Originally posted on The AXELOS Blog , March 2021 and written by Solmaz Purser , Project Editor, AXELOS The past year has been tumultuous and unexpected, to say the least. Over a year on from the start of a pandemic that few ever expected, the world has certainly changed. Many people are now working from home . This was expected to be a temporary measure, but in some instances, people have been working from home for nearly a year. It would be fair to say that this is the new normal, where commutes now involve walking to a computer, and work social events are conducted via video conferencing. This brings us to ITIL® 4;: Create, Deliver and Support (CDS) and how it can be used to help you in the new normal. The components of CDS are flexible and adaptable enough to be applied to any situation, such as surviving prolonged periods at home. Relationship management CDS explores the importance of relationship management, where a service manager acts as a point of contact and liaison between

By Donna Knapp and Jeff Jensen Let’s answer the obvious question first. What is a service management office (SMO)? ITIL® describes an SMO as a “group or department that functions as a center of excellence for service management, ensuring continual development and the consistent application of management practices across an organization.” So given that service management is a “set of specialized organizational capabilities for enabling value for customers in the form of services”, it is the SMO that helps the organization to develop these capabilities. A SMO can be formalized and have significant authority to drive service management in the organization, or it can be less-formal teams focused on continual development of the organization’s management practices. In some organizations, the SMO provides a management structure for the various practice/process owners and managers to report into. This also allows for a roll-up of enterprise metrics and reporting, and in some cases provides

Guest Host Post by Mark S. Blanke , previously posted on the   Owlpoint Blog , March 28, 2021 Are your service-desk customers sitting in 9C? When customers evaluate your service, do they remember the experience or the statistics? What does that mean for modern IT management? Well, there is a better way to measure. It is called Experience Management. It is an evolution and next level of maturity above that of traditional Service Management. A while back, I read a book called From Worst to First written by Gordon Bethune, the former CEO of Continental Airlines. He led the management team hired to turn around the airline after two bankruptcies and ten CEOs in ten years—clearly a challenging assignment. Gordon, along with his team, established a clear plan to turn around the company. They made remarkable changes that took the airline from worst (in almost all categories) to first in just a few years. Greg Brenneman, the COO, wrote a brief article in Harvard Business Review describing the t

By Donna Knapp We sometimes hear from organizations that they are “good with ITIL® v3”. We’d like to encourage an alternative point of view. AXELOS launched ITIL 4 in February 2019 and since then, the world has changed dramatically. COVID-19 has taught us all that the need for organizations to undergo a digital transformation is paramount to survival, as is the need to understand and leverage emerging disruptive technologies. But let’s be honest, that’s been the case long before a global pandemic changed our landscape. The gap between those able to benefit from the digital age and those who are not has been widening since the 1990s. What COVID-19 has done is accelerate the digital transformation processes in organizations. According  to a McKinsey survey of executives, “companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years”. Let’s accept the reality of that… things have sped up dramatically,

Guest Host Post by Mike Orzen, previously posted on Mike’s Blog ,  March 25, 2021 For decades, the lean community has been talking about the importance of creating and managing customer value across the value stream. A value stream is comprised of all the activities performed to create, manage and deliver value to customers. It includes all the wasteful and broken processes we have come to accept as inherent in the way the work gets done. A key player who focuses on coordinating and aligning the efforts of all pieces of the value stream is the value stream manager. Their goal is to get everyone working together and aligned toward the common goal of optimizing their entire value stream. I like to call this character the “mythical value stream manager” because they are described in books but seldom seen in the wild – much like a unicorn. This person is the master coordinator among silos, conflicting priorities, constrained resources, and localized performance. No small task as most peo

As the pace of technological innovation increases and digital disruption becomes the norm, the need to adapt and accelerate IT service management (ITSM) processes is more critical than ever. It’s no longer a debate about whether ITSM and DevOps should interface; it’s time now for ITSM professionals to understand how the practices they use to co-create value can underpin (or undermine) the flow of work and pervasive use of automation in a DevOps environment. It’s easy to understand why ITSM professionals are skeptical about DevOps. ITSM performance metrics and service level agreements (SLAs) often revolve around the IT organization’s ability to mitigate risks, minimize impact, and “guarantee” availability. On the surface, these measures aren’t bad. It’s when we sacrifice speed, agility, and innovation in the process that the business starts to suffer. Even with the evolution to ITIL 4 , the what and why of ITSM haven’t changed. A customer-focused culture in which everyone understands