User stories are one of the primary development artifacts for Scrum teams.  They are a short description of the feature as told from the perspective of the person (stakeholder) who desired some new capability from a current service, system or application.  Many Scrum teams have adopted the user story template developed by Mike Cohn, which identified who the end user is, what the end user wants and why in a single sentence.  This template is most often written like this:  "As a (type of user), I want (some goal) so that (some reason)."  Example: As an Incident Process Owner, I want to see a release of known errors in order to do appropriate service desk staff training. In this way team members are encouraged to think of their work from the perspective of who will use it, ensuring requirements get met and value is delivered.  User stories are narrative texts that describe an interaction of the user and the service.  It focuses on the value that a user gains from utilizin

What is the difference between a Business Service Catalog and a Request Fulfillment Catalog?  One clear way to distinguish the type of service catalog that is required is to ask yourself, who is your audience?  I have found that when a lot of IT organizations say that they have a Service Catalog many are talking about a service catalog for end users.  Another very important service catalog is one that is mapped to your business customer needs.  In this blog I will briefly discuss some characteristics of service catalogs for these very distinct audiences and for the purpose of clarity I will refer to them as Request Fulfillment and Business Service Catalog. Request Fulfillment Service Catalog Service providers today are striving to automate the first line support for user request fulfillment by providing self-help and also more importantly self-serve end user request fulfillment catalogs.  This self-serve catalog is the most common and allows users to fulfill requests directly fro

All changes need to be assessed and evaluated.  Changes that are considered significant should be subject to a normal change evaluation in which we have well defined criteria for making this determination.  In this blog we will focus on the assessment side of the equation. A logical place to begin assessing the impact of changes on services and configuration assets would be the use of the "Seven Rs of Change Management".  Without these questions being answered a proper impact assessment could not be completed.  When leading an impact and resource assessment several items should be considered.  At the top of the chart we need to determine if there will be an impact to the customer's business operations.  Next we might want to know what the effect will be on infrastructure, individual customer services and their performance, reliability, security, continuity and ability to handle various levels of demand.  Additionally we will need to understand what the current change sc

In today's dynamic business climate, service outages cause real bottom line impact to the business. There are documented best practice processes and known critical success factors and yet outages that throw support organizations into reactive firefighting turmoil are far too common. Mature processes with just enough control are needed to smoothly transition new and changed services into production, helping to ensure stability for IT and the business.  Most organizations will confirm that they do have Change and Release Management processes in place.  Service Providers will usually have some level of Service Asset and Configuration Management control.  There is generally a lot of buzz and focus on three core processes for Service Transition and the success and integration of these three are critical to business success.  Three Core Processes for Service Transition are: Change Management Service Asset and Configuration Management Release Management Most IT organizations

A systems engineer recently asked “With all of the buzz around Agile and DevOps, is ITIL Foundation training and certification still relevant?”   The short answer is yes and its relevance is directly tied to the success of strategic initiatives and the outcomes of the organization.  There is direct benefit to the learner/candidate also.  It has been a while since this has been discussed so let’s revisit this once again. For the Consultant or Third Party Vendor: Gets you on the short list! -  ITIL Foundation training gives those who are consulting in any area of “Service Management” a standard set of vocabulary critical to communication.  Also, knowing the terms and basic concepts is crucial to the credibility of the consultant.  The improper use of a single term that is known by your customer could give the impression that you as the consultant do not know the industry and omit you from the short list.  Some organizations will not even consider a vendor without the proper certi

Stuart Rance wrote in a blog  “Knowledge only has value when it is available to someone, either because they remember it or because they are guided towards it at the time they need it”.   One of the key elements in support of CSI is Knowledge Management. An organization must continually gather knowledge about its services and support processes in order to look for trends, find improvement opportunities and develop strategies that will move them into the future.  The philosopher and essayist George Santayana wrote,  “Those that cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”. In today’s reality of increased rates of change, increased employee turnover, increased access to information and greater market completion it is ever more critical to build meaningful knowledge bases that allow an organization can create and capture value by insuring that data, information, knowledge and wisdom are being brought forward to benefit how and what the ITSM organization does to support bus

As the current IT organization has grown from a provider of technology to the Service Provider of choice we have had to incorporate the principles of service management to ensure that we deliver the outcomes required by our customers.  Given that, we have to ask ourselves a couple of strategic questions: What outcomes are we trying to provide? How do we as a service provider facilitate that? Delivering an outcome based definition of services will allow the IT organization to move beyond just business / IT alignment to towards business / IT integration, which really should have been the goal from the beginning.  Supporting customer / business outcomes should be the ultimate focus of the IT organization thus creating value through the delivery of services. A focus on business outcomes is both a critical and in most cases a cultural shift for IT service providers.  As customer’s preferences and perceptions change over time so does the value statement that a service provider

What is hurting the capability of service providers to design and deliver service at the rate of speed and at a cost that is viable to the business?  I asked a group of IT managers and practitioners in a recent training class and all agreed on these common causes: Lack of upper management strategy and direction. Lack of   adequate or accurate information Resistance to change Cultural issues / Agenda’s Inadequate funding I am sure you can add to this list.   Many service providers are suffering from the same pain.   What is causing this?   One area that most will agree upon is the fact that a lot of challenges for a service provider to deliver come from silos.   A classic silo and division that some organizations are addressing are those that exist between development and operational teams. That will help, but it’s not only siloed teams that are hurting this industry.   It is the fact that ITSM processes are also siloed.   If your processes and data are siloed even the best

From an operational perspective, we are primarily interested in the overall management of applications as part of IT services.  These can be developed in-house or purchased off the self from third party developers. Because of our operational point of view, and the focus on ensuring these services/applications are delivered with both utility and warranty, we look at their support from a more holistic approach and use what is referred to as the “Application Management Lifecycle”. It sequences through six stages or steps which are: Requirements, Design, Build, Deploy, Operate and Optimize.  Requirements: Requirements for new applications are garnered, based on business/customer needs and takes place primarily during services design.  There are six types of requirements for any application Functional requirements Manageability requirements Usability requirements Architectural requirements Interface requirements Service Level requirements Design:   At this point the requ

About two years ago I wrote a blog on the four “Ps” of Service Strategy.  Today we going to expand on Perspective, the 1 st of the four “Ps” of Service Strategy.   Perspective is the vision and direction for the services you will provide, and is realized through conversations with your stakeholders.  A well-defined vision and mission statement allows a common goal to be pursued by both the business and IT. This enhances the organizations ability to focus on the customer perspective and the business outcomes that the customer desires, and to implement a continual service improvement approach so that you are regularly enhancing and differentiating the services you provide. In this way the business stays relevant to the changing business environment. The perspective describes what the organization is, what it does, who it does it for, how it works and enables this to be communicated easily to both internal and external stakeholders.  It defines the overall direction for the organiza

The NYSE reportedly told floor traders the exchange had to suspend trading due to an error with a systems upgrade that was rolled out before the market opened.  Early in the morning the NYSE sent out a message alerting traders that there was a reported issue with a number of the exchange’s gateways.  It appears that performance degraded from there and a few short hours later trading halted! ( http://fortune.com/2015/07/08/nyse-halt/   for full story ) How does this happen?  Other issues reported that same week included United Airlines who closed all flight bookings due to what was labeled a “Router” issue.   Microsoft GoToTraining impacted several business owners and customers due to a suspected “Citrix” upgrade.   If ever a case for why do we need Service Management processes that are aligned with business outcomes can be made, one only needs to listen to the news.  Just yesterday a computer system outage disrupted Spirit Airlines flights at Chicago O'Hare, forcing the carrie

If you are in the position of providing IT services to customers then you know the importance of the statement: Utility plus Warranty equals Value (U+W=V).  So when we talk about value, we must consider who determines that value and what are the components that go into making up the agreements that will define how value gets created and delivered.  The value of a service is normally defined as “the level of service that meets customer expectations” and is often measured by how much the customer is willing to pay for the service. An industry trend today that may have been excluded in the past is the ability of the service provider to be able to define and document the costs involved in providing that service beyond its core value. Services being intangible and unlike products do not have much inherent value.  This value does not get realized until the service is actually utilized and enables someone to create the desired business outcome, which means that the provider of the servic

I was recently asked about companies that have made improvements and/or had significant transformation as a result of disruptive processes.  The one that I am familiar with is Netflix and their philosophy of injecting failure into the production environment to ensure systems are fault-tolerant and how they continually test their ability to survive “once in a blue moon” failures. Introducing Chaos Engineering  -  Netfl ix Simian Army http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/09/introducing-chaos-engineering.html I did some additional Google searches:  “Disruptive improvements” & “Improving your IT services in a disruptive way”.  I think the following sites and resources provide more insight: Disruptive Business growth steps – Dow Corning https://www.dowcorning.com/content/publishedlit/solarticles/simple_steps.pdf IPhone success: Disruptive innovation and continuous improvement http://businesstheory.com/apple-teach-product-development/   Disruptive technolog

ITSM Best Practice will align five main process with the lifecycle of “Service Operation”. Incident Management Problem Management Event Management Request Fulfillment Access Management  It was not too long ago that the idea of some of these processes were new to service providers. Most will find them to be common in today’s market place.  An organization may not literally follow the best practices for the service operation processes but most likely have some close facsimile when executing Incident, Problem, Request Fulfilment, and Event management processes for provisioning IT services and support.  In order to ensure identity management and authorization for access, some form of “Access Management” will also be needed to support an overall security policy in Service Operation.  I would like to focus on some thoughts for “Event Management” and early engagement of operational staff in the service lifecycle. As organizations mature they begin to realize the value

IT is a large and growing slice of the overall budget for many companies. That money spent on IT is anticipated to create business value and support business growth. However in many IT organizations, a considerable percentage of this budget and IT labor is consumed on managing of incidents. First, second and third tier levels of support along with support technology and tools can become expensive to retain and maintain. In fact this is unplanned work which inhibits value creation and business growth. Many people will advocate a solid proactive problem management process to eliminate the root cause of these incidents and I am right there alongside them. However, I think we need to look even earlier in the service lifecycle. The standard statistic that I see most often quoted is that up to 80% of all incidents are cause by undocumented and unauthorized changes.  So for the sake of this argument let us take that as our baseline and discuss critical success factors facing service tran

The “ Agile Manifesto ” states that “We value Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools”.  What? Some have taken that statement and interpreted it to mean that when it comes to design and development … “No Process” is required!  In fact if we look further in the manifesto we see clearly that the value of process and tools is indeed recognized.  The manifesto is trying to impart the importance of people and interactions.  If we have a brilliant process that is defined and documented and yet drop the ball when it comes to people and interaction we will surely miss the mark every time.  Therefore, while there is value in process and in tools service providers must value the people and interaction with them more. In her book titled “The ITSM Process Design Guide” Donna Knapp stresses the importance of “Just Enough Process”.  When designing ITSM processes such as Service Level Mgmt, Change Mgmt, Incident Mgmt and others, service providers could miss the mark and over design

A core principle of popular Agile methodologies is to limit “Work in Progress”. Self-organizing Scrum teams, will only take on a small piece of work from the overall backlog that can be completed within a timeboxed period, normally between 2 and 4 weeks. By limiting their focus and attention to what is most important (priorities are set and agreed to) you enable the team to complete the agreed to work and by limiting work in progress we train teams to finish work, rather than begin added work. With this focus to customer requirements, a higher level of quality and more satisfied customers is the result.  Additionally, because the work is done in smaller increments, there is much less risk to our environment. In order for our ITSM teams to move from the methodologies currently being used to Agile methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban to name a couple, we must have an advocate for our teams to be able to engage in this new way of developing and maturing our ITSM/ITIL processes. T

What if we did not build an operational support system to meet current business requirements?  That might sound a bit outrageous and contradictory to everything we have learned. If you are a service provider than you are aware that what we consider premium service support today could be accepted as the norm and sometimes can be outdated before it becomes a reality.  The key to sustaining underpinning operations for any industry is in the constructs of the system.   If we build a system to provide what the customer and business outcomes require now then that is what we will have.  The likelihood is that we will have a system that provides for a service that will render itself less than optimized in a shorter time than we would like to think. What is required is an operational support system that can deliver fast but also one that is able to shift, bend and weave with the ever-changing environment and outcomes that it supports.  We need a growing living moving system that can ad

A “Release Unit” describes the portion of a service or IT infrastructure that is normally released as a single entity according to the organizations release policy. The Release Unit can be thought of as a collection of infrastructure items that when packaged together could perform a useful function. The unit may vary depending on the type or item of service asset or service component.  The actual components to be released on a specific occasion may include one or more release units, or may include only part of a release unit.  Release Units should contain information about the service, its utilities and warranties and release documentation.  These components can be grouped together into a Release Package for a specific release.  In general the aim is to decide the most appropriate release unit level for each service asset or component. A “Release Package” is a set of configuration items that will be built, tested and deployed together as a single release.  Each release will take th

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