The disciplines of ITIL define these capabilities and constraints in a service management framework, to encourage IT executives to make sound decisions considering pragmatic approach to practices that support sound business, cost consciousness and risk management. Too much focus on one of these three elements without the other is it's own element of risk.

The IT Service Management Framework is meant to consider the full management practices balancing act that takes into account an organization's capabilities and constraints to approach matters of change and their affect on the IT Environment.

It is easy to get myopic on the balancing act at a macro level and introduce costs, risk, or dissatisfiers to the strategy. IT Service Management maturity is recognized in developing ITIL champions that challenge and evolve practices to deliver to your organizations present objectives, while transforming your key practices to deliver the right level of change, maturity and performance criteria that defines the goals and implications of these goals.

At the macro level, IT knows IT... So to learn to manage unreasonable requests, timelines, and complexity and be the organizational hero is 'what they might be known to value'. What if our rewards system were incenting the wrong behavior?

If a component is a part of an application, an application, part of a service portfolio, the sum of which is a set of performance expectations in terms of cost, resources, and decision making capabilities.. How effectively are we making change? Where do we need to adjust our focus to continue to meet the business needs?

Considering these questions in light of my conversations with other practioners in the industry:

(1) Have you written any kind of process maturity business plan that defines the key capabilities, constraints, threats, and opportunities? What are the key requirements or 'must do's'?

(2) What would you indicate are your organizations key capabilities and constraints to change? How are they positioned to align, communicate, and support these requirements?

(3) What are the unique process focus areas that will be affected by this change?
* How have you marketed the process standards to date?
* What is working?
* Where are the barriers to alignment?
* What are the key portfolio, governance, or service management implications?
* What conclusions might be leading us in the wrong direction?
* What performance indicators would evidence effectiveness?