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Showing posts with the label Stakeholders

Focusing on the Fundamentals

By Donna Knapp Have you ever done business with an organization that liked to brag about all the extras that it provides, but doesn’t get the basics right? To some extent, the accelerated innovation that was sparked by the pandemic fueled this need to focus on the new and shiny. And for some organizations, it is what’s needed to stand out in the crowd, or to compete, or simply to survive. But here is what we know. All the new and shiny in the world can’t make up for a poor customer experience. You cannot sacrifice quality for speed. And a perk here and there can’t overcome the lack of trust that builds up when an organization fails to get the basics right day in and day out. So, what we’ve got to do is strike a balance. A feat that is easier said than done. According to the 2022 State of CIO report, 76% of CIOs say that it’s challenging to find the right balance between business innovation and operational excellence. And yet it is exactly what organizations today need to do… C. All of

Integrating ITSM and DevOps

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

Then and Now – Site Reliability & DevOps

In the past, the idea was to build in the non-functional requirements of service to the best of our ability based on experience or best guess. Sometimes the general thought was, “We will worry about any residual work for availability, capacity, and reliability after the product or service is deployed”. This focus ensured that the product was fit for purpose, but did not ensure that the product was fit for use, that it was reliable. This approach is very costly to the operations of the service and negative consumer impact impedes opportunities for market share.  This type of focus also creates silos between Dev and Ops and Ops become firefighters.  The costs for operations are not sustainable! In addition to loss of revenues, staff morale begins to slip.  So, reliability is really the key to success. Think about your cell phone. A heavy focus on functional requirements would mean that you can make phone calls. You can text, you can  take photos, you can use your maps and a variety of

Co-Creating Service – Customer and Provider Responsibilities

Best practice has proven that to be dynamic and to consistently meet changing business requirements, services must be co-created with our customers.  I learned in a recent ITIL 4 certification class titled Driving Stakeholder Value (DSV)  that providers will start with a stakeholder map and follow up with a customer journey map. If you are not yet familiar with Customer Journey Mapping, I strongly recommend learning about this critical skill needed to enable the co-creation of services.  Once you have a stakeholder map and have mapped the customer/user journey, you will need to identify the roles required. In our example below, we use the two roles of customer/consumer and service provider. Each of these, although not the only stakeholders involved, is critical to the success of co-creation.  Notice a relationship is being established via these responsibilities  Both the service provider and the consumer have responsibilities.  An IT service provider, for example, manages resource

Effective and Efficient Incident Response – Rethinking the way YOU work!

Learn more about new ways to do work! Explore DevOps, ITIL, SRE, XLA’s and more ! Silos are not uncommon, but when you silo the service desk from second and third-tier support staff, you likely have a recipe for pain. An ineffective incident response system within the organization is painful and disrupts the entire organization, especially the customers. We must shift the way we think and work to stabilize and improve the situation. One organization felt that they had a grip on service desk and incident management, but they blamed the subject matter experts for breaches to Service Level Agreements . The blame game is always detrimental. Their process consisted of the service desk agents receiving the incident, performing the initial triage, and then forwarding it to the subject matter expert based on how they categorized the incident. Sound familiar? Sometimes we pass tickets to and fro, get everybody and their brother involved, wait on email responses, and create chaos that frustrat

Grilled Pizza, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Continual Improvement

Originally posted on owlpoint.com  August 6, 2020, written by Greg Smith , Director of Service Delivery and Resident Pizza Maker at OwlPoint Like many others, I’ve recently taken up a few “COVID hobbies” to keep me occupied (and sane). After homebrewing a few gallons of root beer, I decided I needed a hobby that didn’t result in such large quantities of food that had to be consumed in a relatively short amount of time. After some thought, I landed on making pizza on the grill as my next hobby attempt. Though I’ve always liked cooking and grilling, I’d never made pizza from scratch before, let alone doing so on the grill. It seemed like it would be finicky and have plenty of opportunities to mess up. But I’ve heard that there’s no such thing as a bad pizza, so I ordered two cast iron skillets from Amazon and set about my new hobby. Normally, when I engage in something new, I research the entirety of Google for hints, tips and what to avoid. After spending a couple of nights researchi

ITIL®4 Specialist Drive Stakeholder Value: Maximizing the Consumer Experience

Originally posted on The AXELOS Blog , February 2020 and written by Christian Nissen , IT management consultant and lead author for the ITIL 4 Drive Stakeholder Value module. Back in the industrial society, goods were a dominant factor in our lives. But in the “service era” we prefer to replace ownership of goods with access to services and resources without necessarily owning them. This is happening with and without digital transformation , although the latter accelerates this phenomenon: think Uber and Airbnb. In this context, the ITIL® 4 Specialist Drive Stakeholder Value module – within ITIL 4 Managing Professional – is about the engagement and interaction between service providers and stakeholders and the conversion of demand to value via IT-enabled services. But what does this mean in practice? Previously, services were treated in the same way as manufactured goods: it was the customer’s responsibility to derive value. Conversely, the core concept of ITIL 4 is that value is co-c

Improving IT service outsourcing experience: The magic of bringing XLAs & SLAs together

Our friends over at CitrusCollab shared this really interesting case study: Improving IT service outsourcing experience: The magic of bringing XLAs™ & SLAs together Business Situation A regional utility company with 10,000 employees was ending a first time, multi-year IT infrastructure outsourcing contract with a well-known, sizeable India-based outsourcer. At the termination of the contract, the client was extremely unhappy with: the lack of service quality, the lack of promised innovation and cost reductions, the poor employee experience with the technical services delivery quality, the unacceptable governance experience with the management of disputes and issues, the ineffectiveness of financial penalties as a lever to obtain service performance improvements.  CitrusCollab consultants assisted in the outsourcing contract rebid process. We created several Employee Experience Level Agreements (XLA*) to augment the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for the new IT Infrastructur

ITIL 4 Guiding Principles – Start Where You Are!

START WHERE YOU ARE! This guiding principle is just common sense. We are either not moving and dying or we are moving forward and living. The guiding principles from ITIL4 best practices are universally applicable to practically any initiative, any size of organization, or type of service provider. There are seven “Guiding Principles” that can be adopted and adapted to suit any service management improvement. The one Guiding Principle that we will focus on here is simple yet powerful! That is “Start Where You Are”. Every organization that is in business has existing systems comprised of people, practices, and technology! Don’t forget to “Honor the Past”. There are a lot of people who have put a lot of effort (blood, sweat and tears) into helping to improve the capabilities within your organization. Don’t start from scratch and build something new without considering what you already have. It’s almost always better to improve what you currently have than to throw it all away

Co-Create and Accelerate! – ITIL 4

What is changing in your organization? The easier question might be what is not changing. We live in an accelerated world. To say that business and customer requirements are evolving is an understatement. It is a volatile time and the Co-Creation of services between service providers and customers as defined in ITIL 4 is the type of guidance could help. Studies have shown that there is a direct relationship between customer engagement in value co-creation and customer satisfaction.  There is no room for an “Us and Them” environment. Engagement means that we vet the requirements with the customer to ensure needs but also that the customer will engage and play a role in the design, development and the delivery of the product or service. They won't necessarily get down in the weeds with the developers and techies, but they absolutely should have a strategic and a bit of a tactical role to play throughout.  Beyond the consumer/customer and the service provider, the

Inclusion – Required for DevOps Continuous Delivery Pipeline

As a noun the official definition of the word inclusion is defined as the state of being included or being made a part of something. When a book covers many different ideas and subjects, it is an example of the inclusion of many ideas. When multiple people are all invited to be part of a group, this is an example of the inclusion of many different people. There are many certification classes available for DevOps, Agile and ITSM. All of them will speak of Inclusion. When considering inclusion in a DevOps Continuous Delivery Pipeline, service providers frequently miss the inclusion of some very necessary elements. In order to ensure real value, and cost-effective solutions fast, it is back to basics. Consider the inclusion of the following: Best Practices and Methodologies: These are the answer for how to. It is not just one best practice, methodology or standard that will get you there. “There” is where you are trying to go. Consider methods such as DevOps, ITSM, Agile, Lean and st

CSI and the Communication Plan

Timely and effective communication forms a critical part of any service improvement project. To transform an organization and move people and process from just thinking about Continual Service Improvement (CSI) activities to actually allotting time to be able to performing CSI activities, it is critical that all stakeholders are informed of all changes to the processes, activities, roles and responsibilities. The goal of the communications plan is to build and maintain awareness, understanding, enthusiasm and support among all stakeholders for the CSI initiative. A communication plan is much more than just sending out one notification on what is about to happen and should be a series of notifications and meetings to keep people engaged, informed and passionate while incorporating the ability to deal with responses and feedback from the targeted audience. First, we must design how we will communicate and then we must define what and to whom we will communicate. The pla