Observe directly

An ITIL® Guiding Principle

Haitham Hamza

AXELOS.com

Case Study
September 2016
Contents
Introduction 3
Adopting and adapting ITIL 4
Continual service improvement 5
Guiding principles 6
What are your recommended Best Practices? 6
About AXELOS 7
Trade marks and statements 7
 Observe Directly: An ITIL® Guiding Principle 3

1 Introduction
1.1 WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU DO?
My name is Haitham Hamza. I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science
and Information Technology at Cairo University. My core specialization is computer
and communication networks. I have gained the ITIL® Practitioner, ITIL Expert,
and COBIT® Foundation and Assessor Certificates. In addition to my academic
work, I serve as the Information Network Unit Manager for Cairo University. I am
responsible for planning, designing, deploying, and operating all IT infrastructures
and services for the university.

Cairo University, founded on 21 December 1908, is the largest public school in Egypt and the Middle
East. It has around:
250,000 students;
30,000 employees;
and around 20,000 staff.

The university consists of 25 faculties spread over several campuses across the Giza governorate.
Until August 2013, the university IT services were managed autonomously in each faculty with central
management of two core services; namely, the internet and the email service. In late 2013 and early
2014, the university established the Centre of Knowledge and Electronic Services (CKES) to serve as
the central office for planning and operating all IT services. To ensure scalability, IT services strategic
planning and design are centralized and performed by CKES across the university, while operations are
performed in a two-stage model, with the local IT team in each faculty serving as the first line support,
and the CKES staff as the second line support.
CKES currently has around 70 employees divided among six units:
Management information systems (MIS)
Information networks (INFONET)
Digital library
CU portal
E-Learning
IT training for staff and faculty.

My team, under the information networks unit, consists of 11 engineers and technicians that are
responsible for all servers, DNS, hosting services, and typical internet and communication services.
The team is responsible for designing and transiting new services related to all the above services.
They are also responsible for operating these services for the whole university, and serving as
second-line support for any incidents related to the services that are reported by the local IT teams in
the 25 faculties.
I started investigating the ITIL framework in 2007 when I first joined as a consultant in the Software
Engineering Competence Centre (SECC), which is part of the Information Technology Industry
Development Agency (ITIDA). ITIDA is a governmental entity that operates under the Ministry of
Communication and Information Technology (MCIT) of Egypt. I was responsible for studying the
framework and proposing an approach for promoting the framework in the IT industry in Egypt.
In 2009, I started the certification journey by completing ITIL Foundation, ITIL Capability modules,
and the MALC certificates. In 2010, I received the ITIL Expert certification. I also developed the ITIL
Foundation training material that was accredited by APMG. As an accredited APMG Trainer for ITIL, I
delivered the ITIL Foundation training for more than 300 individuals from companies and universities. I
have also delivered consultation services for ITIL adoption in more than six large organizations in various
IT sectors including education, health, and telecommunication.
Before assuming my position as the Information Network Unit Manager at Cairo University, there was
no awareness or adoption of ITIL in the organization. The service lifecycle was ad hoc and no processes
were written about or adopted by IT within the organization a whole.
4 Observe directly: An ITIL® Guiding Principle

2 Adopting and adapting ITIL

When I assumed my position as INFONET Manager, I found there to be no monitoring for the overall
network infrastructure. Moreover, none of the IT employees had an understanding of the core business
or what it needed from them. Certainly, none knew or attempted to observe the pattern of business
activities in order to understand how to better serve the customer.
We fielded a lot of complaints about the network speed, and it was a regular challenge to explain why it
was slow, which was due to the sheer size of the university and its large and diverse customer base. The
customers were not happy and university business operations were frequently interrupted. I understood
that the problem had two sides; one related to customer expectation and the management of those
expectations; the other related to the technical issues and problems which impacted the overall speed.
I decided to address both sides and, given my understanding of ITIL, adopted the Best Practices of the
ITIL framework to confront this business challenge.
The first set of ITIL processes that I defined and adopted at INFONET of Cairo University included
the following:
Business relationship management (BRM): I realized that the business clearly needed BRM at the
university. The business needed IT to talk its language and understand its business objectives,
needs and requirements. This process is not always easy to adopt when starting the ITIL journey;
however, I capitalized on the fact that I am already part of the customer base as a faculty member.
The main objective from this process at the beginning is simply to manage the expectations of our
customers, understand their needs, give them the confidence that we, as IT, talk their language and
understand their business.
Service level management (SLM): I selected this process to manage the expectations of our
customers and to train the IT staff to respect their customers by striving to deliver everything
we promised. The process was adopted with simple definitions and agreement on service levels for
all services delivered to customers, enforcing the IT staff to work within this service level agreement,
(SLA). Whenever an SLA was violated, I requested the team responsible to analyze why and provide
one well-justified recommendation: either to change the SLA or to fix the issue that prevented us
from achieving our promised SLA. They now feel ownership for the services they are accountable for,
and they strive to improve their performance.
Service catalogue management: Our customers did not know what they could ask for and,
conversely, what they couldn’t ask for. Clearly, knowing the services we provide and who can request
them was a good move in managing the customer expectation and improving stratification. Internet
connectivity and its related services are now better understood because we articulated them in detail
in our catalogue.
Incident management: The team used to resolve incidents and issues in an ad hoc manner, without
any recording or tracing. Mishandling of the priorities of incoming incidents made the service and
support inconsistent and confusing to the customer.
Request fulfilment: To better manage the customer expectation, a formal request fulfilment process
was established. It facilitated the way our customers requested their services and, at the same time,
freed our IT staff from ambiguous requests from customers.
Access management: The IT staff did not understand which customer was eligible to receive what
service. They worked in a mode of ‘making all customers happy’ by delivering whatever services
the customer asked for. I found no trace of a policy or set of rules that defined eligibility for
accessing services.
Event management: This was a fundamental process for confronting the key business challenge of
the slowness of the internet. Without knowing where my bandwidth went, I would never
be able to plan or manage it. With this simple and logical statement, I convinced the team to
adopt a monitoring tool for the network in conjunction with the event management process. The
main objective at this point was to understand the dynamics of our network and bandwidth usage
and demand so we could better deliver our internet services.
 Observe Directly: An ITIL® Guiding Principle 5

It is worth pointing out that I attempted to adopt the service and asset configuration management
(SACM) process in the first batch of processes; however, it did not work. The main reason was the
overwhelming size of the infrastructure. This was compounded by the lack of knowledge of the SACM
process concepts within the team. They needed to formally learn the process and develop the technical
background required to deal with the SACM tools. I decided to postpone adoption until we overcame
these challenges, which I’m pleased to say we are now in a position to take on.
These ITIL processes needed to be adapted to fit the scale and nature of Cairo University’s business.
ITIL professionals should embrace the adopt and adapt concept to ensure the processes fit the
business’s requirement. In our case, we adapted the BRM and the SLM processes to fit the nature of
our customers, who are primarily academic staff with diverse backgrounds and preferences. All activities
related to service level requirements, identifications and service reporting are adapted to be practical for
implementation. In addition, event management was simplified to fit the scope and current capability
of our unit. In particular, activities related to second level correlation, and interfaces with change and
problem management, are removed in current adoption.
Naturally, resistance arises when new changes are introduced into the environment. The main
resistance I faced during the adoption of ITIL was centred on the event management process, as the
team considered the process to be too complicated, with little value on return. From the other side,
at the beginning, customers resisted the concept of the service desk and the incident management
procedures we put in place. They believed that it was much easier to contact the IT manager or their
favoured IT staff member in person to get things done. It took a while for the customer to appreciate
that the service desk could be more efficient in resolving their incidents than if they contacted specific
individuals or top management.
The main challenge faced in the adoption of ITIL at Cairo University was organization change
management. (ITIL Practitioner Guidance discusses organizational change management [OCM], which
was not covered in previous ITIL publications). We did not do proper OCM when adopting ITIL. This
made the adoption more difficult and slower. We are integrating this aspect now, taking our lead from
the publicized AXELOS Guidance, along with other resources that provide more detailed Best Practice on
OCM. We also adopted some processes from the CMMI-SVC model. In particular, we adopted processes
relating to project management, project monitoring and control, and project planning. These process
areas are useful for service design and transition stages as they are a collection of projects which require
project management capability. The ITIL framework addresses management issues of projects but not
at the depth needed to run intensive transition projects such as those adopted at the scale of Cairo
University.
We are proud at INFONET in Cairo University that we set up a full service desk with the above
processes and started our second phase of process adoption. I am most proud of being able to detect
and proactively act on events that would have adverse impact on our services before they take place
by adopting event management. We are happy to see our customers interact with our processes
effectively…we made them speak ITIL!

3 Continual service improvement

INFONET is now involved in mega-scale IT projects that affect around half a million customers. The
scale of these projects requires well-developed and implemented transition and operation processes.
We are facing a challenge in adopting and scaling-up change management, release and deployment,
service asset configuration management (SACM), and service desk processes. We are re-thinking the
model we use to operate services and plan to adopt an integrated tool to run these processes, (change,
SACM, and service desk operations).
I believe that ITIL training is fundamental to communicating the vision of ITIL to my team. I have
just concluded six full days of training for all my staff, which explained in detail how to manage those
processes with the software we use. The team was assigned the task of configuring and implementing
those processes.
6 Observe directly: An ITIL® Guiding Principle

4 Guiding principles
Several complaints were received from users in several faculties regarding the speed of the internet,
emphasizing how low speed hindered their business activities (admin reporting, exams, etc.). The IT
network team worked in firefighting mode in an attempt to speed up the internet as much as possible,
in order to make their customer/users happy.
When I assumed office as IT manager, I too received such complaints. I asked the network team: “How
do you know that the internet is really slow?” They said, “We observe the link speed with the typical
monitoring tools.”
I asked them to visit any site that reported complaints and to observe what business activities they were
performing. After several visits, we concluded that some sites were running an e-learning application,
which meant they were encountering issues magnified by the number of students attending the course
and the nature of the course material, (video, audio, high-resolution figures, etc.). Their courses were
not sized or planned to run on the campus network.
One of the most important activities in running IT is to directly interact with the customer on the spot
and make first-order observations that go beyond the typical IT measurements and analysis tools.
In addition, I found the following key principles very important for successful adoption of ITIL at
Cairo University:
Focus on value: It is crucial that the adoption of ITIL must return value to the customers, even
if the value is indirect. This was the key principle I used to get buy-in from my team to adopt event
management, SLAs, and the service catalogue. By clearly explaining and demonstrating the value to
business, it was clear to them why we should go for the full adoption of these processes.
Be transparent: At INFONET, we aim for full transparency, both internally with staff and externally
with customers. The BRM and SLM processes taught my staff that facing the customer with the
fact of what is going on in major incidents, outage, changes, new polices, etc. is the best way to gain
support, confidence, and respect. We successfully made ‘be transparent’ one of our core values.
Keep it simple: There is a misconception that ITIL is designed for large-scale IT organizations who
can afford expensive tools and process consultations. We jump-started our ITIL adoption by, at
times, simplifying ITIL Best Practice to suit our capacity, resources, and capability. By breaking the
barrier to adopting complex processes and tools, the team is better prepared and more tolerant of
added complexity as the process scales up and the business becomes more complicated.

5 What are your recommended Best Practices?

5.1 TOP FIVE ITIL DO’S
Adopt and adapt ITIL utilizing the CSI approach.
Understand the nine ITIL guiding principles and translate them into your own context in order to
guide your ITIL adoption.
Use the concept of functions to help structure your IT organization and adopt processes
more efficiently.
Adopt the RACI matrix. It has a magical effect.
Embrace the lifecycle approach even if you will not adopt all the processes. The lifecycle is a mind-
set, not only a way to structure and organize the 26 ITIL processes.
 Observe Directly: An ITIL® Guiding Principle 7

About AXELOS
AXELOS is a joint venture company, created by the Cabinet Office on behalf of Her Majesty’s
Government (HMG) in the United Kingdom and Capita plc to run the Global Best Practice portfolio.
It boasts an already enviable track record and an unmatched portfolio of products, including ITIL®,
PRINCE2® and RESILIA™. RESILIA is the new Cyber Resilience Best Practice portfolio.
Used in the private, public and voluntary sectors in more than 180 countries worldwide, the Global
Best Practice products have long been associated with achievement, heightened standards and truly
measurable improved quality.
AXELOS has an ambitious programme of investment for developing innovative solutions and stimulating
the growth of a vibrant, open international ecosystem of training, consultancy and examination
organizations. Developments to the portfolio also include the launch of PRINCE2 Agile®, the ITIL
Practitioner qualification and a professional development programme for practitioners, fully aligned with
AXELOS Global Best Practice.

Trade marks and statements

AXELOS, the AXELOS logo, the AXELOS swirl logo, ITIL®, MoP®, M_o_R®, MoV®, MSP®, P3M3®,
P3O®, PRINCE2® and PRINCE2 Agile® are registered trade marks of AXELOS Limited. RESILIA is a
trade mark of AXELOS Limited.

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