Create, Deliver and Support (CDS) is one of many content areas of focus within the ITIL 4 guidance . It is included in the ITIL 4 schema for ITIL Specialist certification and is one of the many modules contained in the Managing Professional Transition class .  Create, Deliver, and Support (Training and Certification) is an advanced course that requires the ITIL 4 Foundation knowledge and certification. It takes a deeper dive into core areas of holistic thinking and application by understanding clearly; the Service Value System, Service Value Chain and the Anatomy of a Value Stream. To create, deliver and support services, specialists need a broad set of competencies to meet the dynamic need and demand for digital services. Proficiencies gained will help professionals optimize end to end value and must expand beyond tech to include such things as:  Radical soft skills that take communication, leadership, and innovation to the next level Ability to provide

If you have ITIL Expert Certification or 17 ITIL v3 Credits you are eligible to transition UP!  The Managing Professional Transition certification classes are filling up quickly, and are only available for a limited to, so we recommend that you grab your seat..."while the getting is good" :-).  ITIL 4 Foundation is NOT a prerequisite. However, the Foundation course provides exposure to concepts and practices which aren't covered in MPT. The ITIL 4 Foundation Module of MPT will give you a good introduction to the Service Value System, The Service Value Chain, Service Relationships and more. Reach out to the Academy team for your discount on your ITIL 4 Foundation training. Managing Professional Transition will start you on your journey for new ways of thinking and new ways to approach best practice and like any other bridge or transition class, it has a short shelf life! The Managing Professional Transition Course covers: Key ITIL 4 concepts And from the adv

Henry Ford did not invent the car. Providers of automobiles during the 1800’s were ok creating cars as toys for the very rich. Henry Ford, on the other hand, was interested in the experience of the common man and created an automobile that was within the economic reach of the average American. Ford developed a method of manufacturing that optimized his resources and lowered the cost of manufacturing. His motto was to simplify, simplify, simplify! Henry Ford knew how to apply common sense to new ideas. His ability to simplify and to optimize solutions to otherwise complicated and insurmountable problems made him the great pioneer of his time.  This blog is one in a series for the seven guiding principles from ITIL 4 best practices. To optimize means to make the best or most effective use of a situation, an opportunity, or of a resource. Get started on your journey today! Optimize and Automate!  The idea to “Optimize and Automate” is not new to manufacturing and the sam

If there is a way to make something complex it seems like we as IT Service Providers have that technique down to an art. Last week an ITIL 4 Foundation student asked, “Why is that?" The human brain is an intricate organ weighing on average about three pounds. There are about eleven billion neurons and one hundred trillion connections in your brain. The brain is the command central of everything that we think, everything you say and yes, of every solution that we might come up with. Our brain is thirsty for information. The more information we allow in the more eager our brain gets. This cycle generates a demand for stimulation. The more complex something becomes, the more stimulated our brain becomes. Hmmm, this might explain why so many become addicted to tech!     This guiding principle “Keep IT Simple” is just that… SIMPLE! The difficult task is going to be how do we ensure that we have “Just Enough” process and governance moving forward but also how do we t

Keeping it Simple is one step towards creating a world where people get up in the morning and are inspired to go to work and love to do the work that they do. The more complex something is, the more there are ways for it to go wrong. We as an industry of service providers must become educated and stop the insanity! Getting the education and the certification is a wonderful first step but once qualified we must adapt those learnings to make it simple and “Keep IT Simple”  “Keep it Simple”, one of the seven ITIL 4 Guiding Principles is a topic we have written about many times over the years.  It is anything but simple. We must acknowledge that IT services are comprised of many complex systems and if there is a way to make them even more complex IT Professionals in general seem to have that idea down to an ART.  So; How did we get that way. Business requirements are dynamic and are consistently evolving even as you read this line. Over a period of years and in ma

These “Three Golden Keys” are powerful! They can unlock the power of your ITIL 4  Qualification and will accelerate your journey in the right direction as you achieve one goal after another! Believe in Challenging the Status Quo With ITIL 4  Get out of the box. It is a new world. Leaders and teams will succeed by creating an environment to challenge the status quo. You are free, to give yourself permission to question the status quo of your organization and invite others to join you. We must stop doing the same thing over and over again and yet expect a different result. Use the idea of a Service Value System, Value Streams, and the four dimensions and apply the ITIL Guiding Principles as you “Challenge The Status Quo”. Real change begins with YOU!  Keep The Momentum Going!  Getting your ITIL 4 Qualification is a huge milestone in your learning and career path. Once there, the real journey begins. Be sure to get the most value from your accomplishment and the best

Communication has always been a key principle for service providers and this ITIL 4 Guiding Principle “Collaborate and Promote visibility” takes us to new heights. Encouraging staff and giving stakeholders the opportunity to develop this skill, will amalgamate teams in ways we never thought possible.  This guiding principle also represents the influence of Agile, DevOps, and LEAN on ITSM and best practices. A pillar of Agile is to be “transparent” and LEAN encourages making work visible in order to remove waste and increase flow. Both collaboration and being transparent are a key focus of DevOps integrated teams in order to ensure a continuous delivery pipeline. To understand this further let’s look at the two elements of this ITIL4 Guiding Principles. Collaborate  When we communicate, we are notifying or telling something to a person or a group. Collaboration is quite different and occurs when a group of people work together. The key word here is “together”. They wor

Adopting the ITIL seven “Guiding Principles” for service providers could be the best way to establish a healthy organizational culture. All “Guiding Principles” are powerful but today are some thoughts on just one and that is “FOCUS ON VALUE”.    ITIL 4 best practice guidance says to focus on value.  Getting level set on what VALUE is for your business partners, customers and consumers is critical to every strategic, tactical, and operational action! To understand this better let’s start with the official definition of a service. “A service is a means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating OUTCOMES that customers want to achieve without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks". If this is so, then there is a direct correlation between VALUE and OUTCOMES. When it comes to defining “VALUE” we must get OUT of “IT”.  An “OUTCOME” is what we deliver. It is not the activities within the value delivery stream but rather the RESULTS of all people,

One of the leading questions following the release of ITIL 4 is “How do I Transition from ITIL V3 to ITIL 4?   Which translates to, how do you proceed to adapt existing processes to the new way of working?  The answer is… ITIL 4 for ITIL 4. What? That’s right! ITIL 4 has the best practice for “adapting” and might I include “accelerating” the ITSM processes that you have in play today. Below is an outline of principles, concepts and precepts from ITIL 4 guidance that will help. Ongoing Continual Improvement has always been a best practice. Therefore: How do you proceed to adapt existing processes to the new way of working? Each is discussed here at a very high level. First and foremost, START WHERE YOU ARE!  Continual Improvement - ITIL 4 is the next logical progression of your improvement cycle. Business Requirements are dynamic and therefore we must be dynamic in order to provision for evolving business and customer needs. We must be responsive (Agile) and ensure “Stab

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 any 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 awa

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  that 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 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, there

In the early days of DevOps, there was a lot of debate about the ongoing relevancy of ITIL and IT service management (ITSM) in a faster-paced agile and DevOps world. Thankfully, that debate is coming to an end. ITSM processes are still essential, but, like all aspects of IT, they too must transform. Recent updates to ITIL  (ITIL 4), as well as increased interest in site reliability engineering (SRE), are providing new insights into how to manage services in a digital world. Here's a look at ITIL 4 and SRE and how each underpins the "Three Ways of DevOps," as defined in The Phoenix Project, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford.‎ What is ITIL 4?  ITIL 4 is the next evolution of the well-known service management framework from Axelos. It introduces a new Service Value System (SVS) that's supported by the guiding principles from the ITIL Practitioner Guidance publication. The framework eases into its alignment with DevOps and agile through a bi-mo

There are some misconceptions about ITIL ® 4 and its use of the term ‘practice’ vs. ‘process’ as a component of its recently introduced service value system. One misconception is that processes aren’t important anymore. Another is that organizations think they must completely redesign their tools in order to accommodate this change. Neither is true. Let’s begin by taking a look at how ITIL 4 defines these terms. Process: a set of interrelated or interacting activities that transform inputs into outputs [to accomplish an objective]. Processes define the sequence of actions and their dependencies. Practice: a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective. Practices include resources based on the four dimensions of service management which include: organizations and people, information and technology, partners and suppliers, and value streams and – wait for it – processes.   Both processes and practices focus on achievin

Testing starts with the first line of code!   It is NOT a downstream activity. DevOps testing has a critical role to play in a Continuous Delivery Pipeline. Without integrated testing DevOps simply will not work!   With the advent of DevOps and the movement to breakdown silos between developers, QA, security, and operations, it becomes critically important that all members of an IT team - regardless of what tools they use, or role they play - understand the essentials of testing. Every member of your development team should also integrate to ensure Compliance and Audit outcomes!   It is a new world.   In this new world, we can leverage from existing but must be open to walking through new doors of opportunity. Understanding traditional test strategies is helpful but when and where, and most importantly how we proceed with our test strategy must shift.   Knowing how to code is not enough, Quality Assurance in and of itself is not enough.   We cannot afford to have our products