The best practice approach and the Seven-step Improvement Process for Continual Service Improvement (CSI) begin with identifying the vision, mission, goals and objectives of the business.  In order to measure with appropriate targets these outcomes and objectives must be quantified. If you cannot measure it you cannot improve it.  First and foremost in order to perform ongoing CSI for a service we must identify the service.  That is just common sense right?  Yet how many discussions take place in Sales, in Development, and in Operations about whether something is or is not a service.  Collectively everyone in the lifecycle has a mission to meet the outcomes of the service or services that are being provided.  Measuring and Reporting For CSI to be successful we measure and monitor and report upon a service end-to-end.   When measuring and reporting IT managers will generally report availability in terms of percent with such things as 99% availability on a server or other c

I was recently asked to comment on the importance of Demand Management for IT Services as it relates to the IT Business organization. Demand Management Demand Management is tied to the “Customer” or consumer demand. It is more about the market and what is the demand from that level. Strategic Example Strategic Demand Management might be a business strategy for how to influence user behavior. The telecom industry a few years back offered “Free nights and weekends”. This was a “Strategy” to manage the “Demand” until the provider could get all of the infrastructure laid down to support the demand for service. Tactical Example Within the activities of “Demand Management “ are those that are defined to monitor, manage, and report upon the patterns of business activities (PBA) and the activities of the varied user profiles (UP’s) . Demand Management would provide the UP’s and PBA’s and work very closely with Capacity management (managing workload at the component level to meet

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

I highly recommend The Visible Ops Handbook by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford. There are a lot of intersections between Visible Ops (VisOps) and being Agile.  In fact, following Visible Ops practices allows you to achieve an Agile perspective in a shorter time scale.  There is an area in particular where I think alignment between VisOps and Agile is very strong. One of the four tenets of the Agile Manifesto is that we value “Responding to change”.  This is further underpinned by the principle “Welcome changing requirements, even late in development”.   Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.   This also ties us to the goal and objective of Agile Service Management in “Improving IT’s entire ability to meet customer requirements faster”. Responding to change does not equate to bypassing process or controls.  Every business decision triggers an IT event.  Industry statistics tell us that 80% of outages are a direct results from poor

Anyone who has worked in Information Technology knows that today, there is and always will be improvement opportunities available to our organizations.  This is especially in light of the pace of change that is taking place in all market spaces and the level of customer expectations that accompanies that change. If you have worked in IT for a number of years, you may remember when change was not welcomed. Well the good old days weren’t always that good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems (Billy Joel).  The challenge is in getting started. If……. ·        the processes that are currently being engaged are not as efficient and effective as you would like ·        you are finding that your environment isn’t as stable and reliable as it should be ·        that when you make changes to your environment it generally results in an outage and prolonged and repeatable firefighting then ……. I recommend that you read The Visible Ops Handbook by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and Geor

Although these terms are frequently used synonymously, “Training” is not “Education”.   This is not to say that training is not important because without training, education would be incomplete.  When investing your capital to increase performance and change behavior it could be beneficial to understand the distinction. Education When we are educated we learn facts, theory or required details about the who, what, where, when and why of a particular subject.  Sometimes education will build on a foundation of knowledge so that you may become more expert in that area.  A simple example is given with the idea of a language.  You may know how to speak it.  When you go to school and are educated you learn what a verb is, and how adjectives are used.  We learn the syntax and constructs of the language.  Some move on to be expert linguist. They become educated and highly skilled in the subject of language. When you are attending a Service Management or DevOps course you are learning

I once heard an IT manager say… “We do not need Service Asset and Configuration Management”!  We have Asset Management and we can add a few more fields of information for IT in that database.”  Is this true?  Would this give the service provider the same value as a Service Asset and Configuration Management Process and System?  Asset Management Most organizations have a process that tracks and reports the value and ownership of fixed assets throughout their lifecycle. This process is usually called Fixed Asset Management or Financial Asset Management.  Activities in traditional Asset Management include such things as documenting the cost of the asset and projected life of the asset.  Other bits of data captured might be the cost of maintaining the asset.  For the most part this is financial information.  Being able to determine the depreciation of an asset is year over year, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI) are key.  Fixed Asset Management maintains