Adopting and Adapting ITSM Best Practices at IKO Industries

Welcome to this series of articles that follows the ongoing implementation of ITSM best practices at IKO. I am the Global ITSM Process Manager at IKO and am responsible for the ITSM process design, education, training, and adoption.

Here are a couple of snippets to give you a synopsis of the company:

IKO is a pioneer and leader in the global roofing and related products industry. The company was founded in 1951. It first manufactured building paper and then expanded to include coated roll roofing. Its first asphalt shingle was made in 1954, and the rest, as they say, is history. Today, more than 60 years after its founding, IKO has grown to be among the world’s largest exporters of asphalt shingles.

IKO is now a worldwide enterprise with more than 4000 employees and more than 25 manufacturing plants in Canada, the United States, England, Belgium, Holland, France, Slovakia, New Zealand, and Australia. The company ships roofing products to 96 countries around the globe.

The IT organization supports the entire IKO organization and all its employees. Like many organizations, we basically support everything IT related within the organization.

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So Why Are We Adopting and Adapting ITSM Best Practices?

The answer can be summarized like this. Not only has the organization grown through expansion and acquisitions, the last few years the IT department has also grown significantly in terms of numbers, teams, and skillsets. This growth is a direct result of a modernization initiative across the organization, from manufacturing equipment to new enterprise applications as well as refreshing and replacing aging IT infrastructure.

Which ITSM Best Practices Are We Embracing?

There are plenty of best practices, frameworks, and methodologies for and by the IT industry. Although each of them will provide great benefits to any organization, one of the many challenges is to decide which one to start with. There are many experts and great consulting and education organizations specializing in either one or many of the frameworks and methodologies. There are many great sets of “tools” for each and every one of them. However, I have learned in my career from both personal experience and from talking to many experts and other consultants as well as “tool” organizations that the practices and the organizational change should precede the tool. Of course, there are organizations that have successfully implemented the tool first and then the practices and have achieved great results. Here is what we have decided to do at IKO:

The practices and the organizational change should precede the tool.

• ITIL 4: After conducting a process maturity assessment where we received a response rate of nearly 75%, we selected six processes to implement first (identified below).
• ISO 20000: The ISO 20000 standard will be used to ensure all documents use the same template, are properly stored, and are communicated to the entire IT department personnel.
• COBIT 2019: The framework will be used to identify that for each process the proper controls are in place and that all IT roles understand and abide by the controls. This will assist us in setting compliance targets and drive organizational change.

Which Six Processes Are We Implementing?

The IT leadership and management teams met to identify the most pressing issues IT faces supporting the organization. We consulted with various business leaders to identify their perspective. Based on the data gathered, we came up with a list of six processes: incident management, change management, request management, knowledge management, problem management, and service level management. The survey results showed what I expected based on my experience as a consultant; our capability-maturity scores were quite low for all processes. To be honest, we have very little in terms of formalization and documentation of processes, and have only a rudimentary awareness of available best practices. However, the culture survey showed very strong support for improving our processes evenly across all groups and all levels. The ITIL survey results were shared in order to provide all team members with an in-depth review of the results across our six targeted process areas.

We established a roadmap for adopting the ITIL framework at IKO. Our approach starts with bringing awareness of the ITIL framework and ITSM processes to all our IT team members, educating them on the ITIL 4 Foundation, followed by defining ITIL in IKO terms, and finally implementing IKO-tailored ITSM processes.

We scheduled training consisting of grouping team members cross-functionally for the workshop and training sessions to minimize impact on our current priorities as we move toward adopting an ITSM culture in our organization. I lead the training sessions (using the ITIL 4 syllabus).

What Is Next?

1. Complete the ITIL Foundation training. We highly encourage our IT team members to utilize this great opportunity to prepare for ITIL 4 Foundation certification. As of the end of August, I have completed eight such training sessions.
2. Schedule and start the IKO Process Definition sessions by engaging a select number of team members to participate in developing ITSM processes.

In my next article, I will describe our approach to the ITIL Foundation course and certification. Until next time, please stay safe.

Pierre Bernard is currently the Global ITSM Process Manager for IKO Industries. He has 34 years of experience in IT, seven of those as a service desk manager. He has extensive experience, knowledge, and expertise in service management, organizational change, business management, and continual service improvement. Pierre also holds numerous certifications, including ITIL Expert, AGILE Foundation, PRINCE2 Practitioner, Master Trainer/Facilitator, COBIT5, ISO/IEC 20000, and ISO/IEC 27000. Connect with him on LinkedIn.