Attending a quality online Instructor-Led Virtual Classroom  allows you, the learner, to immerse in material that is presented in a fun, practical manner.  This is NOT a Webinar! This is NOT an e-learning self-paced computerized course.  You are not on your own!  Instructor-Led Virtual Classrooms allow you to :  Learn online with a live experienced instructor. Interact in group discussions and activities with others in the class. Engage your instructor with ongoing Q and A throughout. Listen to or share real-world examples. Participate in analyzing sample exam questions with the instructor.  Collaborate with chat, open mic, polls, and other interactive tools – VOIP or phone!  Learn from; review sessions, videos, workbook activities, study aids, Reference Cards, and more! Benefits Include: Take a class at your home or office – more time for you and yours! Receive materials online – no shipping.  No travel, no TSA, stay safe and self-distanced!  Less overhead, redu

Originally posted on DevClass , June 22,2021 written by Joseph Martins and sponsored by Axelos Experience is everything when it comes to delivering IT-enabled products and services. But it’s no longer about how many deadlines your team smashed, how often you’d exceeded service-level agreements (SLAs), or how many lines of code you’ve spat out. Rather it’s about how the services and products you deliver impact the rest of the organisation’s ability to do their jobs, increase productivity, deliver customer satisfaction and co-create value. “Experience” may be seen as subjective, even ephemeral, compared to the traditional IT metrics, deadlines and SLAs. But if you want proof of its importance, consider how ITIL® 4, the latest revision of the best practice framework for service management from AXELOS, focuses on improving user experience of digital services and how this enhances productivity right across the organisation. Ian Aitchison , VP Product Management at Nexthink, the leader in di

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 turnaround  read here . This story is personal to me. I lived near one of Continental’s hubs, s

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

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

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

The risk is below the water and we are headed right towards it. Organizational Transformations, Business Transformations and IT Transformations are all at their very core really CULTURE Transformations!  Ok friends, I’ve loaded this one up. For a deeper dive into some of the topics addressed in this blog, be sure to click on the embedded­­ links provided. Culture must be considered to Drive Stakeholder Value - This is POWERFUL! Think about how a culture shift  enables the following: Mapping the customer journey with all touchpoints and interactions. You can potentially map the customer journey and map the stakeholder’s roles and responsibilities brilliantly, but what about the cultural shift to enable these stakeholders? Without it we will likely fall short of our goals. If we have any hope of converting demand into value via IT-enabled services – culture is key!  Properly designing XLAs , SLAs and meaningful measurement models.  Without culture, the risk is high t

Written for LinkedIn.com by  John Worthington ,  Director of Customer Success at eG Innovations Experience Level Agreements & Surveillance Capitalism Does the Customer Really Come First? On Sundays, I try to relax and not think too much about business, but I almost always fail to do so--- Monday’s right around the corner and it’s impossible not to begin thinking about the week ahead... As it happens today I read an article in the NY Times and was immediately drawn to work. Being focused on the digital user experience and recently completing ITSM Academy’s The Essence of eXperience (XLA) Certification   (see my review here ), I found this article unsettling to say the least. Don’t get me wrong, managing the customer experience is definitely key to survival in the digital age, but it’s not a big jump from managing the experience to managing the customer . “These data flows empty into surveillance capitalists’ computational factories, called ‘artificial intelligence’, where

It is a new day! The world of IT has changed from solely provisioning technology and services to actually being integral in the fulfillment of all business operations. It is time for staff and leaders to learn, get certified, evolve and most importantly to move forward with XLAs . As the climate of business operation changes it makes sense (or should make sense) that the way we measure and fulfill the provisioning of services must evolve to meet new challenges. This does not mean that SLAs are gone and XLAs are taking over. They can co-exist! Traditional Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are sometimes rigid and can be restrictive in a world where the ability to shift and change with dynamic business needs are prevalent. Many of you can relate to those organizations that are meeting and exceeding SLAs only to find Customer Satisfaction (C-Sat) Scores are tanking. Internally the staff celebrate while the organization loses market share! There is still a place for SLAs in the world

That is not a typo!   Alan Nance of CitrusCollab recently spoke about The Anatomy of an XLA in an ITSM Academy webinar.   I learned that the days of SLAs are behind us and the future lies with digital experience and eXperience Level Agreements (XLAs).  If this is the first time you have heard of XLAs then this is a sticky-note moment.    By that I mean; find a sticky note, and write down today's date.   Now write down XLA.   Remember that this is the day that you heard it and you heard it here!  XLAs are the foundation of a fresh and optimistic approach to managing the business of technology. Research for yourself and staff members. Learn and explore more about XLAs! A little history: “Service Management exists to guarantee a valuable experience to customers and colleagues. Despite years of implementing best practices, the reputation of most technology departments is below par in the eyes of business leaders. Consider that 90% of CEOs feel they aren’t meeting their custom