Prevailing Service Management

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...

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...

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 v...

In this post, I'd like to share my thoughts and reflections from the   Australian IT Service Management Forum (ITSMF) Conference held in Sydney Australia on August 20 & 21, 2015. The conference was held over 2 days instead of 3 like previous years.  I felt a little rushed to see my bookmarked presentations, network with peers and catch-up with vendors. However justifying 3 days away from work is very hard so it was a good compromise.  The four topic streams this year were: Building SM Foundations,  SM Innovation,  People, Culture, Community, Capability, Aligning Business and IT in the Enterprise. These streams presented a healthy blend of topics and I found it refreshing to see speakers were not the traditional ITIL practitioner/manager. This also appeared to attract some new delegates who were also not working in this specific field.  Overall I thought the conference was well run with no great issues (although queuein...

Craig Smith gatecrashed the Australian ITSMF / ITIL conference, LEADit in Melbourne and in the hallway chats to Korrine Jones (an Organisational Development Consultant and running late for a plane) and myself  about how People Development and Service Management are intersecting with Agile and each other. More details include the interview audio can be found on The Agile Revolution. Reblogged from  The Agile Revolution.

Recently colleagues and I were discussing topics such as ITIL Change Management, Continuous Delivery, Devops and Separation of Duties. Stone (2009) stated  "the general premise of separation of duties is to prevent one person from having both access to assets and responsibility for maintaining the accountability of those assets." In IT Change Management, the premise is to prevent a developer from deploying untested code into production or modifying it once in production without testing.  As an ITSM team, we had established clear guidance on separation of duties for production changes with our manual release processes which satisfied all stakeholders including external auditors. The question from development teams then arose of how will we continue to satisfy the needs of separation of duties with  Continuous Delivery and/or Devops?  To establish consistent guidance, my team met with counterparts in Risk Management and Internal Audit (and we didn't real...

Compared to other industries, IT is young. Industries or fields of study such as medicine, law, and engineering have been practised for centuries whereas IT is just a few decades old. It is for this reason I often find that the solutions of the problems facing the IT industry can often be found in other mature industries. In recent times, large IT organisations or enterprises have been or are attracted to the concept of continuous delivery (CD) and/or DevOps. This isn't surprising, what CIO would not want to be able to deliver value (often in the form of IT changes releasing new functionality) to the market quicker and more reliably? From my perspective, enterprise IT folk want to be able to deliver the same great outcomes and further demonstrate how they provide value to the business.  There are various challenges facing larger IT enterprises/organisations in adopting CD and/or Devops, most of which are already mentioned in various other blogs. The one ...

As an IT Service Management (ITSM) leader with a strong preference to leveraging Agile, Scrum and Lean (including LeanIT) to effectively and efficiently deliver IT operations, I became quite interested in the concept of the Scaled Agile Framework by Dean Leffingwell and his associates. The Scaled Agile Framework ® (pronounced SAFe™) is “an interactive knowledge base for implementing agile practices at enterprise scale”. In the SAFe website, Leffingwell states that “this model of agile adoption has been elaborated primarily in my books Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements for Teams Programs and the Enterprise (2011) and Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises, (2007) and my scalingsoftwareagilityblog.com . It has been successfully applied in programs of only 50-100 people, and in enterprises employing thousands of software developers.” SAFe has four (4) core values: 1. Code Quality (because you can’t scale crappy code); 2. Program ...

With the advent of cloud computing (regardless whether it is private, public like AWS, Rackspace, etc, or hybrid) a popular meme has arisen to "treat your servers like cattle, not as pets". This meme suggests that IT organisations should change their views (and therefore behaviors) with servers in the cloud by not treating servers as their favourite pets, but rather act like farmers and view their servers as cattle. There are several blog posts already on this topic by authors like Mark Needham , Greg Ferro , Massino , Simon Sharwood . The  slide below from  Gavin McCance from CERN  provides a great, single image of the meme. His  presentation titled “ CERN Data Centre Evolution ” detailed the scientific organisation's 12,000-odd servers and plans to manage them more efficiently. From this slide, you probably now understand the meme: If pets are sick, we nurse them back to health. If cattle are sick, we destroy them (sounds harsh, but we can spin up new se...

My IT Service Management team provide Incident, Problem, Change and Configuration Management services in line with ITIL . Our work is highly variable and ranges in complexity since we primarily support other IT professionals in their IT operations.  Agile is the chief service delivery methodology in our organisation and so we have adopted and tailored Agile's Scrum methodology as our way of working. I have been fortunate enough to present on this topic to numerous conferences but time doesn't allow me the opportunity to explain how we work in great detail to interested peers. I thought I'd share more detail on how my team has adopted Scrum, and this article assumes you already know some basics of Agile or Scrum. As a side note, my team as a whole uses Scrum; the Problem Management analysts use kanban for their daily business-as-usual (BAU) work (managing problems/known errors). In this article, I'll focus on the team's adoption of Scrum. The main ...