Historically there has been a divide between the Systems Administration (Operation folks) and Software development (Application folks). This divide often results in services being released that only partially meet customer/business requirements and leaves the organization with the perception that operations is often inefficient and ineffective. This riff is not of our own making. In the past it has been caused by a combination of conflicting goals, objectives, processes, and tooling.  Development-centric people tend to believe that change is good. As a matter of fact it’s the thing that they are paid to realize. The business depends on them to be agile to the changing business environment. Because of this correlation, they are often rewarded to create as much change as they can and do it as quickly as possible. Operational people on the other hand, have institutionalized the belief that change is the nemesis of who they are. The business depends on them to keep the lights

Do you ever notice you can hear things over and over and then there is that one moment where a comment or phrase all of a sudden shouts at you with real meaning and significance? I’d like to share one of those aha moments with you. I recently took a class called Certified Agile Process Owner (CAPO). During that class the instructor, Donna Knapp responded to a learner and said …  “Remember that your process is either improving or it is deteriorating”.  For some reason while thinking about that from an Agile Service Management perspective I thought REALLY?! That is so very true. If we think about it, by the time we define, deploy and utilize any set of process activities the objectives could change, the technology used certainly has changed and the overall requirements for any one of those process activities or procedures could have changed. Today we all know that business requirements are dynamic. All the more reason for taking an iterative approach to process design. For

Value Lean starts with a defining value precisely from the perspective of the customer in the relationship to the features and characteristics of the organization’s product (goods or services) and other critical attributes. Value Stream A value stream contains all of the activities required to create customer value for a service product or family of products. This would include all of the processes needed from designing the product, building, testing, releasing and deploying it into the live environment, being able to support the use of the product by your customer and finally being able to improve it to meet the customers changing requirements over the lifetime of the product. Lean organizations wisely distinguish their value streams and arrange their operations to maximize the value created for the customer and minimize the waste in these processes. Flow and Pull Make the remaining value–creating steps flow. Lean organizations will seek to maximize the flow of materials, resource

When discussing the elements of value creation through the delivery of services we always talk about customer preferences, perceptions and the business outcomes they generate.  We also throw in the elements of utility and warranty.  These are all critical in ensuring our ability to create value for our customers and capture value for ourselves as service providers. The service relationship between service providers and their customers revolves around the use of and interaction of assets.   Assets are made up of both resources and capabilities and are provided by both the service provider and the customer.  These are critical value elements in the creation of usable, customer aligned services. Many of our customers utilize our services in conjunction with their own assets to then build and deliver services or products our customers then deliver to their customers. We, as the service provider, consider these customer assets.  Without these there would be no basis for defining th

Continuous Delivery is a software development practice where software is always in a releasable state.   Teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time.  By relying on automated testing and deployment, as well as ensuring collaboration and communication between development and operational teams (DevOps), the goal of building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently can be achieved. This approach can help to reduce the cost, time and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications and configuration items (CIs) into production.  A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery and will be critical for operational processes such as Change Management and Release and Deployment Management to be agile and robust in the DevOps environments where continuous delivery will be part of best practices.   Continuous Delivery is sometimes co

In today’s world of DevOps, development, deployment, operations and support are being done at lightning speed compared to methodologies employed just several years ago. With the implementation of “Infrastructure as Code” (IAC), a type of IT infrastructure, development and operations teams can automatically manage and provision through code rather than using a manual process.  A part of this movement includes, “Desktop as a Service” (DaaS) which is a cloud service where the back-end of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is hosted by a cloud service provider. The service is purchased on a subscription basis. In the DaaS delivery model, the service provider manages the back-end responsibilities of data security storage,   backup, and upgrades. DaaS has a   multi-tenancy   architecture which means a single instance of a software application can serve multiple customers at one time. Each customer is called a tenant. Tenants may be given the ability to customize some parts of t

As the New Year begins, most IT service providers already have their IT strategy in place.   A few decades ago we heard loud and clear… “You must align IT with the business”.  Then we heard in the next decade…  IT...”You must align with the business”.  Notice the focus was on what “IT” must do.  I believe that most IT organizations get that.  The real question when considering a strategy is how this can be achieved.  Or is it?   I hope that moving forward the new mantra will be “Hello business”… “You must engage IT in order to ensure success.”  If the strategy does not include how the business is going to consistently engage, plan and strategize with the IT organization it is possible that the business strategy will not ensure the type of success that is hoped for and could continue to miss the mark. A recent BizReport article by Kristina Knight states; "During 2016, the perception that developers are basement-dwelling, socially-awkward techies with no grasp on business