By Donna Knapp For many organizations, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed one of two ends of a spectrum: poorly defined processes, or overly-rigorous processes. At either end of the spectrum, these organizations likely struggled to adapt as the pandemic impacted our lives. For those with poorly defined processes, things were probably pretty chaotic. For those with overly-rigorous processes, things were most certainly taking way too long. Even organizations with well-defined processes felt, and continue to feel, pressure to speed up the flow of work, minimize toil, and automate processes where possible. To do this, they must develop a culture of continuous improvement and learning. Continuous improvement is an ongoing effort to improve all aspects of an organization; its people, processes, tools, products, services, and experiences… all of which are tightly integrated. Whether improvements are large or small, what matters most is that they are constant. The highest performing organizations a

Recently, I am hearing things like  “We are the World Leader for Value Stream Mapping”  from vendors and managed service providers alike.  Why? I thought. Value Stream Mapping (VSM) was originally introduced in 1996.  Why is this becoming such a hot item again now?   Other tag lines and mantras that you are likely to hear are things like:      Experience Management is an Evolution Speed to Value not Time to Market Without continuous flow, continuous integration               Continuous Delivery are just an aspire! From Milestones To a Continuous Quality Assurance Flow Shift Left, and    Green to Green Every IT executive, manager, or practitioner can surely add to this list.  I thought about these and other new ways of thinking and realized we are moving beyond Digital Transformations and understood that true success for any delivery cycle will require Flow Engineering. Without continuous flow service providers are likely not going to be able to meet business and customer requirements

I'm working with some of the ITSM Academy folks today, and I realized just how many "assets" they have for you around ITIL 4 ( as well as #Agile #DevOps #XLA #VSM #SRE and #ITSM) .  As Lisa and team always say, "Not ready for training just yet? Please use us as your resource." So I want to do a quick recap of some of the assets available to you, before (and after!) you become Academy Alumni... BLOGS: This one is a little self-serving, but there are TONS of blogs on here - since 2019 all of the ITIL blog posts have been about ITIL 4 - 🦩  LINK  🦩 POST: A business strategy, a digital strategy and an IT strategy walk into the bar and… Oh, wait they can't because of COVID-19. Now what? 🦩  LINK  🦩 WEBINARS: Since 2007, the Academy has hosted monthly “no selling allowed” webinars 🦩  See Archive  🦩 ITIL 4 GUIDING PRINCIPLES POSTER: And the best part, they made it small enough to print for your home office! 🦩  LINK  🦩  WHATIS...?: So the ladies got Serious wi

By Donna Knapp Look around and it’s likely that many of the organizations that you do business with, and perhaps the company that you work for (or want to work for), are demonstrating a commitment to sustainability. Sustainability has become a top priority for CEOs but what is it? In 1987, the United Nations (UN) defined sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”   Sustainability is not just environmentalism, although that is an aspect of it. Sustainability is a set of values that are shared by individuals and organizations worldwide who demonstrate their commitment to these values every day through their decisions and actions. Embedded in sustainability we also find concerns for social equity and economic development, as illustrated by the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals . In recent years much of corporate America, including many large multinationals, has signed on to support the sustainabl

Axelos/Peoplecert has released the newest ITIL Specialist course:  Sustainability in Digital & IT .   This course is designed to provide a practical grounding in the key principles of sustainability (as defined in the United Nation’s sustainable development goals ) and then uses the ITIL continual improvement model to introduce methods and models that organizations can use to improve their sustainability. In recent years much of corporate America, including many large multinationals, has signed on to support the sustainable development goals. Investors are also starting to take notice. The movement for ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing is strong and growing, driven by investor demand and regulatory pressure. So strong, that CEOs are starting to take notice. According to a 2021 IBM survey, 37% of CEOs view sustainability as a priority over the next three to four years. According to McKinsey, “In the very near future…[sustainability] will be as fundamental to doin

I really like teaching Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation course.  I find it really effective to link SRE Foundation to the learners’ needs of incorporating SRE core concepts to ITSM and DevOps (and any other framework!)  This course allows me to explain how SRE improves operational excellence and quality, a key performance measure for ITSM. It also allows me to explain how SRE improves Automation, not only with the DevOps pipeline, but also how Ops uses this data to improve the flow of work into operations, and then automate repetitive tasks by utilizing tools (e.g., ChatOps).  Most importantly, SRE improves collaboration with customers, defining Service Level Objectives (SLO’s) so that IT consistently achieves (and exceeds) customers’ expectations AND delivers VALUE for the organization.  Automated monitoring is NOT enough these days, we must include observability, using automation to manage security, and ultimately delivering improved IT service quality to the business.