HR professionals have made good use of best practice methodologies to help develop high performing organisations. ITIL has played a key role in providing a framework for effective service delivery, increasingly not just for IT services but for all service delivery in an organisation.
As the pace of innovation quickens and businesses look to deliver more innovation to customers to stay ahead of the competition, there is a trend to combine service management best practice with project management best practice to get the best of both worlds.
Organisations know they need to be more effective and efficient in the delivery of services and while they are finding best practice for delivery is ITIL, best practice for introducing new services into a live environment is almost certainly some sort of project methodology. The most logical one to turn to is PRINCE2 because it aligns so closely with ITIL.
Complementary approaches
PRINCE2 and ITIL are complementary in many ways. ITIL is a framework, while PRINCE2 is a methodology. PRINCE2 mandates certain things, including documentation and measurement of success. In contrast, ITIL is less prescriptive and offers suggestions as to the best approach rather than mandating actions.
PRINCE2 tends to usually be associated with large-scale, government projects but aspirational businesses of all sizes can tap into the benefits. These include a focus on business justification for any project, its approach of management by stages to break a project down into manageable chunks, its emphasis on lessons learned from previous projects and its methodical and consistent approach to risk management.
ITIL is definitely no longer just about IT – it has evolved well beyond its origins as an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library and offers organisations much more. The delivery of IT services into any organisation has changed. Instead of delivering discrete IT services, organisations now need total end-to-end service delivery. ITIL focuses on the delivery of services. PRINCE2 focuses on the definition and delivery of products, and in particular their quality requirements. However, it is rare outside of construction that organisations are looking to deliver a product with no service element.
Product supply has transformed into service delivery even for individual small ticket items such as mobile phones, let alone large-scale corporate solutions. Technology is now so complex that is must be supported by end-to-end service.
While PRINCE2 offers a useful way to support the ITIL approach, this is not just a question of organisations looking at implementing ITIL using PRINCE2. In addition to the useful support PRINCE2 offers to an ITIL implementation, ITIL can also support PRINCE2 implementations, plugging PRINCE2 gaps, especially during the start-up phase of a project, and helping with the communication of a project. ITIL can also help with balancing quality considerations versus cost.
HR and L&D professionals face a challenge in creating a workforce capable of taking a multi-skilled approach to developing the business. It is possible to continue to produce new teams or improve service delivery by skilling people up in either PRINCE2 or ITIL and going ahead with just one approach. However, combining the two approaches holds a much better prospect of successful service introduction.
ITIL and PRINCE2 may be a marriage made in heaven but it has its ups and downs. The combination of ITIL and PRINCE2 can drive innovation and growth but careful planning, taking into account the key strengths and overlaps of a combined approach, is vital to reduce the risk of duplication of effort, complexity and disagreement.
Starting points for HR and L&D professionals
ITIL can be a good starting point to support the development of HR’s strategy as to the training and development of PRINCE2 and ITIL skills. Using the ITIL framework HR people can identify what their aims and objectives are and how they will add value to the business. ITIL is an approach focused on continual improvement, not just a single step change.
HR and L&D professionals looking to take a sophisticated multi-layered approach to Best Practice and creating the right mix of ITIL and PRINCE2 skills need to ask themselves the right questions. ITIL can help with formulating those questions with its practical focus on creating and delivering value to the business.
ITIL asks ‘what is the business?’ and ‘what is the vision of the customer?’ If the organisation does not know what it is trying to achieve with the services it is delivering to customers how can it ensure that the services it is offering are effective and efficient? The next steps are to identify where the organisation is starting from, set targets as to where it wants to go and then work out how it is going to get there. Here PRINCE2 would be a useful methodology and can help to measure success.
ITIL and PRINCE2 becomes symbiotic. ITIL does not ‘do’ project management but it can help HR identify where things could be improved, before PRINCE2 steps in to support the delivery of the planned improvements. Increasingly ITIL and PRINCE2 are tools that will support an entire service delivery strategy.
Paul Fegan is operations director at ILX
