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Showing posts from July, 2016

Minimum Viable IT Service Management (MVITSM)

The aim of Minimum Viable IT Service Management (MVITSM) is to put in place “just enough” process to meet your organizations, needs, goals and circumstances. Minimum Viable Product To understand this concept let’s take a look at some of the origins.  The term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) originated in software development.  If we research the definition we find that in product development, the MVP is a product which has just enough features to gather validated learning about the product and its continued development. Gathering insights from an MVP is often less expensive than using a product with more features which increase costs and risk in the case where the product fails, for example, due to incorrect assumptions. Minimum Viable Process In a recent workshop Donna Knapp from ITSM Academy indicated that the Minimum Viable Process is really a matter of looking at what are the minimum critical activities that need to be performed in a process.  Complex bureaucratic processes

Business Relationship Management (BRM)

Business Relationship Management (BRM) is the process and role that allows us, as a service provider, to establish a strategic and tactical relationship with our customers. This will be based on ensuring we understand the customer and the business outcomes they are trying to create and how and what services are engaged by the business to meet those defined goals and objectives. A key activity of the BRM process is to ensure that as business needs change over time, we as a service provider, are able to translate these needs into requirements through the use of a Service Level Requirements document (SLR) which then manifests itself into the portfolio in the form of defined services.  The BRM will assist the business in articulating these requirements and the value of these services that the business places on them. In this way the BRM process is executing one of its critical success factors, which is to safeguard that the customer’s expectations do not exceed what they are

The Best of the Professor for DevOps #1 – Resources to “Educate and Inspire”

If you are a strategist, manager or practitioner working in service management today you will probably be working on ways to improve lead time, cycle time and overall flow of work through the lifecycle of delivery.   Business demand requires speed and dynamic business requirements force us to look at ways to bust out of silos for cross functional integration.  Time to market, customer satisfaction and the need for secure robust systems are being optimized by many service providers as a result of successful DevOps initiatives.  When considering where and how to optimize the flow of work from ideal to end of life for a service , managers and IT staff frequently have a subjective view of what DevOps is all about and will often get into war room discussions around what certain terms mean.  Over the last year there have been many papers written by the ITSM Professor that clarify terms, concepts and methods current in the industry for service providers.   For clarification, and to ensur

Death by Meetings

So I assume everyone has heard the phrase “death by meetings”, that fear that you are going to be in a series of meetings and that no matter how hard everyone tries, you seem to come out of these meetings with the same to do list or a larger one.  I know your all shaking your head yes or saying “been there done that and have the tee shirt to prove it”.  We at ITSM Academy recently had our yearly strategic meetings and I want to say up front, Best Strategic Meetings in the eight years I have been with the organization. Now that it is not to say that we haven’t had great Strategic Meetings in the past, because we have.  And that is not to say that I wasn’t heading into these meetings with a bit of trepidation, as I think most of us do. I recently read an article called Managing Yourself, Learn to Love Networking*. It defined four strategies that you can engage to help you network with other people even if you really don't enjoy it.  I thought, why can’t I take these 4 approaches