I once worked for a large enterprise that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars training its global IT workforce in ITIL. In fact, others such as business partners and senior leaders jumped in, the commitment was admirable. Teams flew to workshops, sat through training, and came away with badges. But as the weeks/months rolled by, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something didn’t smell right.
There was a lot of talk about implementing ITIL and that still stops me because i believe you don’t implement ITIL. You don’t do ITIL. ITIL isn’t a product, a project, or a checklist, its guidance and in the right hands, it’s incredibly useful. But saying you’re rolling out ITIL across the business like it’s a new CRM software shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what it’s for.
In my opinion, what should have happened and what I did attempt to steer toward, was a conversation about improving how we worked. Where were the bottlenecks? Which processes were producing inconsistent results? How could we make things simpler, faster, and more accountable?
Instead, what we got was a flood of process documents, in fact more dollars were spent across rolling out process guides as produced by a big 4 consultancy that looked brilliant on paper but didn’t align with reality, and ended up as shelf-ware. Process owners and teams were ticking boxes, not solving problems. I remember one incident review where someone said, we followed the ITIL process, and no one asked whether it actually helped.
The Real-World Consequences of Doing ITIL
What followed was sort of predictable. Service delivery I believe slowed down because teams were now waiting for approvals that hadn’t previously existed. Mind you i would say, most just dropped the newly formed process concept completely if the situation was deemed as critical. Incident categorisation became confusing, almost complex, trying to mimic the examples from the newly formed material rather than reflecting what users actually experienced. Metrics improved on paper, sort of, but user satisfaction quietly remained the same or pointed lower. We spent lots time reporting on SLA breaches that no one understood or acted on.
Even worse, it created silos. Some people became process champions while others quietly ignored the new rules altogether. Instead of collaboration, we had the opposite, debates about whether a change was standard, normal, or emergency, in some cases it became very confusing for some.
To me that’s the risk when certification becomes the goal. People start treating the framework as something sacred rather than something flexible. The real value of ITIL or any framework comes when you adapt it to your organisation’s context, not when you try to apply it verbatim.
And let’s not forget most organisations already have processes. They may just be undocumented, inconsistent, or siloed, but the goal isn’t to implement ITIL as if nothing existed before. The goal is to improve what’s already there, using the guidance as a tool, not as a rule book and for me that were we went wrong.
Use ITIL as a Lens, Not a Label
To be clear, I’m not anti ITIL, like most ive made a living from it for many years. Far from it. I’ve seen it used very effectively when the focus is on capability, not compliance. But I’ve also seen too many cases where it becomes a badge collecting exercise, with little meaningful change on the ground.
If your organisation is spending big on ITIL training, that’s fine. But ask yourself the following.
- What are you really trying to improve?
- Who is accountable for the outcomes?
- Are you using ITIL to support your goals, or are you trying to make the business fit a model that was never meant to be prescriptive?
If your answer starts with We’re doing ITIL, it might be time to take a step back.