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• ITIL Compliance & Accreditation

South West London NHS

ITIL and new Service Level Agreements to prepare for the National Programme for IT

Background

• Spread across multiple sites, the Trust has in the past struggled to deliver a high quality of service and support, and now needed to prepare for the National Programme for IT by adopting ITIL processes to ultimately transform the service culture
• The existing Service Desk was staffed by three full time employees supporting every application across the Trust, and was reliant upon an Access database with no opportunity to collect figures and track trends or identify areas that needed technical or training input
• Poor communication between users and IT technical teams means there was a barrier between the two, which also led to confusion over system changes which caused unacceptable unplanned downtime

Plan-Net\'s intervention

• Plan-Net created a number of generic ITIL processes which were rapidly tailored to meet the needs of the Trust
• The new ITIL processes embedded using a workshop approach, where changes were explained to the service delivery team
• ITIL Foundation training was provided for 14 of the IT service delivery staff, which helped the team understand the goals and objectives of the Trust and gave them a common language across all service and support functions
• Consultants worked closely with the service delivery staff to improve understanding and communication and overcome the barrier between IT department and users
• As service management system Magic was adopted, Plan-Net helped set the expectations and define requirements, particularly in areas such as information gathering and reporting

Results

• Adoption of Best Practice ITIL processes has allowed to create the right environment for the deployment of Connecting for Health applications and the creation of new Service Level Agreements
• Problems associated with poor change and release management have been reduced and the new service desk is beginning to gain user confidence
• New services such as making the Service Catalogue available on the Intranet are increasing the service desk visibility and making IT service delivery processes far more proactive
• Thanks to the increased level of communication, frank discussions to define ongoing service requirements is finally possible
• Feedback from other organisations involved with the NPfIT states that the Trust is significantly ahead in the adoption of ITIL, especially at service desk level

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