Franny (the Festive) Flamingo

Guest host post by Lisa Schwartz

It is time to get back to sponsoring tradeshows!

And here at ITSM Academy that means our mascot, Franny the Flamingo (click to read her origin story) is going to Las Vegas. She's been with us at every conference since the early 2000s and I am sure she is ready to hit the road, via my suitcase, to represent again.

And her moment is here. We just signed as a sponsor of #Pink23. It was an easy decision, year-over-year, the conference is awesome.

This year, one of the options is to host, and name, the Signature Drink.

During the February conference, Franny will be celebrating her 19th birthday - the Canadian legal drinking age.

It seemed fitting to honor her contribution to ITSM Academy by calling the #Pink23 Signature Drink the Festive Flamingo. That way, everyone attending can join Franny’s birthday bash.

#flamingoals

As it happens, @ITSMDonna is also celebrating her birthday in February and we take birthdays very seriously - paid holiday seriously - here at the Academy.

In the spirit of celebration, we created a custom banner. And then boy-o-boy, one thing led to another and we landed on a whole themed booth to serve as birthday celebration HQ.

We’re talking custom tablecloths, special giveaways, and prizes, even our logo got a Festive Flamingo pink-themed alteration. The best part, we can also use it in our breast-cancer awareness work.

We had so much fun designing for the Festive Flamingo we wanted to expand the audience we got to share it with. As part of the campaign, we updated our social media banners. Then the team suggested I write a follow-up to the original Franny blog post.

They say that picture is worth a thousand words, and that’s a lot of keystrokes!

So we grabbed some shots of our favorites and put them into a little 58-second digital book - selectively leaving out some of the fun surprises we have planned for the folks who stop by the booth.

Clearly, if you are thinking of attending #Pink23 we think you should. We have lots to celebrate including birthdays, our Guaranteed to Run courses, great prizes, and raffles.

Hope to see you there!

Comments

The Four Ps of Service Design - It’s not all about Technology

People ask me why I think that many designs and projects often fail. The most common answer is from a lack of preparation and management. Many IT organizations just think about the technology (product) implementation and fail to understand the risks of not planning for the effective and efficient use of the four Ps: People, Process, Products (services, technology and tools) and Partners (suppliers, manufacturers and vendors). A holistic approach should be adopted for all Service Design aspects and areas to ensure consistency and integration within all activities and processes across the entire IT environment, providing end to end business-related functionality and quality. (SD 2.4.2) People: Have to have proper skills and possess the necessary competencies in order to get involved in the provision of IT services. The right skills, the right knowledge, the right level of experience must be kept current and aligned to the business needs. Products: These are the technology managem

What Is A Service Offering?

The ITIL4 Best Practice Guidance defines a “Service Offering” as a description of one or more services designed to address the needs of a target customer or group . As a service provider, we can’t stop there! We must know what the contracts of our service offering are and be able to put them into context as required by the customer. Let’s explore the three elements that comprise a Service Offering. A “Service Offering” may include: Goods, Access to Resources, and Service Actions Goods – When we think of “Goods” within a service offering these are the items where ownership is transferred to the consumer and the consumer takes responsibility for the future use of these goods. Example of goods that are being provided in the offering – If this is a hotel service then toiletries or chocolates are yours to take with you. You the consumer own these and they are yours to take with you. Note: Goods may not always be provided for every Service Offe

What is the difference between Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner?

I was recently asked to clarify the roles of the Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner and wanted to share this with you. Roles and Responsibilities: Process Owner – this individual is “Accountable” for the process. They are the goto person and represent this process across the entire organization. They will ensure that the process is clearly defined, designed and documented. They will 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. Process Owner ensures that all Process activities, (what to do), Procedures (details on how to perform the activity) and the

Search