Food for thought

"Frankly, I'm desperate - I'm choking" is a phrase I've become familiar with over years. Faced with a daily diet of conflicting business priorities, resistant staff and increasing pressure to reduce costs, many IT Directors and Service Managers bear a striking resemblance these days to someone asked to suck an elephant up a straw. In an attempt to wet appetite, an ITIL menu is rolled out. However, grasping at ITIL as a saviour for all ills without comprehensive forethought, analysis and planning is folly.

What's dish of day?

Chef's special starter offers how ITIL can enable your organisation to adapt rapidly to changing market conditions and service constraints lightly sautéed on a bed of crisp, green cost savings. The dish of day tantalises taste buds with how implementing ITIL can leverage maximum value from your strategic partnerships. For dessert Sir? Madam? Let me tempt you with our double cream, extra thick service continuity `n' high availability gateaux, lightly drizzled with consistency and robustness. "What's house whine (sic)?" "A devilish, fruity little number preferred by most IT staff; Chateaux IT'IL Never Happen If We Resist Enough; 2002, 2003 or 2004 - a superb year for suppliers".

At worst, ITIL can prove to be an expensive set of processes and procedures nobody in your organisation follows. At best, it formalises common sense; adding value to your daily operations, internal and external relationships and, can fully flex in concert with your Corporate Strategy. But, only if you don't choke to death trying to stuff it all in at one sitting.

ITIL's exquisite beauty lies in its simplicity, flexibility and risk management emphasis. In all its implemented glory with internal processes dovetailing into your 3rd party supplier processes, everyone knows who's doing what and when. Indeed, research carried out on behalf of ITSMF shows that of those questioned regarding use and benefits of ITIL, 97% said their organisation had derived benefits; 70% of these describing these benefits as tangible and measurable.

Are you hungry for it?

You wouldn't spend your hard earned cash on a new, expensive car without researching quality and having a test drive unless you had money to burn. However, it's surprising how organisations will begin implementing ITIL before researching some of basics and asking a few simple questions such as; will it save us money? Will it add value to our activities or value chain? Will it enable us to become more agile? Will it improve our customer service and perception?

It can be frustrating being a senior executive, wanting desperately to actually achieve something tangible for organisation but feeling like a flea in a jar - jumping up and down but just hitting your head on lid. Having previously witnessed benefits and opportunities implementing ITIL or some of its components can bring, it's tempting to blindly assume that as it all worked perfectly well before it must work in your current organisation. Think before you jump.

What do you want or need to achieve within context of your current organisation? What is it you think you'll achieve by implementing ITIL? Generally, identification of perhaps 2 or 3 high level, key objectives is an excellent start. A maximum of three objectives focuses mind. Any more than 3 and bar may appear just too high to hurdle. Objectives could be:-

The result? A powerful marketing system that will save you lots of time and enable you to spend more time promoting and advertising your business.

1. Know thy email program! ========================== Whilst all email programs exist for same reason - to send and receive email - and whilst most of them work in roughly similar ways, it still pays you to spend 30-45 minutes with your email program to get to nitty-gritty parts. The sort of parts that mastering will enable you to cut valuable minutes off your day dealing with your inbox.

Like how to set up an auto-reply, or a signature, or automatically save incoming and outgoing emails into different folders, like a well-organised filing cabinet.

Most email programs have very good 'Help' files - make use of them in your quest for more knowledge and more time.

Once you've got a good grip on your email program, move on to tip 2...

2. Automation is vital! ======================= You should aim to spend about 85-90% of your time promoting your business, NOT answering emails! If, like me, you get over a 100 emails a day, not automating your emails can be a real killer as far as your personal productivity goes.

Remember how in stage 1 I suggested that you get to grips with your email program and learn how to automatically save emails into folders? Well, this is a key strategy I use to save myself time.

Why should I waste precious time moving from subject to subject, looking at each incoming email in turn, when I can have my email program file my incoming emails automatically into subjects of my choosing. Subjects like each different project I'm working on, different clients, different business areas (marketing, sales, research, and so on).

With all of my incoming emails automatically placed into relevant folders, I can move from folder to folder, keeping my working memory focused on one area, with result that I become more productive than if my attention was having to be spread across multiple areas.

With many email programs you can even set up automatic replies (known as autoresponders) for each folder - so that when a new email gets 'dropped' into that folder a reply is automatically generated to sender, allowing you to acknowledge their email and promise them a response shortly. Without YOU having to lift a finger!

How efficient and marketing-smart is that?!

3. Set up your signature. NOW! ============================== It really is a fundamental online marketing principle and if you don't have a signature you are missing out on chance to advertise your product or service to literally thousands of people.

Thousands? Yes, because everyday emails get forwarded on to friends and business colleagues. Jokes, sad stories, news items, useful tips... all these types of emails and more get forwarded on to people you probably don't know.

If you don't have a signature set up, here's some examples. Note that they are a maximum of 8 lines long and each contain a compelling reason to DO something, like visit their website to grab a free report...

Example 1: