Talent profiles

Output: Methods for integrating knowledge transfer into day-to-day practice

Materials: Role Transition Plan Template

Participants: IT leadership/management team, HR, Knowledge source, Knowledge recipient

Utilize methods that make it easy to apply the knowledge in day-to-day practice.

Select your method according to the following criteria:

1. The type of knowledge. A soft skill, like professionalism, is best taught via mentoring, while a technical process is best documented and applied on-the-job.
2. What the knowledge recipient is comfortable with. The recipient may get bored during formal training sessions and retain more during job shadowing.
3. What the knowledge source is comfortable with. The source may be uncomfortable with blogs and wikis, but comfortable with SharePoint.
4. The cost. Some methods require an investment in time (e.g. mentoring), while others require an investment in technology (e.g. knowledge bases).
   • The good news is that many supporting technologies may already exist in your organization or can be acquired for free.
   • Methods that cost time may be difficult to get underway since employees may feel they don’t have the time or must change the way they work.

The more integrated knowledge transfer is in day-to-day activities, the more likely it is to be successful and the lower the time cost. This is because real learning is happening at the same time real work is being accomplished.

Document the knowledge transfer methods in the Role Transition Plan Template.

Role Transition Plan Template

Explore alternative work arrangements

Ensure sufficient time to prepare successors

Choose the alternative work arrangement that works best for you and the employee

The arrangement chosen may be a combination of multiple options

Alternative work arrangements require senior management support

Senior management and other employees must see the value of retaining older workers, or they will not be supportive of these solutions.

Step 3.3

Document Role Transition Plans for all Key Roles

Activities

• 3.3.1 Document Role Transition Plans

The primary goal of this step is to build clear checklist-based plans for each key role to help ensure a smooth transition as a successor takes over.

Outcomes of this step

• Completed key role transition plans

Knowledge Transfer

3.3.1 Document Role Transition Plans

Input: Role profiles, Talent profiles, Talent assessments, Workforce plans

Output: A clear checklist-based plan to help ensure a smooth transition.

Materials: Role Transition Plan Template

Participants: IT leadership/management team, Incumbent, Successor(s), HR

Define a transition plan for all employees in at-risk key roles, and their successors.

You should already have a good idea of what knowledge and skills are valued from the worksheets completed earlier. Focus on identifying the knowledge, skills, and relationships essential to the specific incumbent in a key role and what it is they do to perform that key role well.

Using the Role Transition Plan Template develop a plan to transfer what needs to be transferred from the incumbent to the successor.

1. Record the incumbent and successor information in the template.
2. Summarize the key accountabilities and expectations of the incumbent’s role. This summary should highlight specific tasks and initiatives that the successor must take on, including success enablers. Attach the job description for a full description of accountabilities and expectations.
3. Document the knowledge and skills requirements for the key role, as well as any additional knowledge and skills possessed by the key role incumbent that will aid the successor.
4. Document any alternative work arrangements to the incumbent’s roles.
5. Populate the Role Transition Checklist for key transition activities that must be completed by certain dates. A list of sample checklist items has been provided. Add, delete, or modify list items to suit your needs.

Role Transition Plan Template

Research Contributors and Experts

Related Info-Tech Research

	Mitigate Key IT Employee Knowledge Loss Transfer IT knowledge before it’s gone. Effective knowledge transfer mitigates risks from employees leaving the organization and is a key asset driving innovation and customer service.
	Implement an IT Employee Development Plan There is a growing gap between the competencies organizations have been focused on developing, and what is needed in the future. Employees have been left to drive their own development, with little direction or support and without the alignment of development to organizational needs.

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Coyne, Kevin P. and Shawn T. Coyne. “The Baby Boomer Retirement Fallacy and What It Means to You. “ HBR Blog Network. Harvard Business Review, May 16, 2008. Accessed 8 Jan. 2013.

Dwyer, Kevin and Ngoc Luong Dwyer. “Managing the Baby Boomer Brain Drain: The Impact of Generational Change on Human Resource Management.” ChangeFactory, April 2010. Accessed Jan 9, 2013.

Gurchiek, Kathy. “Poll: Organizations Can Do More to Prepare for Talent Shortage as Boomers Retire.” SHRM, Nov 17, 2010. Accessed Jan 3, 2013.

Howden, Daniel. “What Is Time to Fill? KPIs for Recruiters.” Workable, 24 March 2016. Web.

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