Best Practices Help School Districts Do More With Less
School Advisor , 2008 Issue No. 2

Doing more with less is becoming an all-too-familiar struggle for school districts across the Midwest. That’s why it’s so important for districts to employ appropriate technology best practices; it not only streamlines processes and increases efficiencies but also helps districts contain costs. 

One way to do this is by adopting the best practices associated with ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library). ITIL is a framework for best practices related to IT services. While it’s not prescriptive—it doesn’t detail how to conduct specific IT practices—it does shed light on the types of processes best-in-class organizations use. 

ITIL Best Practices

What kinds of best practices does ITIL include? Here are just a few: 

• Change Management. The goal of change management is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for the efficient and prompt handling of all changes in order to minimize service disruption.

• Financial Management. The goal of financial management is for IT services to provide sound financial management of the IT organization, ensuring that services are delivered with maximum efficiency. This includes understanding service costs, accounting for cost recovery, if applicable, and budgetary planning.

• Capacity Management. The goal of capacity management is to proactively monitor and plan for future upgrades such that district needs are met in a timely, cost-effective manner. 

• Configuration Management. Configuration management aims to provide information that the IT organization uses to maintain/increase up-time and customer service. Configuration management involves maintaining up-to-date documentation on the network, servers, and workstations such that outages can be quickly rectified.  

• Service-level Management. The goal of service-level management is to maintain and improve IT service quality and performance. This includes managing customer satisfaction and adherence to agreements between the IT department and the organization regarding IT service quality and performance. 

Other best practices include release management, security management, continuity management, incident management, problem management, and availability management.   

ITIL Version 3

ITIL recently came out with Version 3, which builds on all of the processes defined in Version 2—but contains a greater focus on ROI, is more industry focused, and offers more guidance on softer issues such as cultural issues and organizational politics. It also contains additional best practices, including service reporting, service measurement, service validation and testing, request fulfillment, knowledge management, strategy generation, and demand management. 

So how do you get started? First you assemble a team, establish clear goals (including an objective, scope, timing, and success measures), and use ITIL as a roadmap to process improvement. Consider the following steps:

• Review the current state process. Assess where you’re at in terms of best practices for each process area, and identify current process flow and where it is on a continuum from weak to strong.

• Select one or two ITIL areas for focus—do not attempt to undertake all at once. Involve key stakeholders in the process.

• Design the future state process. Be realistic—don’t design a theoretical utopia. Compare it to end user needs and expectations, and check against best practices, internal requirements, and common sense.

• Document “should be” procedures. Redesign and document procedures and work steps, and create tools, forms, check sheets, and records as necessary.

• Develop a plan to move from current state to future state. Document all implementation tasks including who, what, and when. Review and approve the plan, and monitor and report implementation progress.

• Audit implementation and process effectiveness. Review success against process objectives, evaluate results (qualitatively and quantitatively), and continue monitoring. 

Sound complicated? It can be, but Plante & Moran’s Technology Consulting & Solutions team can help. For more information about ITIL and how to use ITIL’s best practices to create efficiencies and contain costs in your district, contact Judy Wright at 248.223.3304 or Sarah Banks at 248.223.3771.