Success in modern technical endeavors absolutely requires multiple perspectives and expertise to collaborate. (1)  When I ask managers attending my classes if their organizations practice ‘agile’ they hesitate and say something like we kind of do but not in all areas of the organization. Further questioning usually uncovers that most of this agility starts and ends with the software development teams. When asked if these practices have been introduced to the business units there is a long uncomfortable pause, and then I hear 'we don’t usually talk to those groups'. Over the last couple of decades, a new set of major management philosophies have been developed and are now being adopted to ITSM. These new ways of thinking enabled manufacturing, software development and others to analytically realize both disciplined execution and continuous innovation, something that was thought to be mutually exclusive and impossible to accomplish with traditional management methods. Over

I always hear people say ‘Don’t like the weather, wait an hour it will change’.  The one constant in our lives is change. In business today, customers, users and stakeholders all have the expectation that as IT service providers we can and should be able to handle change requests at an ever-increasing pace.  Yet they still have the expectation that an appropriate response to all requests for change entails a considered approach to assessment of risk and business continuity, change impact, resource requirements, change authorization and especially to the realizable business benefit. For us to be able to do change management in an Agile environment, does that mean we must give up those requirements for speed and agility? The purpose of Change Management is to control the life cycle of all changes enabling beneficial changes to be made.  I was once told by a very wise thought leader ‘Being agile is a state of mind.  It’s more perspective than prescription.’  Why can’t we have a

When we think about what services we are going to offer we immediately think of the Service Catalog.  We must also consider what agreements go along with the delivery of those services.  What levels of utility and warranty are going to be expected over the life of our services?   What about services that will be supplied by external service providers; who is going to manage those?  Let’s take a look at which ITSM processes we will need to engage to ensure that we are able to strategize, design, deliver and maintain services that will meet our customers’ needs over the lifetime of the services. In Service Offerings and Agreements (SOA), we look at Service Portfolio Management (SPM), Financial Management (FM), Demand Management (DM) and Business Relationship Management (BRM).  These are all processes within the Strategy stage of the Lifecycle.  We also explore Service Catalog Management (SCM), Service Level Management (SLM) and Supplier Management (SM) processes within the Design st

Timely and effective communication forms a critical part of any service improvement project. To transform an organization and move people and process from just thinking about Continual Service Improvement (CSI) activities to actually allotting time to be able to performing CSI activities, it is critical that all stakeholders are informed of all changes to the processes, activities, roles and responsibilities. The goal of the communications plan is to build and maintain awareness, understanding, enthusiasm and support among all stakeholders for the CSI initiative. A communication plan is much more than just sending out one notification on what is about to happen and should be a series of notifications and meetings to keep people engaged, informed and passionate while incorporating the ability to deal with responses and feedback from the targeted audience. First, we must design how we will communicate and then we must define what and to whom we will communicate. The pla

Here is an article I thought you might find interesting.  It was first published in itSMF USA's Source EJournal, April 2017.   The State of ITSM: One Company’s Assessment! By Keith D. Sutherland and Lawrence J. “Butch” Sheets Educators and consultants operating in the formal practice of IT service management (ITSM) have largely been doing so since the mid-90s. Even though the best, codified practices of the IT service management framework, ITIL®, is now just over 30 years old, there remains a large number of organizations still in initial adoption of ITIL.  And of those service providers with longer histories of using ITIL, many still have a significant need to increase maturity, or more fully implement their ITIL practice. The need in these companies for structured education, assessments, and roadmaps still abounds, even while multiple approaches for these practices are available for each. Beyond ITIL (and in many cases, alongside), are the many other evolving a

ITIL is not in conflict with DevOps, ITIL supports DevOps with a solid foundation by providing an up to date an accurate configuration of our IT infrastructure. This, in turn, supports the ability to accurately carry out the detection of issues and underlying problems and deliver collaborative, permanent solutions to operational deviations. Further, it engages the Second Way by “shortening and amplifying the feedback loop” to development.  Historically most IT organizations structure their incident, problem and change processes within a very confined view, typically utilizing these processes from an operational perspective and only marginally engaging them at the design stage of the lifecycle.   ITIL should and can be adapted to DevOps practices to proactively define when incidents and problems arise while still in the design phase of the lifecycle.  This means engaging both software development and infrastructure design in a way that allows us to capture these deviations proactivel

Assigning clearly defined roles and responsibilities are critical to the success of every process. These roles need to be defined early and reviewed periodically to ensure proper training, communication and education.  A process without clearly defined roles will fail at some level.   There is a very clear distinction in the activities or the roles that are played out by individuals in your organization.  You should determine and communicate who is accountable and who is responsible for the process activities.  A role is like a hat.  One individual could wear two or more hats.  Watch out for titles.  You might have a title such as Service Transition Manager.  What role(s) would this individual fulfill? It all depends on WHO is best suited for the role or task that needs to be performed when it comes to assigning roles. The Service Transition Manager could be accountable or OWN the “Release and Deployment” process but might also be a practitioner and be responsible to perform task