Partners in IT’s BluePrint provides organisations with a proven solution to achieving ITSM Best Practice, providing measurable return on investment and a platform for continuous improvement.

There are many well documented benefits of implementing best practice in IT Service Management (ITSM). The journey to achieve these benefits however can be a long one, and the key people in any business need to understand that achieving best practice is not a quick fix and that ITIL forms only a part of that journey.

Many organisations struggle to approve projects that work towards best practice because of difficulties in:

•	Securing Board level buy in
•	Justifying and articulating the Return on Investment (ROI)
•	Perceived complexity
•	Limited understanding of ITIL and best practice
•	Uncertainty of starting point
•	Mismatch of cultural fit

Partners in IT understand these challenges and leveraging over a decade of experience and expertise working with organisations to define and enforce rigorous ITSM Best Practice have developed the ITSM Transformation BluePrint.

The BluePrint provides organisations with a proven solution for implementing best practice IT processes quickly, effectively and addresses the key issue of achieving measurable results within a known, fixed and understood budget.

This makes it significantly easier to overcome all of the above obstacles.

Transformation BluePrint
One of the major problems associated with the delivery of best practice ITIL processes is the endemic assumption that every organisation is unique and as a result requires highly tailored service management processes. The consequence is expensive, long drawn out projects delivering over-engineered processes and strong user resistance.

Using the BluePrint however, with its proven methodology delivers generic processes rapidly and links these processes to the underlying service management technology so that it is possible to deliver best practice service management within a few months.

There are three aspects to the BluePrint:

1) Service Management Review
The Service Management Review is a stand alone fixed price engagement that benchmarks the client against industry best practice metrics for IT Service Management.

This exercise builds a roadmap for the implementation of ITSM Best Practice and creates a set of Key Performance Indicators that can be used to measure the results of the journey.

Regular reviews of performance to provide feedback on the tangible benefits that we know ITSM Best Practice can achieve.

The output of the Service Management Review can be used across the organisation to communicate the business case, plans and measurable benefits of implementing ITSM Best Practice.

2) Transformation Methodology
The BluePrint delivers a detailed IT transformation methodology with extensive supporting collateral, including presentations, documentation and a wide range of templates. The templates include:

•	The project plans, providing a clear outline of the timescales involved in delivering the project.
•	Resource planning based on Partners in IT’s experience in delivering successful service management transformation projects.
•	Defining tool requirements, design documents and CMDB development templates.
•	Running workshops to help build user understanding and buy in.

3) Detailed Process Framework
The BluePrint provides a set of processes based upon ITIL v3 and ISO/IEC 20000, related disciplines and standards. This set of generic processes is highly detailed, providing a fast track to establishing and documenting best practice IT processes and working practices.

This combination of procedure and documentation provides, out of the box, a complete service management framework that supports the majority of organisations.

The process framework is published to the intranet to provide real time guidance and information for everyone from IT Director to help desk operator. This ensures everyone has complete visibility of the lifecycle of service management processes across the organisation.

Partners in IT’s BluePrint provides organisations with a proven solution to achieving ITSM Best Practice, providing both measurable return on investment and a platform for continual improvement.

Process Enforcement
Having developed a proven solution to fast track the delivery of best practice service management processes, the next challenge is to get user acceptance to the changes.

The BluePrint also includes:

•	Template workshop documents to support the process of achieving user understanding
•	A set of detailed tool requirements that can be used to select an industry leading service management tool to enforce and support the processes.

Once it is confirmed that the process framework ensures that all organisational specific processes are supported and enforced, these requirements can be converted into the tool specific configuration elements that will ensure all users follow the process. This makes ISO 20000 accreditation easier because the process is not only documented but can be proven to be in use.

It is by tightly integrating the BluePrint process model with an industry leading service management tool that organisations can ensure processes are enforced, delivering high levels of compliance and information accuracy.

Performance Measurement
By adopting a proven solution for implementing best practice IT processes, organisations can achieve service management transformation within a few months. Pre and post project reviews provide clear performance measures to demonstrate improvement in service delivery and associated return on investment.

The addition of third party reporting products can provide greater, in-depth performance measurement.

Continuous Improvement
The use of the Partners in IT Blueprint service management framework provides a platform for continuous improvement through improved process compliance to increase efficiency.

The immediate benefits of a fast track adoption of best practice service management processes are improved management visibility, excellent documentation, auditable activity and process compliance.

The results include:

•	Immediate return on investment from improved utilisation of resource, reduced downtime and enhanced responsiveness to the business
•	Improved service management processes ensure an ISO/IEC 20000 audit can be achieved within a short time of going live.
•	Strong, auditable processes, combined with strong documentation provide excellent support for other compliance requirements including Sarbanes Oxley.
•	The BluePrint provides a framework for the consistent deployment of service management processes across distributed organisations to deliver a fast track to service management consistency.