BT Managed Service: Keeping the ‘blue lights’ on with continual IT improvements

Keeping the IT running for essential public services is at the core of the UK’s BT Managed Service organization. Having a clear and objective understanding of its capability levels – and what areas of its operations need to improve – is an ongoing mission.

Therefore, the company was the first organization to complete a fully certified, ITSM maturity assessment using the ITIL Maturity Model, conducted by itSMF UK, an Accredited Consulting Partner for PeopleCert.

In this article, BT Managed Service’s Sean Burkinshaw, Service Management Specialist, and Hannah Morris, Service Request Specialist, outline the learnings from the maturity assessment and how the organization has implemented improvements that their customers value.

BT Managed Service is an organization providing managed network and IT services in the UK and Ireland.

Its 2,500 employees look after the technology requirements – including IT processes such as change, problem, incident and request for government and public sector organizations; what Sean Burkinshaw calls “The big stuff”, including the large government departments, numerous police forces, hospitals and large businesses.

Using the ITIL Maturity Model to understand BT Managed Service’s level of maturity and capability was, according to Sean, about “holding an industry mirror to ourselves" and wanting to make the organization better.

Sean said: “We do a lot of audits against international standards, but ITIL is the IT service management model we align to, so the audit content fits our organization and gives us an objective view of reality.

“All assessments feed into continual improvement and audit reports are gold dust for identifying improvement activities, giving us a clear steer on what we can do better. From the outset, we were very much focused on improvements as our primary objective.”

And the ITIL Maturity Model includes the option to assess service design, something rarely included in other assessments: “We’d not previously mapped their maturity and capability, so this gave our service designers independent insight into what they can improve too,” Sean said.

Among the areas of focus in the assessment were standardization and organizational culture: whether the company’s people were engaged and understood the value they bring to customers.

Positive findings from the assessment showed that BT Managed Service is mature in terms of service management practices – though some are more mature than others.

For example, the service design practice was deemed exemplary, as was continual improvement.

The ITIL Maturity Model went over and above other assessment frameworks, particularly concerning the cultural elements featured in ITIL. This revealed the openness and willingness of people to share information with the assessor.

Indeed, most people referenced the internal culture and habitual nature of continual improvement in the organization. “As this is one of the key concepts in ITIL, it was good to see this receive a high score,” Sean said. And any improvements included in the final report would have come directly from the teams, he said.

Hannah Morris added: “The assessment showed the openness and honesty of our people; collaborating and wanting to make things better.”

“When we talk about the ITIL concept of continual improvement, the clue is in the name – we are working to improve continually. And we don’t see assessments such as the ITIL Maturity Model as a one-off. We want to keep our objective view of reality as things change.

“And, within in the organization, sharing the maturity assessments and continual improvement with senior leadership ensures we’re seen as professionals in what we do.”

“Many of our customers run the UK’s critical national infrastructure. So, it’s vital the IT works and that we have their trust. Ultimately, it’s about working every day to do things better.”