Prevailing Service Management

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.

Gartner  described bimodal IT as " the need to operate the safe and reliable traditional IT systems while cultivating a more fluid IT that takes advantage of the digital world and its continuous flow from moment to moment". IT organisations are investigating the opportunities presented by disruptive techniques and technologies such as agile and devops, and so it comes as no surprise that the option to adopt bimodal IT is also explored.  In this post, I attempt to outline some potential challenges and questions for an organisation if it adopts a bimodal (twin speed) IT model. I shall label the two speeds: fluid IT and traditional IT. The potential challenges are presented from the following perspectives: Customer, Culture, People, Process, and Technology. Customer Fluid IT customers may have different customer experiences with IT than the other lines of business who use traditional IT. It may also be inconsistent depending on which IT team they interact with. ...

I've recently noticed that training organisations have started to advertise DevOps certification training where students gain a fundamental knowledge of DevOps concepts. Attendees can then undertake a multi-choice exam, hopefully leading to a certificate that demonstrates their acquired knowledge in DevOps. I immediately reflected upon a presentation by Michael Ducy (@mfdii) entitled " Why You're Destroying DevOps " at DevOpsDays Brisbane conference in 2014. I felt it was a great thought provoking presentation ( video ) about DevOps as an industry movement. I felt alot of synergies between Michael's current concerns for DevOps and what I have witnessed with ITIL over the past 10 years.  On the topic of certification training, I feel that the method of gaining ITIL certification via multi-choice exams can lead to negative behaviours back in the workplace. In order to pass the foundation exam (which you or your employer has just paid hundreds of dollars), you ...

This month, I had the pleasure of presenting on my updated case study of leading an IT Service Management team who decided to move from Agile Scrum to Lean Kanban. This case study was an extension of my 2012 presentation at LEADit , Australia's premier IT Service Management conference.  In short, the case study refers to our decision to try Lean Kanban rather than Agile Scrum to see if we could deliver higher quality services at a faster rate. We discovered that our use of Lean Kanban encouraged our team to work more reactively and we lost our strong connection to the organisational strategy. One positive from this experience was that after 3 months of using Kanban, the team realised this issue and were able to self-correct by rolling back to Agile Scrum. Other teams did not have this experience so the main lesson to share is that each team needs to really understand the type of work it delivers, and choose a delivery method that best supports their type of work. Leadi...

Before the 2014 Australian IT Service Management conference (hosted by @itsmfa +itSMF Australia  ) known as LEADit (#leadit), I was invited by Kathryn Howard (@KathrynHoward  +Kathryn Howard ) to participate in a Twitterchat. I've been in google hangouts and skype calls before, and only really watched twitterchats so actively participating or being interviewed via one was a new experience for me. I was fortunate enough to have Kathryn to guide me through the event and from this, I'd like to share the following tips: Beforehand, participate in other twitterchats (even just to observe) to understand how they flow; Make sure you have a very unique hashtag for your twitterchat so everyone can filter the tweets easily. Be sure to advertise this hashtag very clearly and ask all participates to use it for each tweet;  Promote the twitterchat leading up to the event with the hashtag, and consider the timezone of your target audience; If you are working with another party ...

Recently I was lucky enough to be part of a team who won the 2014 Suncorp Innovation Day. This event was heavily based on the concept known as a Fedex Day (known variants include Ship It Day or Hackathon ). What is Fedex Day? Well you'll be surprised to know that it did not originate from Fedex , one of the world's largest express transportation companies. Altassian , an Australian software company are noted as the creators of the concept which has been adopted by organisations across the globe. Rob Van Lanen best sums up Fedex Day as "a 24-hour event in which employees deliver innovation to the company they work for. It is called FedEx Day, because you have to deliver overnight, like the parcel delivery company. A FedEx Day is a fixed time box in which people are not disturbed for regular work. Within this time box, employees have total autonomy over the project they are enthusiastic about. They decide for themselves what they will be working on, who they are going t...