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Employing value streams in Enterprise Service Management

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Introduction Enterprise Service Management (ESM) is the technical extension of pre-existing Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) to other areas of an enterprise (e.g. Corporate or Shared Services). Successful ESM balances efficiencies gained from employing standardised process management, tooling and reporting with the nuances of organisational capabilities such as Finance, HR, Facilities and so forth. ESM leverages the industry proven service management concepts from ITSM that have been available for more than 20 years. Further to this, ESM operations implement similar concepts as ITSM including a service desk for 1st level support, end to end process management, request/issue management software, self-service knowledge bases and more recently chatbots and AI. Value streams are born from Lean manufacturing and comprise of a series of steps an organisation undertakes to create and deliver value to customers, typically in the forms of products and services. In the IT co
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ITIL 4 Foundation exam – tips and insights

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I attended an ITIL 4 Foundations upgrade course (classroom style training) and successfully passed the examination. During the course, there were some notable concerns raised by some of the attendees related to the volume of new concepts and what could be assessed in the exam. This blog post aims to simply share my experiences and hopefully help others to become more confident with the exam. Exam Format : The ITIL 4 Foundation exam format is no different to ITIL v3 and is the same format if you attend the 2 day Foundation upgrade, full 3 day Foundation course or an online course. No prerequisite is required and the format is: Multiple choice examination questions (4 possible answers provided, only 1 is correct) 40 questions 26 marks required to pass (out of 40 available) - 65% 60 minutes’ duration (if the exam is in a language that is not your native or working language you may be given an extra 25% of time – i.e. 75 minutes) Closed book exam Available as an online or pa
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Seamless and scalable IT major incident management

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As digital transformations continue to be implemented and business value chains become even more dependent on IT services, the impact on businesses and communities arising from unplanned outages continues to rise. In conjunction with this, organisations are experiencing a rise in cybersecurity attacks (Seals, 2017) placing further pressure on the availability of services and endangering the customer experience and loyalty.  IT organisations are seeking to understand how significant, wide-ranging business impacting incidents (especially cyber-security incidents) can be better managed and in particular what the role of the IT Major Incident Management (MIM), Security Operations and IT delivery teams should be during such incidents. To further complicate this setting, enterprises may employ numerous incident management processes including Risk Management, MIM, Information Security Management, Crisis Management, and Business Continuity Management. Each of these processes employs varyi
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IT process automation and its impacts on IT service management

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Introduction IT organisations are under pressure to reduce idea-to-product cycle times while improving the service availability of the diverse range of systems and technologies under their charge. IT service management (from IT strategy to operations) cannot support this change if it continues to be underpinned by manually executed processes and activities. Contemporary IT service management (ITSM) incorporates concepts such as cloud, infrastructure as code and Continuous Delivery (CD), where ITSM must be able to manage the complexities of numerous elastic and dynamic IT environments that can change in size and location at short notice.  Manually executing the underpinning activities and tasks will lead to higher probability of errors and longer service provisioning times. Automation is a solution since it imposes consistency and reduces the manual work that is tedious and error prone. As an example, an Australian financial institution was embarking on a digital transformation prog
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Improving your IT service delivery and operations with ChatOps

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Introduction IT organisations are under pressure to reduce idea-to-product cycle times while improving the service availability of the diverse range of systems and technologies under their charge. In response, IT leaders are seeking to leverage technologies and delivery models such as cloud, infrastructure as code, Continuous Delivery (CD), Big Data and IT Process Automation.  This intersection of contemporary concepts is deriving new IT delivery patterns which are impacting on traditional IT service management (ITSM). From my recent experiences working with Australian enterprise-sized IT organisations, it is my view that ITSM & Operations teams are not keeping pace with their peers in application development to meet current business demands. ITSM and Operations cannot remain effective and efficient if the teams continue to work in disjointed practices that are underpinned by manually executed processes and activities. To remedy this situation, ITSM & Operations teams need
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Using the Lean Canvas for an IT solution proof of concept

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I was assisting a client with sourcing some new IT solutions. For one particular IT need, the client had shortlisted a potential solution with a trusted vendor but they needed to explore the potential solution further to understand its capabilities in more detail. They were unclear as to whether they should directly source with this vendor or go to the wider market (with a Request for Proposal (RFP)) to address this particular need. Further to this, it was unclear how long this project would run for so it was important to understand the time and effort that may be involved without consuming too many resources.  The client was seeking to employ a specific approach for this potential solution, where a “fail fast” lean Proof of Concept (PoC) would be conducted to rapidly test whether the potential solution was fit for purpose without spending unnecessary time and effort required to conduct a RFP. To start, we confirmed the following principles to guide the PoC: Do not develop
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