Prevailing Service Management

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 ...

I previously led an IT Service Management team provided Incident, Problem, Change and Configuration Management services in line with   ITIL . Our work was highly variable and ranged  in complexity since we primarily supported other IT professionals in their IT operations. T he whole team used Agile Scrum to manage our work and the problem analysts used Lean Kanban for (ITIL) Problem Management. This blog post will outline how Kanban was applied to effectively deliver our Problem Management service. Our organisation used Agile as the main delivery method for projects, and Lean (based on the Toyota Production System) for operations. Bell and Ozen (2011, p8) suggest Lean aims to empower teams to simplify, then when appropriate, automate routine tasks. Process improvement frees up capacity, providing individuals with more time and better information to exercise problem solving, creativity and innovation in situations that are not routine. What is Kanban? Kanban means s...

In this article, I'll lightly explore continuous improvement using Agile, ITIL and Lean. Continuous improvement with Agile Agile is more than just a modern software development process, it is having an agile mindset (or to demonstrate agility for your customers' dynamic needs). While the Agile Manifesto outlines four (4) values, it is principle 12 that highlights Agile's focus on continuous improvement. Principle 12 states " At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly " (Principles behind the Agile Manifesto, n.d.).  Retrospectives are one instrument that Agile provides to check the health of your service delivery and identify improvement opportunities. Held at the end of a sprint (time boxed interval of enhanced product delivery), the retrospective gives stakeholders an opportunity to reflect on: - what went well for the sprint (to repeat it again), - what didn't go well (to ...