The introduction of formal ITIL processes into organizations has been a focus for improvement over the past two decades. When adopting ITIL there is an impact on the four Ps – people, processes, product (technology) and partners (suppliers) – and this requires a significant organizational commitment to meet improvement objectives, including funding and resources. Many organizations, on completing their process implementation projects, believe that the processes, as implemented, will serve the organization well for some time. Sadly, this is not the case. Unless organizations continually pay attention to the processes, they will almost certainly not protect their initial investment and, more importantly, the processes will not stay abreast of the changing needs of the organization. Neither will any shortfalls in process performance be addressed.

To address this practical and operational issue, the ITIL framework defines a service lifecycle stage – continual service improvement (CSI) – that is intended to measure and improve processes and services. Although ITIL Continual Service Improvement (Cabinet Office, 2011) offers a generic improvement approach, the quality practitioner may need more guidance than the seven-step improvement process can offer. Fortunately, multiple frameworks are available in the public domain to integrate well-defined quality practices into an improvement schema.

In this White Paper we discuss an approach using one such wellestablished process improvement methodology – Six Sigma. The Six Sigma methodology is particularly compatible with ITIL. A basic premise of Six Sigma is a focus on improvement efforts surrounding process, product or service performance that impact on the customer. This relationship is very similar to the one between services and the business and how those services are managed via the ITIL processes. We review some basic ITIL principles; we also discuss how those principles apply to Six Sigma, and how Six Sigma can be applied practically to CSI efforts. Finally, we offer some practical tips for applying Six Sigma to improve ITIL processes and services in general.

This White Paper will be useful to all ITIL practitioners, process owners and managers, but it will be of particular interest to CSI managers, reporting analysts, process improvement programme managers, problem managers, service level managers, service owners and directors. As we will discover, Six Sigma can have broad applicability to support the ITIL processes. For example, we (the authors) have worked with an organization that employed the Design for Six Sigma (DMADV) method to help in designing and implementing their ITIL processes. For this organization, a critical component of the process design was an assurance that the processes would function at a high level of quality when implemented. We have also observed organizations using the DMAIC approach when designing metrics to support problem management or their CSI initiatives (see section 3 for an explanation of these two approaches).

https://www.axelos.com/case-studies-and-white-papers/integrating-six-sigma-and-itil-for-csi