Rory’s default is to drive for high quality, highly mature processes, whereas, while I think processes and process improvement are important, I often push back a little on his quest for perfection.
Why is this?
I think it’s because Rory and I have quite different professional backgrounds. Much of Rory’s career has been spent working as an external consultant helping implement tools and establishing ITAM systems in finance, engineering and telecoms firms. On the other hand, a big chunk of my early career was spent working in construction and facilities management.
How is this relevant, I hear you ask? The firms Rory has worked with tend to be high margin (i.e. wealthy) firms where process quality and consistency is important because they need to demonstrate to regulators and other stakeholders that the firm isn’t going to do away with customer’s money, or kill people because of badly designed products.
On the other hand, construction and facilities management firms tend to be low margin (i.e., these firms are VERY cost conscious) and largely unregulated. While process maturity is important to them, the processes that matter are those which keep their workers physically safe (i.e., so they don’t fall off buildings!), and ensure they get the supplies and equipment they need to the right place at the right time. The quality of IT processes often comes a long way down the priority list.
So in contrast to Rory, my experience is that many firms didn’t mind muddling through with low quality and inconsistent processes because although improving ITAM process maturity might bring some benefits, it can also be quite expensive.
The moral of this story is that organisations’ needs and desires with regard to process improvement occur on a spectrum ranging from operating very ad hoc processes despite the potential poor quality, inconsistent results, through to absolutely top notch, tightly change-controlled processes that produce exactly the same high quality output time and time again.
The question everyone who operates or owns ITAM processes is should be asking themselves is: where do my processes need to be on this maturity spectrum?
When thinking about this, bear in mind that process maturity also feeds in to your ability to achieve capabilities – things like performing a license check prior to software deployment, or being able to evidence that equipment has been wiped prior to disposal. The higher your process maturity, the more likely you are to be able to perform a greater number of ITAM capabilities with a higher level of quality and consistency. More consistent processes and output quality also means that you will find it easier to automate your processes – machines don’t spot mistakes and fix them up on the fly, like humans do, so automating poor quality processes all too often results in a car crash where everyone ends up spending all their time firefighting errors the automation caused!
Understanding your desired maturity
As you may be aware, we’ve recently been partnering with the team at Licenseware to expand and update the old SAMCharter maturity assessment <shameless plug, you can find out more about the new Licenseware Self Assessment Service here>.
When you complete the new maturity assessment, you’ll receive a report with scores for both process maturity and process capability. It will be tempting to look at those scores in isolation and think ‘we’re so bad at this’ for those processes where your scores are low. But what you need to do, preferably BEFORE you complete the assessment, is think about where your organisation WANTS to be in terms of process maturity and process capability, so you are comparing your final result not with the highest possible score, but with the score that is right for your organisation.
We’ve made the underlying process maturity and process capability matrix we’ve used to help score the Self-Assessment available here.
We recommend taking a look at the matrix BEFORE completing your assessment so you can agree with your senior management which level is most appropriate for your organisation. This means that when you receive your report, you can avoid falling into the trap of comparing yourself against perfection, and assess what you need to improve based on where your organisation wants or needs to be.
To help make performing this assessment easier, we’ve split the ITAM processes and their capabilities into 6 dimensions: Control, Data and Systems, Financial Management, Governance, SAM Lifecycle and HAM lifecycle.
Accounting for changing circumstances
And finally, of course, it may be that in the future where you want to be on the maturity and capability spectrum changes. Perhaps your organisation is going through hard times and needs to be more cost-focused, or has received adverse findings in a regulatory audit and your bosses have decided they need to up their governance game.
We suggest regularly (perhaps annually) revisiting with your managers that assessment of where your organisation needs to be in terms of process maturity and capability. You can then complete a new maturity assessment to get an accurate idea of your current maturity (as opposed to last year’s) and then compare that against your changed needs and use that to prioritise your process improvements from there.
So there are many reasons to establish your organisation’s desired maturity and capability levels before completing a maturity and capability assessment. It recognises that reality that not all organisations want or need to achieve the same level of maturity, and that perfection might not be as desirable as you thought! It also helps avoid a mismatch of expectations between the IT Asset Manager and their senior management, and by making an organisation’s maturity and capability needs explicit, it provides a concrete baseline against which to measure an IT Asset Manager’s performance over time.
