Effective ITIL project leadership: Plan-Do-Check-Act

Effective ITIL project leadership: Plan-Do-Check-Act

The first step in the Plan-Do-Check-Act process is to have an executive address ITIL stakeholders at all project kick-off meetings.

This falls under the "Plan" and "Do" activities and also shows the team that the ITIL program has leadership support.

If a CIO or senior executive doesn't attend the kick-off meeting, project support is questioned and that immediately weakens the team and the leader's ability to direct the program.

Following the kick-off meeting, leaders execute the "Do" portion of the cycle by simply following the same process as the rest of their team.

When you talk about "Plan-Do-Check-Act" in ITIL, the "Do" really means that leaders must set the example and establish a culture where the senior executives follow the process like any other employee.

One CIO I have worked with took this a step further and communicated to the entire company how he followed the process. He did this after receiving an irate call from a senior executive who claimed the service desk was not giving him the priority he deserved.

After sharing the process and his own service desk requests with the executive, the CIO pinned the list on every local notice board and in the service desk operations room to give the technicians a tool for response when they were getting pressure to increase the priority of certain tickets.

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