Still excluded from an ITIL project

Office politics when the budget is tight

Dear Bob ...

Thank you for your response to my last question ("Excluded from an ITIL project," Advice Line, 7/23/2008). Some more information might help clarify my situation.

We're in a very tight budget cycle. Tight enough that essential, dying system replacements are being held at the financial approval level. So there's no official funding for a replacement. The ITIL initiative is in the 'build a business case' phase of the project.

I have discussed the situation with management both officially and unofficially. Completely different answers as to why I am not involved. I'm getting a lot of finger pointing at the person(s) who decided not to involve me in the business case phase of the project. Once I gathered enough information I think I've figured out that they don't want me on the team because I know enough to make it almost impossible to create a business case for a new product. So the easiest way to prevent that is to exclude me from this phase of the project.

My own motivations for wanting onto the team at this point are mixed. The main one is to truly know what they want so that I can contribute my knowledge and experience into getting the requirements defined correctly, to keep the process grounded.

I'm not overly worried about job security.A friend in another company has been after me for years. While I like where I'm working, I'm not about to make the mistake of bending over just to keep a job.

I think you can see my frustration in being kept in the dark. I know the project team doesn't have the good sense God gave rice (nice turn of phrase) but they do have pure, blind self-interest in great quantities.

- Still outside the tent

Dear Outsider ...

Thanks for the additional information. With it, I have a new piece of advice: Ignore the project completely.

This is a probability call, so use your judgment. Here's my guess: This project is and will continue to be a non-starter. Business case development will keep some people busy for awhile. They'll publish a document that will be widely admired before it's put on a bookshelf someplace, gathering dust until someone decides to re-use the three-ring binder it was published in.

But in a company that's in a tight budget cycle, this wouldn't get funded even if your current system and process were pretty bad. There won't be enough money to fix all of the causes of the tight budget, let alone a discretionary system change like this one.

What you might consider doing is dropping a bug in someone's ear, letting them know that whenever the business-case-development team discovers a major business pain point they should let you know ... would they please pass this along informally, thank you very much.

After all, even in the best-case scenario an actual ITIL-compliant deployment of a new system wouldn't be finished for at least a year, and that's assuming the project is fast-tracked. In some cases you might be able to put in a quick interim fix that gives the business an 80/20 solution to tide it over until the real system and process shows up.

It might even happen that way. What's more likely is that this will alert some people who matter that the emperor really is buck-nekkid, no matter how fancily his ITIL suit has been described.

- Bob