Your ITAM project has a finish date, but not your responsibilities!

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There’s a great moment at the end of any ITAM tool implementation when the last milestone is ticked off. The tool is live, the first data load is done, and the project team can close down the project plan and move on to the next thing.

Then things change… again! A supplier changes its licensing terms, Procurement signs another agreement, and no one is quite sure who’s keeping the entitlement records up to date.

That’s the question an ITAM plan (aka Target Operating Model, or TOM) is there to answer. And despite the name, it isn’t a project plan. It sets out how the service will actually run day to day once the project has finished: the people, partners, tools and processes it needs, and what each of them is expected to do. The project plan tells you when the tool will be ready, but not who checks the data is still accurate six months down the line or, even more importantly, who fixes it up!

Rory and I have been covering this in our SAM plan videos over the last couple of months, and we thought it was time for a blog!

To go with the videos, our Create & Maintain an ITAM Plan process is free to download for one week only, until 28 October. It includes the planning steps, responsibilities and review guidance to help you work out how all of this will run once the project team has moved on.

The proof is in the pudding

Imagine the implementation team has moved on, and ask yourself:

• Who checks that the data is good enough to support a renewal decision?
• When a discrepancy needs investigating, whose workload does it land on (and did anyone tell them)?
• When business priorities change, who decides what ITAM should do differently?

If the honest answer is “we’d ask whoever helped last time”, you need to develop an ITAM plan.

How to go about it

Here’s how I’d approach it.

1. Borrow your organisation’s risk framework. Step 1.10 asks you to define how you’ll assess SAM risks. If your organisation already has a corporate or IT risk framework, use the same matrices and criteria. Your risks then sit alongside everyone else’s, and nobody has to translate. We have a separate ITAM Risk Management process if you want to know more about how to manage ITAM risks, too. Just sayin’!
2. Talk to the middle and senior managers before you write anything. Ask each one what their vision is, how it fits the IT strategy, what software problems they have, and what they’d like to see improved. Their teams will be doing a lot of the day-to-day work, so you need to know what their week already looks like.
3. Write down what each process is for, and how you’ll know it’s working. Step 1.30 covers objectives, CSFs and KPIs for each operational process. If you can’t say how you’d measure a process, you’re never going to know whether it’s actually working.
4. Assess the impact on roles and processes. Write down who is affected, circulate it and get sign-off. If you use ITIL or COBIT, go through each management area and note what it needs to do for your SAM and HAM outcomes. It’s dull work, but it’s how responsibilities end up in someone’s job description rather than yours!
5. Do a maturity assessment and a gap analysis. This tells you where you are, where you need to be, and what stands between the two. Ideally, get someone independent to run the maturity assessment… we can help with that too!
6. Structure the plan around people, partners, tools and processes, and keep it visual. Make it easy to follow. People should be able to find their responsibilities without needing you to talk them through the document.
7. Put review dates in the diary now. Review the plan once a year or so, and do a full review whenever the strategy is reviewed. If the organisation outsources a large part of its technology, or the business direction changes significantly, revisit the plan then as well.

You don’t have to solve everything in one sitting. If one part of the operating model is holding you back, say, how your SAM tool links to ITSM and Procurement, or the balance between your own team and external support, look at that piece in more detail. It also gives you the evidence for a business case to get in more people or tooling to solve the problem.

If you’d like to hear Rory and Kylie discussing the ITAM Plan / TOM, you can watch Part 1 of our SAM plan videos and Part 2.

And if those questions about who does what sound uncomfortably familiar, download the process free until 28 October. Start with the responsibility that keeps finding its way back to your desk.