Over the last couple of weeks I have been looking for samples that describe how to "behave" in a service management environment. The trigger for this was a request from my customer that wanted to define the 2 to 3 most important behavior guidelines to work successfully in the new situation where they are implementing several ITIL processes and supporting tooling (HP software of course ;-). In collecting information to address this request, I got some interesting discussions with several colleagues several of which I want to share with you through this post.

One of the discussions centered around the question whether steering the right behaviour should be a pre-requisite or an after-thought? In most of the service management projects that I have seen, the initial focus is on changing roles, metrics and activities. Of course the role descriptions include topics like skills, training and experience. However behaviour is typically "managed" later, based on actual execution of the service management system (incl. processes). BTW some organizations don't even manage behaviour at all....

So In my opinion behaviour should be addressed after implementation during execution and continual improvement. The main reason being that people are already being confronted with many changes when they are "forced" to become service- and process-oriented. This is typically pereceived as "limiting your freedom" and by including behaviour guidelines to the pile of changes the freedom becomes even more limited (read: the individual resistance get's higher).

Another point that came up is the statement that focusing on behaviour only is too narrow and should be looked at in the broader context of competency management. This includes topics like character, behavior, experience, training and knowledge. A strong point made here was that there is no way you can ensure behavior if a person doesn't' have the right character, talent, ability and motivation to do what you have asked him to do. So you really need to look at behavior from more angles.

So one of my ultimate conclusions was that focusing on behavior only is a too fragmented approach for ensuring an fully integrated service management system in the end. Would you (dis-)agree? Why?

Regards,
Jeroen Bronkhorst