ITSM Professor

How Can the ITIL Maturity Model Benefit Our Organization?

2021-10-12T13:30:00.021-04:00

Written by Greg Smith, originally posted in OwlPoint News, September 14, 2021

What is the ITIL Maturity Model?

The ITIL® Maturity Model is a tool used to objectively and comprehensively assess an organization’s service management capabilities and the maturity of the organization’s  Service Value System (SVS).

AXELOS is about to release the new ITIL Maturity Model which OwlPoint – the most tenured AXELOS Consulting Partner in the US – will use to assess clients’ service management capabilities.

Why would an organization need an ITIL assessment?

There are three main reasons an organization would want to have an ITIL assessment performed:

To achieve a desired level of certification and/or meet contractual obligations, they must meet a pre-defined level of maturity and capability.
They have undertaken a Service Management implementation or improvement initiative and need to validate the project goals have been met.
They are preparing to undertake a Service Management implementation or improvement initiative and want to determine current state and identify improvement recommendations targeted to meet their organization’s objectives.

How would my Organization benefit from an ITIL assessment?

The result of an assessment is knowing where you are – your current state rating in ITIL maturity and capability. This current-state knowledge can be used in the following ways:

Once you have an initial assessment, in the future you can use this current state knowledge to compare against the results of a previous assessment using the ITIL Maturity Model.
Once sufficient data exists from assessments using the ITIL Maturity Model, you can compare the results of your ITIL Assessment against others in your industry (“benchmarking”).
The most beneficial and immediate result of an ITIL Assessment is as a key component of a Service Management Improvement Initiative.

There are three parts to any improvement initiative:

1. Knowing where you want to be (your goals and objectives)

2. Knowing where you are (your “current state”)

3. Identifying how to get there (recommendations)

With your organization’s goals and objectives in mind, an ITIL assessment identifying the current state helps an AXELOS Consulting Partner, such as OwlPoint, identify recommendations. From there, the Consulting Partner can determine improvements to prioritize and how to implement them. This will help an organization achieve optimum Service Management improvements.

For more information on the ITIL Maturity Model and ITIL Assessments, see our Q&A on the topic.

If you’d like to learn more about the partnership between OwlPoint and ITSM Academy, or about planning an ITIL Assessment for your organization, please contact us.

ITIL 4: It’s time to focus on people, not just SLAs

2021-08-31T13:42:00.002-04:00

Originally posted on DevClass, June 22,2021 written by Joseph Martins and sponsored by Axelos

Experience is everything when it comes to delivering IT-enabled products and services. But it’s no longer about how many deadlines your team smashed, how often you’d exceeded service-level agreements (SLAs), or how many lines of code you’ve spat out.

Rather it’s about how the services and products you deliver impact the rest of the organisation’s ability to do their jobs, increase productivity, deliver customer satisfaction and co-create value.

“Experience” may be seen as subjective, even ephemeral, compared to the traditional IT metrics, deadlines and SLAs. But if you want proof of its importance, consider how ITIL® 4, the latest revision of the best practice framework for service management from AXELOS, focuses on improving user experience of digital services and how this enhances productivity right across the organisation.

Ian Aitchison, VP Product Management at Nexthink, the leader in digital employee experience management, argues that the IT department – and the organisation at large – needs to shake off the idea that their job is only to develop and deliver IT services, and then set an “an availability metric”, which they then aim to meet – more or less.

That’s because 95 percent availability is meaningless to someone who is unable to do their job during the other five percent of the time. “IT might be doing a great job running IT,” says Aitchison, “but if your employees’ experience is terrible, this will impact their willingness to work, the pleasure they take in their work, and the productivity of the business as a whole.”

How does your experience measure up?

That’s assuming the right things are being measured in the first place. For example, with an increasingly distributed workforce, stuttering Zoom calls or dropped VPN links can affect the ability of both office-bound and remote workers to carry out their work. “Is it okay for the business to shrug and say, ‘Oh, we don’t care if your home equipment isn’t good enough, just cope’?” says Aitchison. “Surely the business should say ‘we do care, we want you to be a happy and productive employee, we want you to do a great job’.”

A Nexthink-commissioned study, published in April 2020, reveals a disconnect between most companies and their employees. The research showed that IT downtime can amount to two weeks a year for the average employee. More shockingly, although 84 per cent of employees believed companies should do more to improve their digital experience at work, nine out of ten IT leaders believed workers were happy with the status quo.

These figures should be wakeup call for IT leaders and business managers. As Aitchison points out, technology means employees can work from virtually anywhere, and many will continue to do so. “But it also means that people can pick and choose who they work for. And it means attracting – and retaining – talent becomes much more important.”

The cloud giants have raised the bar for experience – and its relationship to value – even further. “People have an expectation of a technology experience that’s similar to using Amazon, to using Apple, to using Google. These things should be easy to use and always available, says Aitchison. The webscalers also lead the way in the methodologies they use internally to develop and deploy technology and services, he adds.

ITIL 4

ITIL 4 can help organisations in their quest to improve employee experience and productivity, and deliver value. The framework embraces modern development and deployment approaches such as DevOps and Agile, which focus on incremental, collaborative progress involving the whole business. It positions these methodologies within a broader context of realising value for the organisation, its customers, and crucially, for all its employees.

ITIL 4 appeared at “just the right time for IT leaders to recognise that the IT organisation needs a cultural shift, a mindset shift,” says Aitchison, who was a contributor to ITIL 4 Specialist: Create, Deliver and Support.

So how do you start working experience into how you deliver IT? In Aitchison’s view, two of the ITIL 4 guiding principles are particularly key. These are: “focus on value” and “optimise and automate”.

These should immediately lead to conversations where IT asks people using technology about their experience, and collaboration, in order to understand journeys within the organisation and beyond. “You have to be able to measure and understand people’s ability to do their job, their digital experience, you have to be able to know what that is. And then you have to improve it by reducing delays, reducing failures.”

The processes and the technology are there do this, he argues, so why delay when you could be building individual experiences that are smooth and seamless?

As for determining whether people are having a good experience, Aitchison says there are two key dimensions, the first being to simply ask them. “Which is a surprisingly simple thing… ‘Is everything OK? Is everything good? Is it working?’.”

But that only delivers half the picture, he says, and must be supported by monitoring technology performance you need to know more about, even when the user might say “it’s fine”.

Try working in someone else’s shoes

“That’s where this idea of experience level agreement gets interesting (an evolution of SLAs in the ITIL 4 Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value guidance). Because you merge together things you can measure, things you can monitor and things that people feel. Perception becomes very important.”

Which is where ITIL 4’s focus on the importance of IT and digital people thinking and working holistically about the employee or customer journey comes to the fore, which is also another of the guiding principles.

“Sit with your employees as they use technology,” Aitchison says. “And think about what it’s like for them, under pressure when the phone rings and it’s a customer or it’s a sales call, or it’s something critical, whether they’re in the office or home. Think about what it’s like for them to do 10 clicks, instead of one. What it’s like for them to have to wait for 10 seconds instead of one.”

It’s not hard to see how this “business minded” approach fostered by ITIL contributes towards the development of T-shaped individuals. These are individuals with deep experience in one area and the openness to engage with other specialities within the organisation, to realise greater value co-creation and build greater collaboration across teams, which in turn boosts productivity. Over time, the analogy goes, they will become comb-shaped employees, successively building experience in multiple areas, making themselves ever more valuable to the company.

“Obviously, these people get harder and harder to find,” says Aitchison. Or indeed to develop internally. “But when you’ve got them, you want to hang on to them. And again, you’re back to experience, you’re back to why people are so important in a business. These days, you can’t afford to lose precious people, because they’re so valuable.”

It’s no surprise that organisations sometimes turn to the ITIL 4 guidance in the wake of a major catastrophe, for example by bringing in a new leader with ITIL experience. But increasingly, it’s a question of organisations proactively building the framework into the foundations of their IT team, giving staff a common terminology and concepts, and a platform for exploring the higher levels of ITIL 4, the Managing Professional and Strategic Leader designations. And, crucially, says Aitchison, “it makes your skills portable. It proves you’re at that extra level.”

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of IT – not just in terms of infrastructure, but also in terms of the people who enabled organisations to keep going and do business or deliver services, according to Aitchison. “I’ve heard a lot of feedback from a lot of organisations since the pandemic hit that their IT function has done a great job. They have really excelled… the IT function are the ones that have shipped out the laptops, that have fixed things, that have remoted in and have corrected things, so people could do their job under stress.”

All this provides a platform for the future. “That continuation is ‘we now recognise and care about your experience and your relationship with the technology. And we are making sure it just keeps getting better.’”

If the pandemic had hit ten, or even five years ago, he says, we’d all be in a very different place. “That’s my point. You strive to improve technology all the time because you don’t know when the next weird, unexpected event is going to hit your business and your staff and their ability to work.

“You have to be deliberately innovating ahead of the game. By focusing on digital employee experience, and adopting and adapting ITIL 4 into your organisation, your employees and your whole business are better equipped to manage future unexpected challenges, and to turn them into opportunities to excel.”

Discover how you can future-proof your organisation with ITIL 4 today.

To learn more; consider the following ITSM Academy certification courses;

The ITIL Maturity Model

2021-08-24T13:32:00.000-04:00

Guest Host Post by Mark S. Blanke, originally posted on Owlpoint Insights, July 27, 2021

Most organizations, especially service management organizations, strive to improve themselves. For those of us leveraging the ITIL® best practices, continual improvement is part of our DNA. We are constantly evaluating our organizations and looking for ways to improve. To aid in our improvement goals and underscore one of the major components of the ITIL Service Value System, Continual Improvement, AXELOS has updated the ITIL Maturity Model and is offering new ITIL Assessment services. This will enable organizations to conduct evaluations and establish baselines to facilitate a continual improvement program.

A while back I wrote an article on the importance of conducting an assessment. I explained the need to understand where you are before you can achieve your improvement goals. Understanding where you are deficient, how significant gaps are from your maturity objectives, and prioritizing which areas to focus on first are key to successfully improving.

One method many organizations use to improve themselves is to evaluate their organization against a maturity model and establish a baseline. A maturity model is a reference to a sequential set of capabilities that demonstrates how well an organization is achieving a certain set of practices and capabilities.

As it relates to ITIL there has been an ITIL maturity model based on the ITIL 2011 edition of best practice guidance. There have been two versions: a self-assessment version, and a comprehensive version used by AXELOS Consulting Partner organizations to provide comprehensive assessments.

AXELOS recently announced that they are releasing a new version of the ITIL Maturity Model that addresses the ITIL 4 best practices.

About the New ITIL Maturity Model

The ITIL Maturity Model is a tool that organizations can use to objectively and comprehensively assess their service management capabilities and the maturity of the organization’s Service Value System (SVS).

The primary intended purpose of such assessments is to inform the organization’s improvement planning by highlighting the areas which need improvement. The Assessment should be aligned with the organizational goals and the scope be established accordingly.

The new reference Model and related ITIL Assessment will be released in later September or early October 2021.

Capability and or Maturity

The ITIL Maturity Model has two major elements: The Maturity Criteria for the five ITIL Service Value System components and the Capability Criteria for all 34 ITIL 4 Practices.

A Capability rating represents what the organization can do to manage services
A Maturity rating represents how well the organization is governed and managed

The Maturity and Capability Model is leveraged to facilitate the completion of 3 types of ITIL Assessments

A Comprehensive Assessment – This includes the evaluation of 7 or more practices as well as the components of the ITIL Service Value System.
A Capability Assessment – This includes the assessment of selected practices but does not include the SVS components
A Maturity Assessment – This review SVS components and up to 6 practices

Depending on the type of assessment being conducted for an organization, either the maturity of the Service Value System along with the capability of a set of practices will be evaluated or just a few practices will be evaluated.

Maturity Criteria

Maturity criteria are defined for each of the five components of the ITIL SVS and roll up to an overall Maturity score. It should be noted that the assessment of the maturity of ‘Practices’ and ‘Continual Improvement’ components is based on the outputs of the capability assessment and therefore all maturity assessments include at least 1 practice along with the Continual Improvement practice.

It is recommended to assess both capability and maturity, but it is possible to assess only one (stay tuned).

Capability Criteria

Capability criteria are defined for every management practice (all 34 ITIL 4 Practices). The criteria are based upon the Practice Success Factors defined within the published ITIL 4 Practice Guides for each practice and mapped to the four dimensions of service management. The higher the capability level, the more likely the fulfillment of the practice’s purpose. The organization, formalization, and management of the practices are not assessed with the capability criteria. This would be part of the governance of practices and therefore assessed as part of the Service Value System maturity.

As defined in the associated practice guide for each practice, there are between 2 and 4 Practice Success Factors (PSFs). These are the activities that are required for it to fulfill a practice’s purpose.

Each practice’s Capability Criteria is mapped to a PSF and one of the dimensions in the 4 dimensions of service management. Capability Criteria are grouped by level.

Capability Levels

The ITIL Maturity Model defines the following capability levels:

Level 0: The practice lacks any basic capability; its purpose is not achieved
Level 1: The practice is not well organized; it’s performed as initial/intuitive. It may occasionally or partially achieve its purpose through an incomplete set of activities
Level 2: The practice systematically achieves its purpose through a basic set of activities supported by specialized resources
Level 3: The practice is well defined and achieves its purpose in an organized way, using dedicated resources and relying on inputs from other practices that are integrated into a service management system
Level 4: The practice achieves its purpose in a highly organized way, and its performance is continually measured and assessed in the context of the service management system
Level 5: The practice is continually improving organizational capabilities associated with its purpose

Identifying The Capability Level

To achieve a certain capability level the following rules are applied:

No criteria are mapped to the capability levels 0 and 1. Assessment starts at level 2
The overall practice’s capability level is assessed as 2 if all level 2 criteria are met
If more than half of them are met, the overall capability level is assessed as 1
If less than half of the level 2 criteria are met, the overall capability level is not assigned (0 for calculations and reporting purposes)
When all criteria of level 2 are met, the level 3 criteria can be assessed, and so on
Only when all criteria of the assessed level are met, the level is considered achieved

Maturity Levels

The ITIL Maturity Model defines the following maturity levels:

Level 1, Initial: Work is completed, but the purpose and objectives of the SVS in scope are not always achieved
Level 2, Managed: Planning and performance measurement take place, and the purpose and objectives of the SVS in scope are repeatedly achieved, although not in a standardized way
Level 3, Defined: Organization-wide standards provide guidance across the SVS
Level 4, Quantitative: The SVS is data driven, with quantitative performance improvement
Level 5, Optimizing: The SVS is optimized and focused on continual improvement

Identifying The Maturity Level

To achieve a certain maturity level the following rules are applied:

The Service Value System maturity is assessed as the lowest maturity level achieved by its components
The maturity assessment is not focused on the adoption of the seven ITIL guiding principles; rather, it helps to understand the role and maturity of shared values and principles across the organization.
The maturity assessment of the organization’s service value chain component is not focused on the specific value chain model provided in ITIL. Rather, it aims to assess the maturity of the organization’s service value streams, including how they are identified, managed, and improved.
The maturity assessment is not focused on the adoption of the particular improvement model. Rather, it helps to understand the role and maturity of continual improvement across the organization.

Maturity Criteria for the SVS Components

The Guiding Principles

Level 1: Key people have different views on values and principles, and they might conflict.
Level 2: Common values and principles are shared by key people and articulated in a similar way; however, they are communicated mostly informally, by word of mouth.
Level 3: Common values and principles are documented and officially declared; most people are aware of them and agree with them.
Level 4: Common values and principles are integrated into the organization’s activities and decision-making at formal and informal levels; they are communicated and promoted across the organization. Adherence to the values and principles is systematically monitored and evaluated.
Level 5: Common values and principles are consistently applied across the organization, but also are continually and systematically reviewed and may be challenged or confirmed.

Governance

Level 1: The executive leaders evaluate, direct, and monitor the organization’s work on an ad-hoc basis; governance activities are mostly reactive.
Level 2: The executive leaders repeatedly define, update, and communicate organizational directives, ensure resources are sufficient; competencies are developed, and people are held accountable for adhering to organizational directives.
Level 3: The governance activities ensure that measures supporting objectives are implemented and analyzed. Practice capabilities are aligned with objectives.
Level 4: Governance decisions are data-driven. Outcomes are systematically measured and evaluated for effectiveness. Deviations from the agreed approach are identified and effectively addressed.
Level 5: The governance activities are systematically reviewed and evolve to support the organization’s vision and stakeholders’ requirements.

Service Value Chain

Level 1: The value creation activities are performed on an ad-hoc basis. The management practices are not used systematically. There are deviations in the processing of similar tasks depending on the individuals involved.
Level 2: There are some established workflows of value-creation involving multiple practices. They are performed repeatedly, although they are largely undocumented.
Level 3: Major value streams are identified, documented, and communicated to the involved parties, including third parties. People involved know and follow the documented workflows and procedures. Roles and responsibilities are assigned and fulfilled. Supporting practices are identified. Exceptions are processed following pre-agreed rules.
Level 4: Value streams are documented, monitored, systematically measured, and evaluated. Supporting practices are integrated into value streams. Management of the practices and value streams is inter-coordinated.
Level 5: Value streams are continually reviewed and improved. This is a documented activity with clear ownership and measured outcomes mapped to the organization’s objectives.

Continual Improvement

Level 1: The continual improvement practice is at level 1 or higher. Performance data is occasionally collected, some improvements are implemented.
Level 2: The continual improvement practice is at level 2 or higher. Some areas of management are repeatedly evaluated and improved; these activities are reactive and largely undocumented.
Level 3: The continual improvement practice is at level 3 or higher. Performance objectives are documented and mapped to the business objectives. A common process for measurement and improvement is formally adopted.
Level 4: The continual improvement practice is at level 4 or higher and apply to all or most aspects of the SVS. Performance is measured quantitatively, performance dynamics are monitored and analyzed, and improvements are implemented proactively.
Level 5: The continual improvement practice is at level 5. Performance objectives are dynamically aligned with the business strategy. The continual improvement approach evolves to support the organization’s vision and objectives.

Practices

Level 1: All key practices within the scope of assessment achieve capability level 1
Level 2: All key practices within the scope of assessment achieve capability level 2
Level 3: All key practices within the scope of assessment achieve capability level 3. All supporting practices of the functional area achieve capability level 1.
Level 4: All key practices within the scope of assessment achieve capability level 4. All supporting practices within the scope of assessment achieve capability level 2.
Level 5: All key practices within the scope of assessment achieve capability level 5. All supporting practices within the scope of assessment achieve capability level 3.

"The ITIL® maturity model is a tool that organizations can use to objectively and comprehensively assess their service management capabilities and the maturity of the organization’s service value system."

Conducting an Assessment

The ITIL Assessment is conducted by AXELOS Consulting Partners known as ACPs. These are organizations that have met the standards set by AXELOS to provide consulting services related to the set of Global Best Practices authored by AXELOS to ensure quality guidance to organizations looking to adopt and adapt these best practices.

Only ITIL 4 Assessors are qualified and allowed to conduct the ITIL Assessment. The ITIL 4 Assessor is an individual associated with an ACP who has been certified by AXELOS. These assessors are seasoned ITIL Consultants who have demonstrated a knowledge of ITIL 4 best practices, have completed the required education on the ITIL 4 Maturity Model and Assessment methodology, and have successfully passed the examination process at an acceptable level.

Scoping of the Assessment

An ITIL Assessment is based on the specific needs of the organizations. The ACP will work with the client to understand their particular need. There are 3 options for the type of assessment performed:

A Comprehensive Assessment – This includes the evaluation of 7 or more practices as well as the components of the ITIL Service Value System.
A Capability Assessment – This includes the assessment of selected practices but does not include the SVS components
A Maturity Assessment – This review the Service Value System components and up to 6 practices

Please note all 3 assessments require a capability assessment of the Continual Improvement practice

Depending on the scope of the assessment, AXELOS will certify the results and issue a formal certification.

Maturity level certificate – Issued for comprehensive assessments including seven or more practices. The number and list of the practices is explicitly stated on the certificate.
Maturity level assessment report /certificate – Issued for maturity assessments excluding the practices’ capabilities assessment or including fewer than seven practices.
Capability level assessment reports – Issued for each practice assessed. Issued after a capability assessment or in addition to a maturity certificate. In the latter case, a reference to the maturity certificate/report is included.

Please note that AXELOS has yet to officially name the certificates.

How to Get Started

In order to get started, you must contact an ACP. OwlPoint is the most tenured AXELOS Consulting Partner in the US and has been a contributor to the ITIL Maturity Model. To find out more about the new ITIL Maturity Model or an ITIL Assessment, please schedule an appointment to talk to one of our qualified ITIL 4 Assessors or send us an email at ITILMaturityAssessment@owlpoint.com

And when you reach out to the team, please be sure to tell them that the ITSM Professor sent you!

ITIL is a registered trademark of AXELOS Limited.

How to Hire Site Reliability Engineers (SREs): 5 Top Qualities

2021-08-17T13:30:00.001-04:00

Guest Host Post by Jayne Groll previously posted on The Enterprisers Project, May 13, 2021

The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) role continues to gain momentum in enterprise IT. Hiring managers, consider this advice on how to spot a strong candidate.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) continues to gain momentum among IT organizations. According to the Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report, 47 percent of survey respondents (up from 28 percent in 2020) say SRE is a must-have process and framework skill. As the demand for strong SRE skills rises, so does SRE hiring.

However, a challenge for business and hiring managers is determining which skills, traits, and competencies make a strong site reliability engineer. I asked several DevOps Institute Ambassadors and SRE subject matter experts to weigh in on what makes a great SRE. Here’s what they had to say:

1. "Great SREs have a passion for high-quality automation. They have a lot of ideas about automation of toilsome production tasks that can improve reliability and save a lot of time for operations. They are good communicators and like to spend time with developers to understand how new products and services can be deployed and operated in high-scale, high-reliability environments." - Marc Hornbeek, CEO and principal consultant at Engineering DevOps Consulting and author of Engineering DevOps

2. "A great SRE ensures SLOs (Service Level Objectives) are set at correct boundaries of service; they define alerts to detect SLI (Service Level Indicator) thresholds. They enable developers on CI/CD automation, quality thresholds, and deployment automation using infrastructure as code. They enable developers to understand how their applications are performing in production building observability. They thoroughly understand deployment and fail-safe strategies. They influence in building fault-tolerant, autoscaling, cost-efficient, high-performing design and architecture.

"An SRE should ensure the consumption of platform standards and consistency of tooling. SREs handle on-call events and do post-mortems. They ensure error budgets are followed, they ensure self-regulation of velocity and stability, and they ensure excess Ops work overflows to the Dev team." - Shivagami Gugan, CTO at CX Tech Unicorn

3. Prize Communication. "A great SRE must have a mix of developer and operations skills. Ideally is not just an ops person and not just a development person. The person must transition between ops and dev very smoothly. A great SRE knows how to communicate well, either writing documentation or talking with their colleagues (especially when working remotely)." - Andre Almar, Co-founder and technical trainer at DevOps Bootcamp

4. Look for longer-term. support experience. “When Google pioneered the SRE approach, they were adamant that all SREs be skilled developers. So, spotting a good SRE is very similar to how one would identify/screen for a good developer. In our company, we use HackerRank to test the proficiency of the devs we hire. Culturally though, the best SREs are developers who have spent time actually maintaining the products that they have built. Many organizations and service providers still adopt short-term project-oriented team structures, so developers end up being shuffled from one product to another instead of sticking with the same product and learning how to support/improve/stabilize it over time." - Lisa Chan, Head of software engineering & DevOps at PETRONAS

5. Look for a person that demonstrates empathy. "Typically, the greatest concentration is on the technical skills, and yes, these are important and to be considered when looking at the toolset to be employed. However, knowledge in the use of tools is something that can be easily trained. Furthermore, any enterprise implementing good SRE is also considering that tools can be easily swapped out, so the need to know and have experience in specific technologies is really not as fundamental as other areas that can’t be trained.

To spot a great SRE, it is key to find someone who has empathy. The greatest barrier to the implementation of any way of working is culture, and for Agile, DevOps and SRE, it is about an open culture. The greatest enemy to having a flowing and open culture is a closed mind. If a candidate is the kind of person who will consider their own role as primary and all others as secondary is possibly not a best fit. Therefore, and something of good advice to candidates also, is to have a holistic perspective for the role you are in and have a balanced perspective on how you fit and impact the other roles around you. Beyond holistics, it is also about having respect for what others do and the challenges they may face. In all, empathy!" - Stephen Walters, Solution architect at xMatters, Inc.

To learn more, consider the following ITSM Academy Certification Course:

SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) Foundation

Franny the Flamingo

2021-08-11T11:00:00.013-04:00

Recently I asked Lisa Schwartz, "Why is the flamingo ITSM Academy's mascot?"

"Franny has a long history at the Academy. At our very first conference, we were just two ladies with a dream, traveling to Long Beach CA for an early itSMF show. The frame to our booth came - think silver scaffolding - but the beautiful art panels I designed and ordered, didn't arrive on time.

Because we are in South Florida, our booth theme was Beach, and the giveaways were koozies, beach balls, etc. I also had ordered a somewhat sizeable inflatable flamingo, which I bought because it was 50% off.

Well, we just had the silver scaffolding, so what's a girl to do?

I blew up all of the inflatables, including the flamingo, who we immediately named Franny.

I shoved the beach balls into the silver frame and hung Franny from the top, using a conference lanyard.* Thinking, Klassy with a K.

Sadly - and shockingly - I don't have a picture... but at the time, I was pretty upset! I had ordered well in advance. 😠

But then, the darndest thing happened. Person after person, after person, stopped to tell us how cool our booth was. With comments like, 'I've never seen anything like it before.' And, 'I can tell you all are fun, I would like to train with you.'

So over the years, with many physical and virtual versions of Franny - she has had some escapades.

🦩 She was lost in Vegas.

🦩 Stolen in DC.

🦩 And spent well over a year out on a fla-mingle, traveling from one team member's house to the next. #wemakememory

She has become a symbol and a constant reminder. Even when things don't go the way you planned, smile until you are actually feeling happy and work with what you got.

Pandemically speaking, we've learned a lot from Franny. When things get rough, take a deep breath and three... two... one... flaminGO.

In the end, all that really matters is that our amazing alumni are being served high-quality education experiences." #Flamingoals

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*Oh, and I found out years later, that some of the folks at the conference thought our pink flamingo had something to do with another training provider who also has a pink animal associated with them. I was simultaneously mortified and highly amused by that.

ITIL 4 and the Evolving Role of Roles

2021-08-10T13:38:00.003-04:00

By Donna Knapp

In the context of work, a role is typically defined as a set of responsibilities, activities and authorities granted to a person or team. While a role can, at times, represent a full-time job, this is not always the case.

In the course of our work, many of us play different roles (i.e., we wear different hats). For example, we may play different roles within our teams (e.g., team lead or team member), or within practices (or processes) (e.g., practice owner, process owner, or practice/process practitioner), or in the context of a framework or methodology (e.g., customer, user, or sponsor; or product owner, scrum master, or scrum team member). Roles are important because they provide greater flexibility than job descriptions, which are often bound to formalized performance plans and perhaps even to contracts.

This flexibility is important because organizations are increasingly adopting operating models that are more evolutionary and less structured than most companies have used in the past. Historically, organizations have used a hierarchical model where departments and job descriptions are carefully documented and illustrated in an org chart. To increase company-wide interaction, some organizations have adopted a matrix organizational structure where employees may report to two or more managers. For example, an employee may have a primary manager they report to as well as one or more project or product managers they work under. This type of structure is useful when the skills needed to complete a task need to be shared across departments. Other organizations are embracing flatter approaches such as Holacracy, which is a method of decentralized management and organizational governance. This type of structure is useful when organizations want to speed up decision making by distributing authority to autonomous self-organizing teams (or circles), rather than having decisions made through a management hierarchy.

Interestingly, the greater the desired flexibility, the more relevant roles become. This is because, in the modern world of work, organizations are responding to ever-changing dynamics by using fluid teaming approaches. These organizations value people who can quickly adapt to new circumstances and who can contribute to their teams in many different ways. This not only enables these organizations to adapt their cultures and operating models as needed to meet business needs, it also enables a fuller, more rewarding job experience for employees.

Job descriptions are important as they can help support legal requirements with respect to the rights of workers to fair and equitable compensation, selection, and career opportunities. Organizations are finding, however, that job roles are changing too fast to ensure that job descriptions reflect all of an employee’s assigned tasks and duties.

Roles can be used to describe those assigned tasks and duties, and also the competencies

(i.e., knowledge, skills, and behaviors) needed to perform that role effectively. What roles do is make it possible to define accountabilities for ongoing work, rather than who (i.e., what job title) is responsible for doing that work.

An education strategy can then be used to provide leaders, managers, and staff the knowledge and skills needed to understand the role they play within the organization (or aspire to play within the organization), along with expected behaviors. Executing this education strategy on an ongoing basis leads to a workforce comprised of T-, or Pi-, or M-shaped professionals who are able to collaborate effectively across disciplines, and who can play many different roles within their teams.

Two significant changes in ITIL 4 that are leading to new roles are the emphasis on value stream-centric ways of working, and the evolution from process to practice. In the context of value streams, emerging roles include value stream owner or manager, value stream facilitator, value stream architect, and value stream analyst. In the context of practices, the practice owner role is accountable for ensuring that a practice fulfills its purpose, just as a process owner did in previous versions of ITIL.

So what’s different about the practice owner role? This role includes managing the practice resources in all four dimensions of service management (another of the important evolutions in ITIL 4), as well as effectively integrating the practice into the organization’s value streams.

In reality, practice ownership (as described in ITIL 4) is what effective process owners have been doing for years. They’ve been thinking beyond just the process or workflow and have defined roles and responsibilities and performance metrics. They’ve been thinking about how their process integrates with other processes and how they can leverage information and technology to improve its performance. They’ve been working hard to continually improve all aspects of their process (now practice) in an effort to ensure the practice is fulfilling its purpose and satisfying the needs of its stakeholders. What’s perhaps most different about ITIL 4 is the need to think about these practices in the context of their greater value stream.

Another role recognized in ITIL 4 is the product owner role. A product owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product that a development team produces. This recognizes the trend to move from temporary project- to longer-lived product-oriented teams. An organization’s operating model, organizational structure, and its product and service architecture will all influence the relationship between the product owner role and the service owner role (as defined in ITIL v3 and carried forward to ITIL 4).

It all comes down to ensuring clear accountabilities, while at the same time enabling flexibility. Organizations today can’t afford to remain stuck in slow-to-change traditional hierarchies, just as people today don’t want to be stuck in a job that leaves them little room to expand their knowledge and skills, or with only one way forward if they want to advance in their careers. Today, both organizations and individuals need to experiment and adapt to survive and thrive. Focusing on roles and competencies provides the flexibility organizations need to adapt as quickly as possible without the massive disruption of organizational restructuring, while at the same time enabling the growth and development of their employees.

To learn more, consider the following ITSM Academy certification courses:

ITIL® is a registered trade mark of AXELOS Limited.

Happy Retirement ITIL© v3 Foundation! Passing the Torch to ITIL 4!

2021-07-27T16:30:00.004-04:00

Retirement is a time that marks a new beginning. It’s a major transition that isn’t always easy. This is true whether it relates to the retirement of people, or a technology, or as is the case with ITIL v3 Foundation, a certification.

Like other major transitions, the retirement of ITIL v3 Foundation has sparked a variety of emotions and concerns. On a positive note, we can look back fondly on ITIL v3 and celebrate the progress that it has enabled us to make in terms of promoting the value of service management. It helped us to understand what processes are and the importance of continually improving those processes. It also paved the way for us to understand the importance of aligning service management with business requirements.

Concerns, however, have started to creep in. Is ITIL v3 enough in the digital age? Or perhaps more importantly, is ITIL v3 too much when viewed through the lens of adjacent ways of work such as Agile, Lean, and DevOps? Have our processes become unnecessarily heavyweight over the years? Have we been overly rigid in our application of best practice?

Just as retirement planning allows us as individuals to consider how we’ll navigate the next chapter of our lives, the retirement of ITIL v3 Foundation allows us to let go of what is now a dated approach to service management, and consider how we’ll move on to ITIL 4.

This doesn’t mean we have to reinvent the wheel. After all, the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of service management hasn’t changed. Adopting customer-focused, value-oriented ways of working will always serve us well. It’s the ‘how’ of service management that must change. Agile, Lean, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering represent more modern ways of thinking and working. These ways of working both support and rely upon service management. But we’re not talking traditional service management. ITIL has evolved and we need to evolve along with it. And therein lies the value proposition for ITIL 4. It is a principles-based approach to service management that aligns with these adjacent ways of working.

It’s quite common when individuals retire for them to have to reorient themselves in order to regain their sense of purpose and begin enjoying the experience. They may even go through a small phase of disenchantment along the way. It’s likely the same will occur with the transition to ITIL 4.

It’s human nature to resist change. Particularly when that change is as significant and fast-paced as what we are experiencing in the IT industry. Here’s where the principles of organizational change management come in to play, and recognizing the importance of preparing, motivating, and equipping people to embrace new ways of working.

Perhaps there is also a greater lesson to be learned here. Don’t get too attached to any one way of doing things. Accept that things are going to change and embrace the journey. Better still, commit yourself to lifelong learning. By turning education into a daily habit, you can hone your current skills and develop new ones that might just put you out in front of the next change curve.

AXELOS has published the following schedule for discontinuing the ITIL v3 qualification scheme.

ITIL v3 Foundation (English) - discontinued as of July 1, 2021 (exams can no longer be ordered or taken)
ITIL v3 Intermediates (English) to be discontinued as of January 1, 2022
ITIL 4 Managing Professional Transition exam (English) to be discontinued as of July 1, 2022

To learn more about ITIL 4, consider the following ITSM Academy courses:

ITIL 4 Foundation

ITIL Leader: Digital and IT Strategy

ITIL Strategist: Direct, Plan and Improve

ITIL Specialist: High Velocity IT

ITIL Specialist: Create, Deliver and Support

ITIL Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value

ITIL® is a registered trade mark of AXELOS Limited.

ITIL 4: It’s time to focus on people, not just SLAs

2021-07-15T13:30:00.013-04:00

Originally posted on devclass.com, June 22, 2021 and written by Joseph Martins.

Sponsored Experience is everything when it comes to delivering IT-enabled products and services. But it’s no longer about how many deadlines your team smashed, how often you’d exceeded service-level agreements (SLAs), or how many lines of code you’ve spat out.

Ian Aitchison, VP Product Management at Nexthink, the leader in digital employee experience management, argues that the IT department – and the organisation at large – needs to shake off the idea that their job is only to develop and deliver IT services, and then set an “an availability metric”, which they then aim to meet – more or less.

That’s because 95 percent availability is meaningless to someone who is unable to do their job during the other five per cent of the time. “IT might be doing a great job running IT,” says Aitchison, “but if your employees’ experience is terrible, this will impact their willingness to work, the pleasure they take in their work, and the productivity of the business as a whole.”

How does your experience measure up?

A Nexthink-commissioned study, published in April 2020, reveals a disconnect between most companies and their employees. The research showed that IT downtime can amount to two weeks a year for the average employee. More shockingly, although 84 percent of employees believed companies should do more to improve their digital experience at work, nine out of ten IT leaders believed workers were happy with the status quo.

ITIL 4

ITIL 4 can help organisations in their quest to improve employee experience and productivity, and deliver value. The framework embraces modern development and deployment approaches such as DevOps and Agile, which focus on incremental, collaborative progress involving the whole business. It positions these methodologies within a broader context of realising value for the organisation, its customers, and crucially, for all its employees.

So how do you start working experience into how you deliver IT? In Aitchison’s view, two of the ITIL 4 guiding principles are particularly key. These are: “focus on value” and “optimise and automate”.

The processes and the technology are there do this, he argues, so why delay when you could be building individual experiences that are smooth and seamless?

But that only delivers half the picture, he says, and must be supported by monitoring technology performance you need to know more about, even when the user might say “it’s fine”.

Try working in someone else’s shoes

“That’s where this idea of experience level agreement gets interesting (an evolution of SLAs in the ITIL 4 Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value guidance). Because you merge together things you can measure, things you can monitor and things that people feel. Perception becomes very important.”

Discover how you can future-proof your organisation with ITIL 4 today.

This article is sponsored by AXELOS.

To learn more; consider the following ITSM Academy certification courses:

WHY become an ITIL Strategic Leader

2021-05-25T16:57:00.005-04:00

Guest Host Post by Jeff Jensen, previously posted on Jeff's Blog, February 23, 2021

I thought it would be valuable for me to share my own personal thoughts on what you will be able to do differently or better as a result of investing your time and money in becoming an ITIL 4 certified Strategic Leader:

ITIL 4 Foundation

WHY this class is worthwhile

ITIL 4 Foundation introduces a brand new framework and concepts to reflect modern ways of working while providing guidance on how an IT organization can both position itself as a high-performing organization and improve its products, services, and underpinning practices and capabilities. The class introduces the Service Value System, which is a systems thinking framework that is foundational for showing how an organization can visualize the end-to-end delivery for current state products and services, as well as utilize the guidance as a means to improve. This class is also the foundational basis of more advanced learning in the ITIL 4 Intermediate modules and is referred back to a considerable amount as you learn more about how to apply the initial concepts.

WHAT you will learn

Foundational elements including the nature of value co-creation, outcomes, costs, and risks (VOCR). Guiding Principles that foster improvements in behavior and ultimately organizational culture. A high-level framework to identify and create value streams utilizing the Service Value Chain operating model. An introduction to ITIL 4 Practices that are utilized to create, deliver, and support products and services across the value chain. And finally, the aspects of looking at IT and its customers in the context of service provider and service consumer, and how to foster improved experiences that lead to better achievement of your bottom line strategic objectives.

HOW this class will help you be a better IT Professional and Leader

Taking ITIL Foundation allows you to go back into your organization and make immediate and significant improvements. Just introducing the concepts of VOCR, value co-creation, service offerings, value streams, guiding principles, and the continual improvement model into your initiatives can make a significant difference between success and failure. You will have the ability to introduce and facilitate the integration of these items into your organization and it will make an immediate and long-lasting difference in your organizational effectiveness and successful achievement of your initiatives.

ITIL 4 Strategist – Direct Plan and Improve

WHY this class is worthwhile

This class provides fantastic guidance around the topics of governance, organizational alignment, and continual improvement. Many organizations are focused on improving speed and time to market/time to value, but are not effective in doing so because of a lack of governance and/or a lack of organizational alignment. Well thought out and implemented governance is a requirement to attaining organization agility and true velocity (speed with direction).

WHAT you will learn

You will learn about the critical role of good governance in an organization, how to best determine where it is appropriate to have policies vs guidelines, and how to best ensure alignment of the organization around these areas to enable the successful achievement of the organization’s strategic initiatives and objectives. This class also goes into a deep dive into the ITIL Continual Improvement Model, which is extremely beneficial across strategic, tactical, and operational realms to maintain the viability of the organization and its products and services.

HOW this class will help you be a better IT Professional and Leader

You will be able to ensure a “just enough” approach around the policies and guidelines being developed and/or modified for the organization, either as one who is helping create them or providing feedback to ensure they are effective in meeting the needs of your organization and customers. The utilization of the continual improvement model allows for ongoing realignment of the work being done across the service value system. Incorporating the continual improvement model not only allows for improvements to processes and tactics but also ensures your products and services remain relevant when dealing with the ever-increasing rate of change of customer requirements and business conditions/environments.

ITIL 4 Leader – Digital and IT Strategy

WHY this class is worthwhile

Digital and IT Strategy is not a typical IT-focused ITIL class. It is really a leadership class that describes what it takes to transition to - and become successful - as a digital organization. Digital Transformation is the current buzzword in many industries, but how many organizations and leaders are truly prepared to meet the challenges of the next decade or even the next couple of years? The knowledge gained from this class will enable leaders to set up their teams, organizations, and ultimately their company to not just survive but differentiate their ability to successfully execute their strategic initiatives in a digital world.

WHAT you will learn

This class provides the foundational context, definitions, guidance, and considerations to deal with digital disruption, and develop a strategic position based on analysis of the factors involved and what needs to be done to execute the digital strategy successfully. DITS is a very experiential class, based on a scenario and group exercises that walk the learners through the framework and approach (which is organized around a strategic view of the Continual Improvement Model). Deeper levels of analysis and understanding emerge as the class progresses, and the knowledge gained sets the stage for teams to unify and align around a well-developed and focused digital strategy to move forward into the future.

HOW this class will help you be a better IT Professional and Leader

This class in particular is targeted to senior leaders (and those aspiring to be one) and will help organizations to develop strategic thinking, analysis, and execution as a true capability to be a digital organization. Your ability to assess, understand, and provide feedback based on the confidence, perspective, and knowledge gained from this class will make a significant difference in the future direction of your organization as you work with leadership peers to architect, develop, and execute a cohesive strategy.

In conclusion, the learnings and insight to be gained by attending the combination of these three classes have the opportunity to make a significant difference in the ability for leaders to have a direct and meaningful impact on the success of their organization and its ability to define and execute its strategy.

We hope to see you in class soon!

How To Use ITIL 4 Create, Deliver and Support in the New Normal

2021-05-11T13:30:00.002-04:00

Originally posted on The AXELOS Blog, March 2021 and written by Solmaz Purser, Project Editor, AXELOS

The past year has been tumultuous and unexpected, to say the least. Over a year on from the start of a pandemic that few ever expected, the world has certainly changed. Many people are now working from home. This was expected to be a temporary measure, but in some instances, people have been working from home for nearly a year. It would be fair to say that this is the new normal, where commutes now involve walking to a computer, and work social events are conducted via video conferencing.

This brings us to ITIL® 4;: Create, Deliver and Support (CDS) and how it can be used to help you in the new normal. The components of CDS are flexible and adaptable enough to be applied to any situation, such as surviving prolonged periods at home.

Relationship management

CDS explores the importance of relationship management, where a service manager acts as a point of contact and liaison between the various stakeholders. For those living with others, prolonged periods of contact in confined spaces can cause tempers to fray and arguments to erupt.

In these situations, it might help to nominate an impartial referee to settle any arguments. If that isn’t possible, remember another CDS principle about communication: good communication is vital and can use various types of media.

So, to avoid an argument, go to separate parts of your home. Any tension can be resolved later when both parties are less angry. Or, if you don’t think that a face-to-face argument is a good idea, conduct your argument via a messaging app, or with paper airplanes. CDS encourages the use of verbal and written communication, whatever works best.

Team culture

Effective communication and relationship management form part of the team culture. For a team to be successful there must be a cultural fit, where the team’s culture complements the persons. This applies to those who live together. If you are too different, it can cause problems.

For example, if one person is very tidy and another messy, this will eventually lead to resentment and arguments. However, these differences can be reconciled through social activities, such as board games, quizzes, or movie marathons. Each person also needs to remember that they are part of one household (or team) and need to take responsibility to maintain an effective environment. In other words, chores must be shared out equally!

Value streams

Many household chores can also be viewed as value streams. For example, the buying, preparing, cooking, and cleaning involved in meals is a series of steps taken to deliver value, which in this instance is food.

CDS can be applied to the meal preparation value stream by adopting value stream optimizing suggestions, such as eliminating work that does not create meaningful outcomes. So, if you include kale in your shopping list despite knowing that you won’t use or eat it, stop. Also, utilize time-saving devices. This could be a robotic vacuum cleaner that cleans as you work, fulfilling two actions at once.

Value stream outputs can also include information, which can be shared with other stakeholders to aid in ongoing management. So, after a meal, the other stakeholders can provide their opinion and evaluate the process from start to finish. The cook can then decide if they will cook that meal again or if they can improve the efficiency of the value stream. For example, by completing some of the washing up as the meal is cooking. This can also be added as an additional step in the value chain.

The components of CDS can be applied to any situation, including the new normal. This can be a great opportunity to practice applying CDS before the world (hopefully) goes back to the old normal.

To learn more; consider the following ITSM Academy certification courses:

Upskilling Your Service Management Office (SMO)

2021-04-28T08:00:00.005-04:00

By Donna Knapp and Jeff Jensen

Let’s answer the obvious question first. What is a service management office (SMO)? ITIL® describes an SMO as a “group or department that functions as a center of excellence for service management, ensuring continual development and the consistent application of management practices across an organization.” So given that service management is a “set of specialized organizational capabilities for enabling value for customers in the form of services”, it is the SMO that helps the organization to develop these capabilities.

A SMO can be formalized and have significant authority to drive service management in the organization, or it can be less-formal teams focused on continual development of the organization’s management practices. In some organizations, the SMO provides a management structure for the various practice/process owners and managers to report into. This also allows for a roll-up of enterprise metrics and reporting, and in some cases provides governance for ITSM practices.

It is important to recognize that in some organizations, governance has a negative connotation. This is often because of heavy-handed policies, or policies that seem to be out of sync with the organization’s strategy. The SMO can play an important role in breaking down bureaucracy and ensuring that policies and controls are ‘sufficient but not excessive’, as explained in ITIL: Direct, Plan and Improve. The SMO can also help distinguish between controls that are necessary to satisfy legal and regulatory requirements and internal controls that can be adapted (compensating controls) or possibly even eliminated.

In this role, the SMO can monitor the performance and conformance of management activities against the direction provided by governing bodies (such as corporate steering committees) and can examine those activities to ensure that they are appropriate to the organization’s circumstances, needs, and goals from a strategic, tactical, and operational perspective. This is particularly important as organizations aim to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, maximize the velocity of product development and innovation efforts, keep products reliable, enhance customer experience, and drive cost efficiencies.

SMO team members act as practice leads and coaches, ensuring that management practices are effectively and consistently applied and integrated in the context of the value streams. They can also monitor the development of established and emerging practices in the industry, ensuring that the organization adopts relevant innovations and that its practices are relevant and up to date.

Why is this so important? The benefits of leveraging established best practices are many and range from establishing a common vocabulary and shared understanding of concepts, to minimizing the proverbial reinventing of the wheel. Organizations cannot, however, stop there. A characteristic of the highest performing organizations is the ability to continuously improve. This involves listening to customers and employees and being on the lookout for emerging practices and relevant innovations, and then determining if, when, and how these insights can enable the organization to improve.

This does not negate the investments previously made in best practices. Rather, it builds on those investments by combining customer and employee feedback with the latest ways of thinking and working to get your practices ‘just right’… for now.

Essentially, the SMO fosters a culture of continual learning and improvement. In DevOps, The Third Way is about creating a culture that fosters two things: continual experimentation, taking risks, and learning from failure; and understanding that repetition and practice is the prerequisite to mastery. Concepts an effective SMO should live and breathe.

To lead and coach others, members of the SMO must first commit to ensuring they themselves are continually learning and improving. They can do this by:

Getting clear on the organization’s strategy. Everything the SMO does needs to align with the organization’s strategic vision and goals and so team members need to be well versed. Industry knowledge and an understanding of trends that are impacting and disrupting the industry are a plus.
Identifying and learning about relevant best practices, frameworks, and guiding principles. No one framework is perfect. Members of the SMO need to learn about and align relevant ways of working and should be masters in how to ‘adopt and adapt’.
Becoming experts in continual improvement. The SMO is ideally positioned to mentor and coach teams on how to continually improve. This means that members need to learn about and practice principles-based ways of working along with proven methods and techniques. Yes, there are processes for improving value streams and processes!

Upskilling SMO Team Members

So, what are the knowledge and skills that SMO team members need to fill this critical role? SMO team members should work to increase their subject matter expertise in areas such as (but not limited to):

ITIL 4 (particularly the advanced perspectives gained in the Managing Professional and Strategic Leader schemes)

Framework alignment (ITIL 4 and DevOps, Lean, Agile, Agile Service Management, Site Reliability Engineering, and so on, as relevant to the organization)

Practice/process objectives aligned to strategic objectives (adopt and adapt)

Coaching, facilitation, and transformational leadership

Value stream and process mapping, design, reengineering, improvement, and management

Baselining, benchmarking, assessment, and continual improvement techniques (e.g., the Continual Improvement Model, the Improvement and Coaching Katas, Kaizen)

Enterprise and outcomes-based reporting, measurement cascades and hierarchies, dashboards

Backlog management (particularly in the context of the continual improvement backlog or register)

Systems thinking, complexity thinking, design thinking, design of experiments, hypothesis testing

Communication and organizational change management strategies

This is admittedly a lot and likely represents years of formal and informal education. It speaks to the need to fill this team with individuals that are curious, open-minded, and committed to lifelong learning.

SMO team members must be willing to learn and willing to teach.

It is also important to recognize that the SMO is a team and so different individuals can contribute different levels of expertise. Building a team filled with T- and M-shaped individuals that possess a common broad base of skills, while also excelling individually in particular specialty areas will benefit both the individuals and the organization tremendously. An education strategy can be used to determine the knowledge and skills that team members need to understand the role they play within the organization (or aspire to play within the organization), along with expected behaviors.

The strategy can also establish, based on each individual’s background, role(s), and

responsibilities, the levels of knowledge and skills needed such as:

Aware – Understands key concepts and why they are important
Core – Can use the concepts as needed in the performance of a given role and set of responsibilities
Advanced – Can mentor others, lead teams, and improve or transform the concepts

Putting the SMO to the Test

Realizing a return on an education strategy requires a commitment from both SMO team members and their respective organizations. A key to ensuring the application of education and the attainment of desired outcomes is an action plan that is aligned with the goals set when defining the strategy.

Approaches will vary based on the expected level of competency but could include:

Applying lessons learned to make measurable improvements to the organization’s products, services, practices, technology, people, etc.
Facilitating value stream or process mapping workshops and supporting the resulting improvement efforts
Setting up and conducting experiments and reporting the findings
Taking on a project or task that is beyond the team member’s current knowledge or skills in order to ‘stretch’ the individual developmentally (e.g., by applying newly acquired knowledge or skills)
Mentoring and coaching others
Leading a team or improvement project

The overall goal is to create an education strategy that enables the SMO to acquire and then transfer to the organization the needed service management capabilities, and that contributes to the attainment of desired business outcomes and the shift to a learning culture.

To learn more, consider the following ITSM Academy workshops and certification courses:

Introducing Experience Management

2021-04-13T15:02:00.010-04:00

Guest Host Post by Mark S. Blanke, previously posted on the Owlpoint Blog, March 28, 2021

Are your service-desk customers sitting in 9C? When customers evaluate your service, do they remember the experience or the statistics? What does that mean for modern IT management? Well, there is a better way to measure. It is called Experience Management. It is an evolution and next level of maturity above that of traditional Service Management.

A while back, I read a book called From Worst to First written by Gordon Bethune, the former CEO of Continental Airlines. He led the management team hired to turn around the airline after two bankruptcies and ten CEOs in ten years—clearly a challenging assignment. Gordon, along with his team, established a clear plan to turn around the company. They made remarkable changes that took the airline from worst (in almost all categories) to first in just a few years. Greg Brenneman, the COO, wrote a brief article in Harvard Business Review describing the turnaround read here.

This story is personal to me. I lived near one of Continental’s hubs, so I had little choice but to fly them frequently. In the mid-’90s, I often traveled for work and remember how I avoided Continental whenever I could. However, I too started to see the change that the new team inspired. I lived the transformation from a customer’s perspective. It was exciting. It was one of the few times I can remember following a company to see what they were doing next. Today, we would call this a “digital transformation” Continental leveraged technology in areas no one else had. As a customer, I felt important, and I believed that they were listening to my fellow travelers and me. I became a fan!

Key to Continental’s management philosophy was the “Seat 9C test”. The frequent business traveler that Continental was most interested in pleasing would sit in seat 9C, a seat close to the front, and an aisle seat. The goal was to make sure this customer had a good experience. They experimented to see what the traveler needed and where they would be prepared to spend more money to improve their overall flight. They knew a positive flying experience would create a loyal following and a stronger airline. This focus on experience was core to the turnaround and success of Continental airlines. I know – I went through it first-hand.

The focus on an ideal customer, 9C, worked for Continental; could it work for you?

How does this translate to us in the corporate world, IT, or even HR, Finance, and Legal departments? Well, the consumers of these departments still expect a good experience with the services these groups provide. If we look closer at an IT organization, what is important to the IT Consumer? It is still the overall experience.

Do IT Consumers care how many tickets the service desk worked or the percentage of the time you met an SLA.? Or do they care about the features, functionality, reliability, and quality of service they receive as part of the IT solution? The truth is, they remember the experience, not the statistics.

They remember the frustration when performance is slow or when an application did not work the way they expected. They remember the negative attitude of the person who answered the service desk call, even when the issue was fixed quickly. They remember that service requests take longer than they expected.

But surely, what gets measured gets managed? That’s fantastic when you have an easy way to measure something. Service Management and ITIL best practices have been excellent guidance on how to measure IT Services and establish continual improvement programs. Practices such as Service Level Management and Business Relationship Management are fundamental components to meeting customer expectations. Yet, they often fail to achieve the goal; a customer who feels satisfied by the services.

Service Management, historically, has captured the effectiveness of work. Most SLAs demonstrate performance effectiveness, such as the number of tickets the service desk processed or how fast we completed a request. However, SLAs typically fail to capture one of the most valuable aspects of the service: “was the user’s experience a positive one?”

Many organizations send out surveys to gauge whether a customer is happy with the service, usually after calling the service desk. Unfortunately, in most cases, we ask the wrong questions. Questions that do not point to the user sentiment. We typically ask questions like, “Was your problem resolved?” or “Was the issue solved the first time you called?”. We then presume the user is happy or happy enough to continue to ignore them. We probably already know that the user is not pleased – they had to call the service desk. Why should we ask any more questions?

There is a better way. It is called Experience Management, and it is an evolution and next level of maturity above that of traditional Service Management. Experience Management (XM) is based on the concept of Experience Level Agreements (XLAs). XLAs enable organizations to deliver an experience that changes and evolves over time, and they are dynamic! At the root of XLAs are Experience Indicators (XIs) that measure outcomes rather than the work produced traditionally measured by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Key Performance Indications (KPIs).

This is just a brief introduction to Experience Management. Over the coming weeks, OwlPoint, along with our partner XLACollab, will be providing more information on XM and how you can learn to apply it to your organization.

In the interim, to learn more about the anatomy of an XLA, consider ITSM Academy's four-hour Essence of Experience class.

We’re Good With ITIL v3… or Are We?

2021-04-06T13:30:00.004-04:00

By Donna Knapp

We sometimes hear from organizations that they are “good with ITIL® v3”. We’d like to encourage an alternative point of view.

AXELOS launched ITIL 4 in February 2019 and since then, the world has changed dramatically. COVID-19 has taught us all that the need for organizations to undergo a digital transformation is paramount to survival, as is the need to understand and leverage emerging disruptive technologies. But let’s be honest, that’s been the case long before a global pandemic changed our landscape. The gap between those able to benefit from the digital age and those who are not has been widening since the 1990s.

What COVID-19 has done is accelerate the digital transformation processes in organizations. According to a McKinsey survey of executives, “companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years”.

Let’s accept the reality of that… things have sped up dramatically, and they are not going to slow down any time soon. So how do we deal with that?

We leverage the ‘tools of the trade’ that IT professionals and their business counterparts have been honing over the past 15 years. Agile thinking and development practices. Lean thinking, techniques, and culture. DevOps practices and culture. Safety culture attitudes, beliefs, and practices. Customer experience management. And that brings us to ITIL 4. ITIL 4 reshapes established IT service management (ITSM) practices in the wider context of customer experience, value streams, digital transformation, and systems thinking, as well as embracing new ways of working, such as Agile, Lean, and DevOps.

The need to continually improve has always been a tenet of ITIL. This improvement cannot, and should not, be limited to improving the processes found in ITIL v3. Process-oriented ways of working tend to keep us bound to silo thinking and local optimization. Things that might have served us well when the world was simpler or when our organizations were in a chaotic state and needed to be brought under control. But the world has changed, and there is an urgent need for ITSM practitioners to change along with it.

So where do we begin? An ITIL 4 guiding principle is to ‘start where you are’. And that’s always great advice. Honor the past. Honor the hard work that has gotten you to where you are. But more importantly, don’t be bound to it. Accept your current reality and look to the future.

This ability to not only improve, but to evolve, begins with a shift in mindset. It is well understood that organizations don’t change, people do. For an organization to evolve, it must examine and then shift the beliefs and behaviors that shape its organizational culture. ITIL v3 represents beliefs and behaviors that were viewed as best practice in the early 2000s. That’s the very distant past. The world has changed and we’re never going back. We’re not even going back to ‘normal’ as we knew it pre-COVID-19. We’ve got to move on!

AXELOS has published the following schedule for discontinuing ITIL v3.

· ITIL v3 Foundation (English) to be discontinued as of 1 July 2021
· ITIL v3 Intermediates (English) to be discontinued as of 1 January 2022
· ITIL 4 Managing Professional Transition exam (English) to be discontinued as of 1 July 2022

ITIL has evolved and we need to evolve along with it. Learning how to recognize an outdated organizational mindset is a first step. Education can help with that. From there, focus on the future and on embracing new ways of thinking and work. Education can help with that as well.

It's time to change your organizational mindset and culture. It’s very likely that the future of your organization depends on it.

To learn more, consider the following ITSM Academy certification courses and workshops:

ITIL 4 Catalog

DevOps Campus Catalog

Key Concepts Catalog

ITIL® is a registered trademark of AXELOS Limited.

The Mythical Value Stream Manager

2021-03-30T14:16:00.008-04:00

Guest Host Post by Mike Orzen, previously posted on Mike’s Blog, March 25, 2021

For decades, the lean community has been talking about the importance of creating and managing customer value across the value stream. A value stream is comprised of all the activities performed to create, manage and deliver value to customers. It includes all the wasteful and broken processes we have come to accept as inherent in the way the work gets done. A key player who focuses on coordinating and aligning the efforts of all pieces of the value stream is the value stream manager. Their goal is to get everyone working together and aligned toward the common goal of optimizing their entire value stream. I like to call this character the “mythical value stream manager” because they are described in books but seldom seen in the wild – much like a unicorn.

This person is the master coordinator among silos, conflicting priorities, constrained resources, and localized performance. No small task as most people focus on improving that small piece of work they have been assigned to and seemingly have control over. Can you really fault anyone for trying to make things better? Lean teaches us waste reduction, minimizing variation, and addressing overburden as ways to improve flow. It’s no surprise that we attempt to apply these methods and tools to our own work first!

But herein lies the problem as well as the opportunity: local improvements do almost nothing to improve value stream performance and often negatively impact the overall flow of the same value stream the team intended to improve!

Good intentions gone awry

I worked with a company whose Document Control Department decided to make improvements to their work processes with the noble intent of improving the flow of customer value. The company had been experiencing many delays in updating controlled documents (work instructions, drawing and technical specifications). The focus was on the time it was taking to process change requests and deliver updated and accurate documents to the appropriate workgroups. The current process was taking days and sometimes weeks and crippling production and service levels in departments across the company. The team had received lean training and requested the help of a lean facilitator to guide them through an improvement effort.

After a focused 3-day effort, the team generated a series of countermeasures intended to address the blockers in their workflow which slowed or stopped their work. They rolled out the changes and measured the impact. Success! The total time it took from start to completion of their section of the value stream went from days to hours to minutes. The team held a party to celebrate the amazing results. They invited the departments whom they delivered they worked for. Surprisingly, no one attended!

A few people from the team were curious why no one came to the celebration. They paid a few people a visit and quickly found that the improvements they made had shifted work and problems to the very people they were trying to serve! Instead of impacting the flow of value across the value stream, they had optimized their flow by shifting the non-value added work to others. One team member shared, “What we discovered was that we had taken out the trash from our workflow and dumped it on our neighbors’ front yard! To make matters worse, we then threw a party and invited them to share in the fun. Our efforts were well-intended, but we completed screwed things up!”

Without a person focusing on the flow of the value stream, how can we expect leaders and front-line contributors to coordinate their efforts to create improvements that ultimately impact the customer? When so many of our performance measures are focused on local results, how can we understand and support value-stream level outcomes?

Why we don’t have value stream managers

If we accept the importance of creating flow and the impact of a designated value stream overseer, then why are they so rare? There are many reasons (excuses) that come up including:

It’s not my job to focus beyond my area of responsibility
I’m busy just keeping my head above water
My numbers are good, go pick on someone else
I agree it’s important, but don’t step on my turf and try to influence my program
My incentives determine my focus and my behavior
Who needs more responsibility without authority? This is a fool’s errand!

Whether you agree with these points or not, they’re real in the minds of many.

What can we do about it?

When leaders understand and appreciate the potential impact of a designated role focused on managing the value stream to improve the flow, quality, and value at the speed of customer need, they may be willing to run an experiment. Create the role, provide clear goals and boundaries, socialize the change and gain support, gather baseline performance measures, run a trial for 90 days, re-assess performance by comparing to baseline, reflect on the results, share the learning, take your next step based on the learning. Sounds easy! It’s not.

Identify a pilot area where you can test the effectiveness of value-stream focus
Socialize the idea with every part of the stream (all the silos, vendors, departments, customers, managers, and leaders (start with the leaders)
Recruit a person who is willing to take on a temporary role of value stream manager – they’ll need a mandate to make things happen – this might be in the vocal support of the CEO or GM
Plan on getting it wrong, learning from mistakes, and making adjustments based on the data

Measures help people align

What works best to align people across the value stream is the use of value-stream level metrics that everyone is measured by. When everyone is playing off a common scoreboard, they shift their efforts from localized to global results. Here are a few examples:

Value stream percent complete and accurate
Value stream cycle time
Order fulfillment rate
Returns

Give it a try

If you want to make a serious impact in your improvements, consider shifting your focus outward to a value-stream level perspective and find someone who is willing to take on the role of value stream leader. They’ll have to work with others based on what makes the most successful sense to the value stream rather than a single department or functional area. Approach this work as a learning experiment and expect many checks/adjustments along the way. Good luck!

Until you shift to a focus on value-stream level performance, most improvement efforts are destined to miss the mark as they will shift waste and inefficiencies to another part of the business. Customers won’t feel the difference, even if you are celebrating the results! But what if your competition is focusing on value-stream improvements? From your customers’ perspective working with you, if things aren’t getting better, they’re actually getting worse.

I wrote this back in 2019 for the Lean Enterprise Insitute and a friend contacted me to share it again – Thanks, Lisa!

To learn more; consider the following ITSM Academy certification courses:

Value Stream Mapping Fundamentals

ITIL Specialist: Drive Stakeholder Value (DSV) - Accredited

Integrating ITSM and DevOps

2021-03-26T11:30:00.005-04:00

As the pace of technological innovation increases and digital disruption becomes the norm, the need to adapt and accelerate IT service management (ITSM) processes is more critical than ever. It’s no longer a debate about whether ITSM and DevOps should interface; it’s time now for ITSM professionals to understand how the practices they use to co-create value can underpin (or undermine) the flow of work and pervasive use of automation in a DevOps environment.

It’s easy to understand why ITSM professionals are skeptical about DevOps. ITSM performance metrics and service level agreements (SLAs) often revolve around the IT organization’s ability to mitigate risks, minimize impact, and “guarantee” availability. On the surface, these measures aren’t bad. It’s when we sacrifice speed, agility, and innovation in the process that the business starts to suffer.

Even with the evolution to ITIL 4, the what and why of ITSM haven’t changed. A customer-focused culture in which everyone understands how they contribute to the co-creation of value will always serve an organization well. It is the how that must be adapted in support of DevOps. It is therefore important that ITSM practice/process owners, managers, and stakeholders gain a breadth of knowledge about DevOps practices and principles, such as The Three Ways, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, and DevSecOps, among others. It’s also important for ITSM professionals to have a clear understanding of new approaches to automated pipelines and continuous testing in order to accelerate and modernize your ITSM processes in support of DevOps. Understanding these DevOps concepts will help ITSM professionals to understand that many of the controls historically addressed through policies and manual processes can now be achieved, perhaps even more effectively and efficiently, through automation.

But what about the “No tools before the rules” mantra we so often hear? That hasn’t changed either. What has changed is the widespread acceptance of Agile and Lean values and practices within IT. DevOps doesn’t stand alone. Its roots are in Agile and Lean and the need to take an iterative, incremental approach with minimal waste. By streamlining processes and striving for “just enough” control, ITSM professionals can craft processes and practices that work with – not against – DevOps. By embracing concepts such as “policy as code” and process automation, ITSM professionals can leverage DevOps practices and achieve greater control than could ever be achieved through the use of tickets and queues and manual checklists and approvals. Simply put, rules + tools = modern ITSM.

The adoption of DevOps practices – particularly within an Enterprise – does not eliminate the need for ITSM. ITSM introduces a common language and proven practices that help ensure end-to-end IT services:

Support business strategies
Result in a positive customer experience
Deliver value
Deliver the required levels of quality, stability, and reliability

Applying Agile, Lean and DevOps principles to ITSM modernizes the approach and improves the ability of both ITSM and DevOps to deliver business benefits.

To learn more about how to adapt your ITSM practices in support of DevOps, consider the following ITSM Academy certification courses and workshops:

ITSM for DevOps

ITIL 4 High-Velocity IT

ITIL® is a registered trademark of AXELOS Limited.

Optimizing Value Streams and Processes

2021-03-09T14:47:00.012-05:00

Value streams are getting a lot of attention these days for a couple of reasons. One is that value streams allow us to identify opportunities to minimize waste or bottlenecks across organizations, processes and functional silos, and to improve the flow of value. Organizations adopting DevOps, for example, are using value stream mapping as a way to improve the flow of activities during the software development lifecycle, and to improve cross-functional collaboration. Another reason is that value streams direct our attention to what customers value. For example, organizations can use value stream mapping to streamline new product development activities, improve time-based measures such as lead time and time to market, and identify ways to improve product quality. They can also use it to streamline the activities involved in integrating a new employee into the company and its culture. What these both have in common is that the focus is on optimizing the value-adding activities; with the understanding that value is defined from the perspective of the customer.

A value stream is the sequence of activities required to design, produce, and deliver a specific product or service. So how is this different than a process, typically defined as interrelated work activities that take specific inputs and produce specific outputs that are of value to a customer? After all, both look at activities.

In our Value Stream Mapping Fundamentals course, we explain that value stream maps and process maps look at work at different levels of granularity for different purposes. Both have a place. Looking at both lets you zoom in and zoom out to see the work at the level you want.

Value stream maps – show the major process steps in a value stream at a macro-level and represent a strategic direction (why and where work is done)

Process maps – trace the sequence of activities for a single process at a micro-level and help identify tactical improvements (how work is done)

Value stream mapping enables cross-functional teams to visualize an entire value stream from a work and information flow perspective (i.e., the ‘as is’ state), establish a common language, and identify areas of waste that could be minimized or eliminated in an effort to improve flow and deliver greater value (i.e., achieve a target future state). Value stream mapping is an invaluable tool but it is just the start of the improvement journey. An output of a value stream mapping effort is a transformation plan that outlines the various experiments and improvements that can be used to iterate to the target future state. To be clear, this is not a ‘fixed’ project plan that suggests there are specific steps that can be taken by X date and all will be well. The key is to set the organization up to try something new and learn. To accept that each change might shift what the next step needs to be.

In addition to experiments, the improvements undertaken as part of the transformation plan will likely include Kaizen events, organizational change management activities, continual improvement projects, and process improvement projects. In our Certified Process Design Engineer (CPDE) course, we introduce Ten Process Design and Improvement Steps along with relative tools and techniques. Yes, simply put, there is a process for designing and improving processes. We also talk about how to leverage standards and frameworks such as ITIL®, COBIT, and KCS to design, re-engineer and improve ITSM processes.

Please don’t let all the recent talk about value streams lead you to believe that processes are no longer important. What is important is thinking about processes in the context of their greater value stream. By doing this, organizations can avoid over-optimizing processes (to the detriment of a value stream) and losing sight of what’s important to their customers. They can also avoid wasting precious time and effort improving a process that is ‘good enough’ while failing to devote the time and effort needed to address processes that are wasteful or that are constraints on a value stream.

Value streams and processes by their very nature drive standardized ways of doing things. What are the implications of this? One is that you create automation opportunities and the ability to leverage modern smart technologies (the Fourth Industrial Revolution). Remember, however, the old adage… if you’re doing things wrong and you automate them, you’ll do them wrong faster. Another implication is the potential to stifle innovation if processes are overly rigorous. The goal is to put in place ‘just enough’ process to meet business needs.

Written by Donna Knapp

To learn more, consider the following ITSM Academy courses:

Then and Now – Site Reliability & DevOps

2021-03-02T13:30:00.001-05:00

In the past, the idea was to build in the non-functional requirements of service to the best of our ability based on experience or best guess. Sometimes the general thought was, “We will worry about any residual work for availability, capacity, and reliability after the product or service is deployed”. This focus ensured that the product was fit for purpose, but did not ensure that the product was fit for use, that it was reliable. This approach is very costly to the operations of the service and negative consumer impact impedes opportunities for market share.

This type of focus also creates silos between Dev and Ops and Ops become firefighters. The costs for operations are not sustainable! In addition to loss of revenues, staff morale begins to slip.

So, reliability is really the key to success. Think about your cell phone. A heavy focus on functional requirements would mean that you can make phone calls. You can text, you can take photos, you can use your maps and a variety of other apps. Brilliant, it works! Now consider you do not have access to the cell tower or that battery life is lacking or that the glass breaks easily, or every time you make a connection, you get dropped. The product is fit for purpose, but not fit for use. It is not reliable.

In contrast to this scenario, today you might have a Site Reliability Engineer embedded in the DevOps team to ensure that all non-functional requirements are fed into the DevOps pipeline in such a way that reliability is built into the development. The SRE shares ownership and collaborates with the team to ensure environments that are being spun up for build, test, and deployment stages are reliable. When Site Reliability Engineering is built into the orchestration of the DevOps pipeline, a cooperative, collaborative effort with the team leads to reliable scalable services, but also to anti-fragile environments. This takes operations from being reactive to being truly proactive. The benefits are a reduction in cost to support, increased value to customers, more opportunity for staff, and a win-win situation for all stakeholders involved.

To learn more; consider the following ITSM Academy certification courses:

Co-Creating Service – Customer and Provider Responsibilities

2021-02-23T13:30:00.001-05:00

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, for example, manages resources such as infra, personnel, contracts, and more. When it is part of an agreed service action, the delivery of goods is also the responsibility of the service provider. In some cases, the consumer will provide their own resources, such as a laptop, phone, or internet device. All aspects of the service relationship must be identified and agreed upon to understand clearly defined roles and responsibilities in the co-creation of a service.

Constructs of a “Service Relationship” – ITIL 4

2021-02-16T16:30:00.001-05:00

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 be able 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 Streams and Processes

Products – A configuration of resources provided by the service provider that are potentially valuable to their customers.

Service Offerings - Simply put, service offerings are a way that providers can offer options to consumers.

An example that we can relate to is a banking service offering. Products might include checking and savings accounts that come with a debit card and access to ATMS and online banking service. A consumer typically can avoid fees by using their bank’s ATMs, or by also having a savings account or using direct deposit. These offerings are designed to address the cost and risk profiles of their various target consumer groups. Products are typically complex and are not fully visible to the consumer. The portion of a product that the consumer sees does not always represent all of the components that comprise the product and support its delivery. Organizations define which product components their consumers see and tailor them to suit their target consumer groups.

Learn more about how to accelerate and optimize your services and receive your ITIL 4 certifications.

Virtual Classroom Training Guide

2021-02-09T10:30:00.002-05:00

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

What's in Your Strategy?

2021-02-02T16:06:00.003-05:00

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 infrastructure)

While seemingly separate and distinct, these strategies merge in response to an organization’s growing reliance on technology. A reliance that has been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most organizations have been adopting some form of digital technology for decades. What differentiates a digital organization is the extent to which it uses digital technology as a basis to differentiate itself. Digital organizations rely on digital technology as a fundamental component of their business and operating models.

Even before the pandemic, most organizations recognized the need to undergo a digital transformation in order to survive and grow in our increasingly digital society. According to Gartner, 69% of boards of directors accelerated their digital business initiatives in the wake of COVID-19. According to a McKinsey survey, companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by 3 to 4 years, and the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has accelerated by 7 years.

The term digital transformation, as defined in ITIL 4® High Velocity IT, is used to indicate major investment in digitizing, robotizing and other forms of automation that enables organizations to:

Do business significantly differently (e.g., switching to a predominantly remote model for healthcare (telemedicine) or education (online training))
Do significantly different business (e.g., introducing new lines of business based on digital technology (e.g., amazon web services)

The term transformation is defined as dramatic or radical change. Transformation does not, however, imply a big bang adoption, although it could be based on the approach selected to achieve the change. Transformation can be achieved, and is often more successfully achieved, by making many small, continuous changes.

Transformation begins with a shift in mindset, coupled with new ways of thinking and working, new skills, and new combinations of skills. It is about reframing work by thinking about things differently, or thinking about different things. It is a journey; but when done well, it is a journey with a clearly stated direction and objectives. Objectives that cannot be achieved without a shared understanding of the organization’s priorities.

According to Mark Blanke, President and CEO of OwlPoint and Chairman of The CIO Initiative, business and IT leaders are narrowing in on four priorities:

Maximizing the velocity of product development and innovation efforts
Keeping products reliable
Enhancing the customer experience
Driving cost-efficiency

While the order in which these priorities are addressed will vary from one organization to next, most leaders recognize the risks they face when sacrificing one (e.g., quality or reliability) for another (e.g., speed) These leaders recognize that to undergo a successful transformation they must nurture a digital culture that embraces constant change and evolution, and that supports agility and resilience.

Admittedly, some organizations have scaled back their digital initiatives and made budget cuts in response to the global pandemic. These organizations are, for now, focused on surviving. Others, however, are taking action to make sure that when the crisis ends, they’ll be stronger than they are today.

For some organizations, the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies across the enterprise. For these organizations, the need to change wasn’t as evident before, but the pandemic and the need to support remote workers forced the adoption. Other organizations found that they needed to transform to stay alive. For example, many small businesses such as restaurants and retail outlets had to rapidly adopt digital technologies in which they hadn’t previously invested. This was a total change in strategy brought on by the need to support digital engagement with their customers and to facilitate touchless interactions.

Regardless of their approach, it is important that all organizations identify and capture lessons learned during the pandemic, and use those lessons to reset the organization’s strategies, build resilience, and improve organizational readiness.

Given the current high levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA),

organizations must move from long-term, rigid and detailed plans to an agile approach with goals that are continually redefined and adjusted based on the analysis of both external and internal factors.

Blanke suggests doing periodic strategy alignment reviews of the organization’s projects and programs. There is no rule that specifies how frequently these reviews occur. Rather, the frequency should match the volatility of the organization’s environment.

Creating and maintaining this set of strategies is not a one-off or annual activity. In fact, according to ITIL 4® Digital and IT Strategy, organizations that both define and review their strategies annually tend to be more reactive. This is because technological innovation and competitive disruption of industries and markets occur frequently. Strategies must, therefore, be managed within shorter cycles, taking into consideration more scenarios and strategic options than has been done in the past. Having said that, not everything has to be evaluated at once. Different levels of strategy (e.g., the enterprise vs. individual business units) usually have different review and update cycles. Strategies are supported by other strategies and subordinate strategies may be re-evaluated more frequently. The higher the strategy is in the hierarchy, the less volatile it should be. The key is to strike a balance between the time and effort needed to perform the reviews, and the time and effort needed to execute the strategy and turn the organization’s vision into reality.

Written by Donna Knapp and Mark Blanke

To learn more, consider the following ITSM Academy certification courses:

ITIL Leader: Digital and IT Strategy

ITIL Strategist: Direct, Plan and Improve

ITIL Specialist: High Velocity IT

Effective and Efficient Incident Response – Rethinking the way YOU work!

2020-11-13T12:30:00.001-05:00

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 frustrates every stakeholder. When this happens it is not uncommon for bouncing tickets to get dropped into the infamous black hole with no fix, no response, and no communication to the users.

This is toil on steroids and sadly not uncommon. From an end-user customer perspective, their opinion of the entire organization can be based on the lack of or bad service they receive at the service desk. Social media lights up and brand recognition is damaged all due to the ineffective incident response system. In come new ways of thinking and working.

Consider new techniques like “swarming”.

Today, when there is a major incident, “all hands on deck”, all stakeholders are immediately contacted and use collaborative tools to very quickly (with humans and Artificial Intelligence) analyze the outage and determine which experts should take this on.
NO MORE PASSING tickets!

With swarming, once the ticket is resolved a blameless post-mortem is performed. This new way of doing work shatters the silos, creates a built-in synergy across the teams and a culture of "it's okay to fail". In order to change the way, we work we must change the way we think! What are your out of the box ideas to “rethink the way YOU work”?

To learn more; consider the following ITSM Academy Certification courses:

Grilled Pizza, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Continual Improvement

2020-10-06T13:30:00.013-04:00

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 researching (when I could have been grilling), I decided I wasn’t going to get it perfect the first time, so I stopped the development research and aimed to deliver a MVP (Minimal Viable Pizza) while identifying improvements for next time.

I prepared the toppings my family wanted, made and kneaded the dough, oiled the pans and put the hot coals in the grill. I was ready to grill pizzas for the first time.

So the end result proved the saying that “there’s no such thing as a bad pizza”; they were pretty good, but throughout the meal my family and I identified some improvement items such as too few onions, overdone crust, too little wood-fire taste (We could only taste the meat, not the heat.). After dinner, I documented the items along with ideas on how to accomplish the improvements.

A week later, I made two pizzas on the grill implementing the improvements we’d agreed. Most of the items had positive results and the pizzas were significantly better than the first batch. We identified three new items to work on for the next batch and will continually raise the bar.

My family is certainly happy to help me work through the process, although they have asked me to stop referring to them as “stakeholders” and “consumers.” I have no doubt we will keep this momentum going and continually identify and make improvements. After all, we need something to eat while drinking all this homebrewed root beer.

What does this have to do with IT you ask? Well, sometimes you have to stop researching and planning, and start doing. There is no better teacher than experience and the best way to get experience is to get started with the mindset of continually improving as you go along. Too much time on research can turn into analysis paralysis, leading to projects on perpetual hold. No one wants to fail or make mistakes, but you will never get anywhere if you don’t take the first step.

Know where to draw the line. Take it from me, there’s no such thing as a bad pizza.

One of the first pizzas

The second batch (with much improved crust)

ITIL 4 and Site Reliability Engineering

2020-09-29T13:30:00.001-04:00

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 language they used could be better understood by their customers and the teams they worked with. If you are reading this article, then you are probably familiar with one of the key values of Service Management and a core driver in developing ITIL in the first place: the need for a common language.

There have been many questions and misnomers in recent years such as “Is DevOps replacing IT Service Management?”, “Are SRE and DevOps the same thing?” and “Do I need them both” Well in all honestly, they are complementary and overlap a bit, but all together serve the greater purpose of co-creating value. ITIL 4 pulls these concepts together well and is described in some detail in ITIL 4’s High-Velocity IT (HVIT).

SRE is much more prescriptive than DevOps. DevOps is based on a set of guidelines but lacks much of the details of how to operate it, which is a big challenge for organizations looking to bring DevOps best practices to their teams.

SRE, on the other hand, is not only more dogmatic, but also is much more focused on bringing the operations aspect into the fold, and doesn’t just focus on the software development lifecycle.

I must acknowledge that I myself need to learn more about SRE, so I was really excited to hear that our partner ITSM Academy has recently launched a new class called SRE Foundation, accredited by the DevOps Institute. If you are interested in attending future sessions or would like additional information, please click here. We hope to see you in class!

ITIL 4 Specialist Drive Stakeholder Value: Maximizing the Consumer Experience

2020-08-25T13:30:00.000-04:00

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-created.

Therefore, we have built this ITIL 4 module around the customer journey – from both parties engaging, agreeing to work together and interacting to co-create value.

While ITIL v3 taught a service provider to improve one-sidedly, ITIL 4 also encourages the service provider to help the consumer to improve. For example, the business product owner (the “consumer” in IT) is encouraged to adopt service management best practices as part of the product development relationship to elevate mutual capabilities and thereby increasing the co-created value.

Key elements of driving stakeholder value

What capabilities will an ITIL 4 Specialist in driving stakeholder value develop?

1. Ensuring high satisfaction levels
ITIL had previously considered satisfaction via service level agreements focused on outcome, utility and warranty. ITIL 4 judges the experience to be equally important as the outcome when consuming a service.

2. Using human-centred design when designing services
The module gives practical guidance about, for example, design thinking to achieve better usability and experience by understanding how the customer feels when using a service.

3. Customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) design to optimize customer experience
These ideas add to the concepts of utility and warranty (achieving quality outcomes) but speak the language of experience based agreements.

4. Communication – influencing stakeholders, encouraging collaboration and transparency
To drive stakeholder value, good communication is a prerequisite of trust: listening and understanding what each party needs and wants. By understanding the dynamics in a service relationship, the practitioner will be better placed to provide services, drive and co-create value.

This is a very different approach from an IT technician setting up a server and concentrating on availability, utility and warranty. The difference is having an awareness that the way service management professionals interact with stakeholders will influence their ultimate experience.

Who benefits from ITIL 4 Managing Professional Drive Stakeholder Value?

As ITIL now includes consumers and producers together in multi-dependent workflows and systems, this module is focused on helping practitioners increase stakeholder satisfaction via the best service offerings; something that is essential to business success in today’s highly competitive landscape.

To learn more; consider the following ITSM Academy certification courses: