I had a recent chat with a coworker of mine that used the CSI Model at home in a funny yet very practical way. I have her permission to use this and I hope you find this as interesting as I have. In her own words…. “In addition, to my career responsibilities I have the honor and for the most part the pleasure of being a Mom to two teenage girls. As we all have experienced in life, our work demands sometimes spill over into our home life. On occasion, I have been accused by my girls that I am NOT their boss, and to leave my work demeanor at the front door. Being so entrenched in striving for continual improvement, I figured, this model works at the office, why not see if I can improve things at home? I know – this has trouble written all over it! The CSI Approach – Using the CSI Model Step 1 - What is the vision? (Define your vision, your goals, your objectives) My vision is that my 17 year old high school junior has straight A’s on her report card for the third marking period – ...

There are several problem analysis techniques which are discussed in the V3 Service Operation book, including brainstorming. I have used brainstorming sessions often in my career. Brainstorming is used throughout the problem solving process whenever the team needs to generate ideas quickly and effectively. Some sessions have been very valuable, others not so much. What was the difference? Basically, we need some structure around the sessions and some rules of engagement. Let’s begin by defining brainstorming. This is a technique used to quickly generate a list of ideas by a team to solve problems or issues. The relevant people must be gathered together either physically and/or electronically to increase creativity and idea generation in a very short amount of time. Here are 3 different types of brainstorming methods:  Free Wheeling Brainstorming Participants call out their ideas when they occur to them and in no particular order. A recorder posts all ideas for everyone to see...

I often get questions on the differences and similarities between the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and the ITIL Application Management Lifecycle. Is the ITIL framework just another rebranding of SDLC? SDLC defines the organization’s standards for the creation and maintenance of applications. The SDLC can be divided into ten phases during which defined IT work products are created or modified. The phases range from initiation, design, development, implementation, operations & maintenance to disposition. The tenth phase, disposition, occurs when the system is disposed of and the task performed is either eliminated or transferred to other systems. The ITIL Application Management Lifecycle presents a more holistic, service-oriented view. It allows for greater alignment between the development view of the applications and the live management of those applications. This ITIL lifecycle focuses on the overall management of applications as part of IT services. Understanding the c...

🔄 Note: Since the publication of this post, ITIL has evolved significantly. In ITIL 4 , Change Management is now referred to as Change Enablement , with an emphasis on enabling frequent, agile, and value-driven change. The types of change— Standard , Normal , and Emergency —still apply, but decision-making is more decentralized with the introduction of Change Authorities . While the concepts in this post remain useful, we recommend pairing it with updated ITIL 4 guidance for a complete view. Rusty asked: I was looking for terms used for categorizing the impact of a change. I remember in Version 2 of ITIL that changes were categorized as Major, Significant, Minor, and Standard. Is that no longer done? Or is the impact also defined as the priority—High, Medium, and Low? Rusty, I’m going to give you my answer in three parts. This information can also be found in Section 4.2 of your Service Transition Book.   In ITIL V3 changes are now categorized into three distinct ...

One of the most important yet often less fully considered aspects of using Service Management is Organizational Change Management. When it comes down to it, Service Management is about people—as customers, users, providers, maintainers, supporters and a myriad of other roles. So while we get caught up in getting effective, efficient and economical services, processes and technologies in place to provide value, we must not push aside the importance of attitude, behavior and culture. We have all encountered new situations, changes in process or work flow, new technologies and other unfamiliar situations. Most people recognized from experience that different people deal with change in different manners. But we do not have to rely simply on hearsay or belief or personal experience. We can turn to experts in the field of Organizational Change Management for a way to work through the adoption of new ideas, approaches and technologies. In 1962 in his work Diffusion of Innovations, Everett...

You can’t always go home again, but you can use Continual Service Improvement (CSI) to meet the changing needs of your customers. I recently posted a blog about returning to a service desk I had managed and spoke about how the changing business environment had impacted management’s ability to sustain the current list of Critical success factors (CSFs) and Key Performance indicators (KPIs). The 1st question that was asked was “What should we measure?” Within the new business reality we reviewed how the corporate vision, mission, goals and objectives had changed? We spoke with service owners, business process owners, business analysts and customers and asked what was critical to them. What services that we were providing was creating the most value to them and enabling them to meet these new goals and objectives? Management then identified the gaps of “what we should measure”, to “what we can measure”. From this a more customer focused list was developed. The overriding objective...

One of the things that troubles me at times is how often people try to make the world more complex than it needs to be. The world is really a rather simple place if you take the time to step back and avoid complexity. I recently read a statement that made think upon this problem again. The opposite of “simple” is “elaborate”, not “complex”— Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin What people call complex, may in reality be elaborate. They confuse the two ideas. This can lead to issues in the delivery of Business and IT Services to customers. If someone believes a service is too complex they can often be less willing to make the effort to provide the service, or support it or improve it. Most likely the service is just elaborate (having lots of underpinning elements and components), not really complex (being of a nature that is difficult to understand). So how do we move away from complexity and towards seeing Service Management in terms of simplicity and elaboration? Here are several tech...