ITSM Professor

I was recently asked to clarify the roles of the Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner and wanted to share with you information from our Certified Process Design Engineer (CPDE) class.

Roles and Responsibilities:
Process Owner – This individual is “Accountable” for the process. They are the go-to person and represent this process across the entire organization. They will ensure that the process is clearly defined, designed and documented (check out our free process design templates!). They also ensure that the process has a set of Policies for governance.Example: The process owner for Incident management will ensure that all of the activities to Identify, Record, Categorize, Investigate, … all the way to closing the incident are defined and documented with clearly defined roles, responsibilities, handoffs and deliverables. An example of a policy in could be… “All Incidents must be logged”. Policies are rules that govern the process. The Process Owner ensures that all P…

LEAN Principles

LEAN principles originated in Japan with the “Toyota Production System” and have evolved from manufacturing. Tools and techniques for LEAN are rocking the world of Information Technology (LEAN IT). LEAN does not stand alone! There is a DevOps Foundation certification class available that explains how LEAN, AGILE and ITSM dove tail together to optimize a DevOps integrated delivery pipeline. The core idea is to deliver customer value while eliminating waste (Muda). The goal is to provide value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.

What About KANBAN?

KANBAN is one of many techniques utilized for LEAN practices and results in an increase in productivity and value for individuals and teams. In Japanese the word KAN means visual and the word BAN means board. KANBAN is a visual board that helps teams to visualize work and get more done. If you’re reading this because you are interested in using KANBAN for yourself or your team, here is…

Learning the principles and practices of DevOps or Agile Service Management or learning how to become an Agile Process Owner are great, but having the credential that validates that you are certified could be a game changer for you in your career path.  There are many certification courses available from the DevOps Campus so be sure to browse through to find those that are best suited for your or your teams career path or job role function.  If you are just getting started there are a lot of free resources available to assist you on that journey. Two free whitepapers that I found helpful were:
What is DevOps?- This is an in-depth overview for DevOps with a lot of good information.  It’s a great getting started and study guide.
What is Agile Service Management? – Agile Service Management (Agile SM) ensures that ITSM processes reflect Agile values and are designed with “just enough” control and structurein order to effectively and efficiently deliver services that facilitate customer ou…

This blog is in response to those IT Professionals who want to know what to expect for the “Managing Across the Lifecycle” (MALC) class, taking the exam and receiving both the MALC and ITIL Expert certifications upon passing the MALC exam.  If you have talked with others that took this class and the exam a few years ago you will be happy to know that the format of this class has changed from what it used to be.  Classes are filled with interesting dialogue, exercises and even laughter as IT managers and practitioners with varied skill sets work together to validate competencies and knowledge for: Key concepts of the service lifecycleCommunication and stakeholder managementIntegrating service management processes across the service lifecycleManaging services across the service lifecycleGovernance and organizationMeasuring and demonstrating business valueImplementing and improving service management capabilitySounds simple right?  It's the level of detail in each of these areas and b…

Business requirements are not static.  The rate of dynamic change for new evolving business needs is increasing as you are reading this blog.  The traditional software development practice for building one big honking monolithic program to provision services is not applicable to the explosion of need. This old way of thinking and deploying is not conducive to Agile. To understand a microservice let’s first start with our traditional view point.  For this purpose, let’s say that you want to build a “Self Service Catalog”.   To make this seemingly complex service less complex let’s break it up into many microservices.   For example; one microservice might be for “Creation of Online Account” another for making a selection from the “Service Catalog”.  One might be to “Select Payment Method” and yet another microservice for “Invoicing” and so on.  These are many microservices or sub-services that will eventually be connected via Application Programming Interfaces. These microservices are …

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on the move and the race is on. In previous years, and for the most part even today, AI has been dominated by the worlds high tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon.  Regardless of where you work or the size of your business, the industry is starving for more information and true knowledge management.  AI goes beyond knowledge management and moves us into knowledge engineering.

As found in an MIT Technology Review article, Microsoft has its own AI-powered cloud platform.  You may have heard of Azure.  This team is joining with Amazon to offer Gluon.  It is an interesting name. I don’t know its origin, but it is essentially an open-source deep-learning library. Gluon is supposed to make building neural nets – a key technology for AI that crudely mimics how the human brain learns – as easy as building a smartphone app.
It is no longer just a high-tech game.   With the onslaught of cloud services, any/all service providers (including enterprise-…