Best practice has proven that to be dynamic and to consistently meet changing business requirements, services must be co-created with our customers.  I learned in a recent ITIL 4 certification class titled Driving Stakeholder Value (DSV)  that providers will start with a stakeholder map and follow up with a customer journey map. If you are not yet familiar with Customer Journey Mapping, I strongly recommend learning about this critical skill needed to enable the co-creation of services.  Once you have a stakeholder map and have mapped the customer/user journey, you will need to identify the roles required. In our example below, we use the two roles of customer/consumer and service provider. Each of these, although not the only stakeholders involved, is critical to the success of co-creation.  Notice a relationship is being established via these responsibilities  Both the service provider and the consumer have responsibilities.  An IT service provider, ...

Generally, when we think of “relationships,” we immediately think of the people aspect. In ITSM, we are referring to the relationships between third-party vendors, suppliers, customers, and many other stakeholders necessary to deliver the optimum service. It is mandatory to manage those relationships at the appropriate level. One way to understand the “organization and people” involved in those relationships is to understand the constructs of a “Service Relationship.” ITIL provides us this model. Starting from the bottom of the diagram and moving up, let's discuss the critical elements of a Service Relationship: Resources – All resources including people, process, and technology. In ITIL terms, that includes resources from all Four Dimensions: People and Organizations Information and Technology Partners and Suppliers Value Strea...

I am  often asked for tips and tricks for virtual classroom success. The team at ITSM Academy has put together this guide for your viewing and downloading pleasure... I hope it helps (and that you get to use it soon!)   Download the .pdf

One of the things we frequently hear from individuals who attend the advanced ITIL ®  4 classes such as High Velocity IT and Drive Stakeholder Value is how very different ITIL 4 is, and more specifically, how relevant it is to challenges currently facing organizations. So how can organizations leverage this guidance? They need a strategy. More specifically, they need a set of aligned strategies that are linked to the  organization’s overall objectives. According to  ITIL  4 ®  Digital and IT Strategy , this set of strategies includes: A  business strategy  – how an organization defines and achieves its purpose A  digital strategy  – a business strategy that is based all or in part on using digital technology An  IT strategy  – a technology strategy and corresponding architecture that supports the digital strategy; along with the back-office strategy and administrative elements of information technology (e.g., the data center and inf...

Learn more about new ways to do work! Explore DevOps, ITIL, SRE, XLA’s and more ! Silos are not uncommon, but when you silo the service desk from second and third-tier support staff, you likely have a recipe for pain. An ineffective incident response system within the organization is painful and disrupts the entire organization, especially the customers. We must shift the way we think and work to stabilize and improve the situation. One organization felt that they had a grip on service desk and incident management, but they blamed the subject matter experts for breaches to Service Level Agreements . The blame game is always detrimental. Their process consisted of the service desk agents receiving the incident, performing the initial triage, and then forwarding it to the subject matter expert based on how they categorized the incident. Sound familiar? Sometimes we pass tickets to and fro, get everybody and their brother involved, wait on email responses, and create chaos that frustrat...

Originally posted on owlpoint.com  August 6, 2020, written by Greg Smith , Director of Service Delivery and Resident Pizza Maker at OwlPoint Like many others, I’ve recently taken up a few “COVID hobbies” to keep me occupied (and sane). After homebrewing a few gallons of root beer, I decided I needed a hobby that didn’t result in such large quantities of food that had to be consumed in a relatively short amount of time. After some thought, I landed on making pizza on the grill as my next hobby attempt. Though I’ve always liked cooking and grilling, I’d never made pizza from scratch before, let alone doing so on the grill. It seemed like it would be finicky and have plenty of opportunities to mess up. But I’ve heard that there’s no such thing as a bad pizza, so I ordered two cast iron skillets from Amazon and set about my new hobby. Normally, when I engage in something new, I research the entirety of Google for hints, tips and what to avoid. After spending a couple of nights resea...

Originally posted on owlpoint.com , August 11, 2020, and written by Mark Blanke , CEO of Owlpoint, and Chairman of The CIO Initiative One of the aspects of ITIL 4 that has impressed me the most is the integration and reference to so many other best practices and frameworks. One such reference is to Site Reliability Engineering aka SRE . SRE was originally developed by Google in the mid 2000s as a way of operating and administering productions system with a software development mindset. One of Google’s key drivers in building out SRE was to help bring developers and operations people together. Sounds like DevOps , right? In reality, they come from the same mindset, but there are key differences. Google only recently started sharing the SRE concepts. It was their secret sauce and a way to be far more effective in operating their systems and maintaining a highly reliable environment. However, over time, they realized that it would be better for them to share their methods, so the ...

Originally posted on The AXELOS Blog , February 2020 and written by Christian Nissen , IT management consultant and lead author for the ITIL 4 Drive Stakeholder Value module. Back in the industrial society, goods were a dominant factor in our lives. But in the “service era” we prefer to replace ownership of goods with access to services and resources without necessarily owning them. This is happening with and without digital transformation , although the latter accelerates this phenomenon: think Uber and Airbnb. In this context, the ITIL® 4 Specialist Drive Stakeholder Value module – within ITIL 4 Managing Professional – is about the engagement and interaction between service providers and stakeholders and the conversion of demand to value via IT-enabled services. But what does this mean in practice? Previously, services were treated in the same way as manufactured goods: it was the customer’s responsibility to derive value. Conversely, the core concept of ITIL 4 is that value is co-c...

Our friends over at CitrusCollab shared this really interesting case study: Improving IT service outsourcing experience: The magic of bringing XLAs™ & SLAs together Business Situation A regional utility company with 10,000 employees was ending a first time, multi-year IT infrastructure outsourcing contract with a well-known, sizeable India-based outsourcer. At the termination of the contract, the client was extremely unhappy with: the lack of service quality, the lack of promised innovation and cost reductions, the poor employee experience with the technical services delivery quality, the unacceptable governance experience with the management of disputes and issues, the ineffectiveness of financial penalties as a lever to obtain service performance improvements.  CitrusCollab consultants assisted in the outsourcing contract rebid process. We created several Employee Experience Level Agreements (XLA*) to augment the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for the new IT Infrastru...

Originally posted on owlpoint.com , June 15, 2020, and written by Mark Blanke , CEO of Owlpoint, and Chairman of The CIO Initiative The Four Dimensions of ITIL 4 and the Changing World of Work Recently Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced his employees could continue working from home “forever.” Knowing some people like an office environment, Dorsey is keeping the door open for those who want to return to the workplace. But ultimately, he is leaving it up to each employee to decide what they want to do. Dorsey’s statement follows reports that Fortune 100 corporations, including JPMorgan, Facebook, Capital One, Amazon, Microsoft, Zillow, and others, are extending work-from-home policies. Post-COVID-19, having employees in an office environment can be a sticky proposition. What if someone falls ill and infects others? What if a valued employee simply doesn’t want to come in – ever? What if half of your office space is continually empty? This leads to another question – why rent expen...

Originally posted on tsoshop.co.uk, AXELOS Global Best Practice Blog , July 2020 and written by Rae Ann Bruno , President of Business Solutions Training, Inc (BST) As it became evident that sheltering was going to be a requirement during COVID, things changed drastically and quickly for organizations. The workforce became remote virtually overnight. Information technology (IT) was suddenly 'at the table' with the business decision makers - some for the first time - to help organizations set-up a remote workforce and service their external customers. What IT accomplished for their organizations, demonstrates the value of the ITIL 4 guiding principles and a focus on the employee and customer experiences. According to PRINCE2 , a project is 'a temporary organization that is created for the purpose of delivering one or more business products according to an agreed business case.' Project managers are empowered to chair the project team and direct them toward successf...

ALL CALL SREs REQUIRED!  Let’s take a walk down to the ocean and while you consider the opportunity, benefits, and $$$, think about dipping your toe in. Let’s explore Reliability, Site Reliability, and the Site Reliability Engineer .  No doubt the world is evolving. People are evolving and tech is evolving. Business and customer requirements are evolving. The evolution of systems requires the evolution of engineers. Nature and pandemics put undue stress on our resources! In comes the Certified Site Reliability Engineer .  "Urgent, Urgent, Urgent… All hands on deck!",  is a call that practitioners, managers, and organizations do not want to hear and recognize must stop! Reliability – At a minimum, we recognize that the delivery of service is not dependent solely on the quality of the product itself and the goal is not that the products or service merely be deployed. A service must be operated and sustained over a period. How long? For the life of the...

There are three core frameworks that can help us to shift the way we think, do work, and ultimately shape the behaviors and values that are the heartbeat of our organizations - CULTURE! Each of these models can be used to identify, analyze, and move an organization to new heights, new ways of collaborating and increasing speed and value for service consumers. Models for learning how to "Shift the Culture!” Erickson Model – Identifies the stages of psychosocial development  The Erickson Model helps as a starting point for “Where are we now?”. Westrum Model – Focus here is on the organizational types :  - Pathological  - Bureaucratic  - Generative  The Westrum Model helps providers get detail on the behaviors within their organization and teams.  Laloux’s Culture Model – Frederic Laloux’s model provides a clear picture of how culture may evolve in an organization. Laloux expands the concepts of the two previous models. ...

The risk is below the water and we are headed right towards it. Organizational Transformations, Business Transformations and IT Transformations are all at their very core really CULTURE Transformations!  Ok friends, I’ve loaded this one up. For a deeper dive into some of the topics addressed in this blog, be sure to click on the embedded­­ links provided. Culture must be considered to Drive Stakeholder Value - This is POWERFUL! Think about how a culture shift  enables the following: Mapping the customer journey with all touchpoints and interactions. You can potentially map the customer journey and map the stakeholder’s roles and responsibilities brilliantly, but what about the cultural shift to enable these stakeholders? Without it we will likely fall short of our goals. If we have any hope of converting demand into value via IT-enabled services – culture is key!  Properly designing XLAs , SLAs and meaningful measurement models.  Without culture,...