Don’t like your job? How about this one?… must be better than implementing ITIL Processes! October 14, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in itil, itsm.Tags: improvement, IT Service Management, itil, ITIL V3, itsm, massage, model, quality, service, service management
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On facebook there is a video going around about a massage therapist complaining about the fact that he has to massage beautiful models all day – every day.
Sort of reminded me of my experience with IT people (sometimes). In my opinion ITIL consultants and IT Professionals have the best job in the world! We get to improve the way businesses work – and we get to play with some serious toys. We get access to the latest and greatest and still…. still most IT professionals complain!
WHY?
I think that no matter what type of job you have after a while it gets normal.. same with this guy: he sees beautiful models all day, every day… it is normal. That becomes his reference frame and he complains.
We can learn from this in relation to our IT Service Management Framework as well: not matter how sophisticated our service is.. eventually our clients will start complaining about it. When our clients get used to the level of service they start to poke holes in other areas of our service delivery.
This is the exact reason why the ITIL framework has a lifecycle phase called “Continual Service Improvement” as this phase keeps ahead of what clients want and need. the activities in this lifecycle phase help to keep the service fresh and up to scratch so that the clients ar continually reminded of the fact that we achieve our service levels and deliver a fantastic service!
ITIL, ITSM and ownership – the perfect trio for success August 11, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in itil, itsm.Tags: call centre, change management, IT Service Management, ITIL V3, itsm, management, service, service management
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Last night I was watching the movie ‘outsourced‘ and apart from the fact that it is a really good movie (laughed so hard I was afraid I’d wake up my son… ) it made me think about accountability and ownership.
Every time I talk with clients and students about Roles and Responsibilities for the various activities in the ITIL Processes the discussion always turns to proven ways to make this approach successful. After all – we want these processes to work. We implement them for a business reason (and not just for the sake of them… it’s not a form of occupational therapy for ITIL consultants).
But the true success of an implementation like this lies in the ownership of the internal employees. You can’t expect them to just change overnight without at least involving them in the process and explaining why certain things are done in a certain way. That’s why it never works when you simply engage a group of ‘ITIL Experts’ to do the work for you… the same happened in the movie – the American guy was very good at his job, you could say he was an expert, but it didn’t make any difference. He didn’t have the buy in from the staff and as such all his good work was in vain.
Ownership is more than feeling responsible – you OWN the activity, and therefore make it your own. You take pride in the fact that this task is performed in a professional and effective manner. But you also take ownership of the things that do not go to plan. Acknowledge that you made a mistake, or that you forgot something. Ownership means that you keep looking for ways to do this task better, easier, faster, smarter, cheaper. It means keeping your eyes and ears open to be aware of the handover points, and formalise them so there are no grey lines – everybody knows what is expected. It also means that by doing this you will identify new communication channels that you didn’t know existed.
In the movie it became clear that until the callcentre team took ownership of their role, task and deliverables, nothing really went to plan. But after this point there was no turning back.. they took pride in doing things better and achieving their goals and targets! The group culture changed into a ‘we can do ANYTHING, just watch me!’ and isn’t that what we try to achieve with the implementation of IT Service Management?
IT Professionals… you can do ANYTHING and you only need to take ownership of your part in the ITIL Framework or IT Service Management methodology..
I’m watching!
In times of recession – how does ITIL Service Management help to keep your good employees? April 14, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in business, itil, itsm.Tags: certification, crisis, customer service, economy, IT Service Management, itil, itsm, recession, service, service management, the art of service, value
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Today I was interviewed by somebody from the itSMF about trends in the ITSM education and training industry. Inevitably the questions go the the current economic climate and the position of education in all this.
To me this is really easy – but then again: I run an education company so I am slightly biased – ITSM education really helps organisations to make a difference. Note that I don’t say ‘training’ as I don’t have a lot of positive things to say about organisations who only focus on the training aspect.. teaching monkeys tricks… Of course there is a training aspect in each educational program but there is so much more to it! Being an educator means that you know your subject as well as have the ability to make people understand what this new theory means for them – in their working environment. You need to understand that it is NOT about you but about the students. Educating is more than presenting, it is about focusing on the needs and requirements of the students… constantly.
Anyway, stepping down from my soap box for a second here, I strongly feel that ITSM education can make the difference between an IT organisation that is subject to outsourcing or an IT group that adds value to the overall corporate goals. ITSM education make the difference to the individual wanting to get that new job, and helps to get passed by when the redundancies are handed out.
Like I said to the interviewer today; I am constantly looking for new staff. We filled 2 vacancies in March and are currently advertising for 2 additional vacancies. So I see my fair share of applications and resumes across my desk. In comparison to 12 months ago, we receive about 10x the amount of applicants but I can’t say that the overall quality of the applicants has risen. Mind you, there are still gems out there – and they stand out! But what I expected to see as a result of all these job cuts and redundancies was that a lot of highly skilled people with fantastic experience and backgrounds would be applying for jobs.. and I don’t see that at the moment. Not in Australia that is…
Why do I say this? Well, for highly competent – qualified and experienced ITSM staff members the jobs are still out there and it is easy to stand out among the other candidates. So adding ITSM certification to your resume could be a good thing for individual IT professionals.
On the other side – IT organisations can use ITSM education as a differentiator to maintain their high performing employees. Offering educational opportunities to them will make them highly productive in the work place – making sure the IT group can cope with the new requirements and added work pressures – but also happier employees as they know they are valued and continue to improve their skills and qualifications. This seems to be a way to retain your good employees. High performers want to be challenged, and constantly learning new things or improving current processes. ITSM education gives them the opportunity to do this. This ultimately saves you money through retention of your high performers and not having to look for new staff as well as an improved IT Service delivery mechanism.
Benefits no matter where you look! So, what’s keeping you from educating your staff?!
SLAs come with a process attached, says ITIL Service Management February 24, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in itil, itsm.Tags: IT Service Management, itil, service, service management, SLA, success
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When you start looking at the reason why many SLAs fail to deliver upon their expectations, you often see that the Service Level Management process hasn’t been implemented at the same time…
This week I have been teaching a workshop on Service Level Agreements in Indonesia. An amazing experience, as it is always fantastic to see the journey that people go through during these two days. Initially the focus is purely on the document; the Service Level Agreement. But by the end of day 1 people start to realize that you need to go through the whole PLAN – DO – CHECK – ACT cycle to have a complete picture.
In the past few days we answered the following questions:
- Q – How can you create SLAs when you don’t have the services written down in a Service Catalogue?
A – You can’t really as you have no idea what the service looks like, and what it is that you can offer, at what levels. - Q – Why should we concern our-self with a Service Level Management process?
A- Because this process will safeguard the accuracy of Service Descriptions, map them against business Service Level Requirements and identify OLAs and UCs that are required to support the agreed Service Levels - Q – where do you start? At the SLA or with the OLA?
A – This depends where you are at the moment! When you currently have SLAs in place, but they don’t work properly – investigate where the gaps are and improve those part of the process. When you don’t have anything at the moment, start with the Service Catalogue and the OLA levels that aggregate up to SLA levels.
It was lovely to see so many excitement for Service Level Management, especially as it gives them tools to set the expectations with the clients, give service guarantees that can be met and tools to measure and monitor what is going on.
It doesn’t stop here though! Each student created an action plan with tangible action items that they will be accountable for in the next 3 months.. Can’t wait to follow up with them in 2.5 months to see what the achievements are!
We’ve done the planning phase… time for some DO-ing!
ITIL V3 Service Strategy Process Demand Management works with other processes January 24, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in itil, itsm.Tags: business, capacity management, change management, customer, Demand, IT Service Management, itil, ITIL V3, management, service, SLM, value
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The ITIL V3 lifecycle phase of Service Strategy puts a strong focus on Demand Management and the role it plays in the strategy towards, and design of, IT services that meet the expected demands. However, this process can not work in isolation…
Demand management needs to work closely together with the processes in the other lifecycles to manage and control all aspects of demand for IT Services. Some examples follow…
Service Strategy:
- Financial Management is involved in costing and pricing issues, but also in preparing a value proposition and ROI calculations. It helps with preparing financial constraints measures.
- Portfolio Management is involved with the strategic planning decisions for this new service. How does it fit into the service pipeline and the current live service offerings? It keeps a high level overview of interactions and possible contra effects of this new service.
Service Design:
- Capacity Management is involved with the design of the service offering AND the supporting environment to deliver the appropriate level of capacity to deliver the service as agreed.
- Information Security Management plays an important role in the analysis of the PBA’s differentiation criteria. Different PBA’s have different security requirements, and the IT organization needs to respond with the correct level of security measures and associated policies.
Service Transition:
- Service Validation & Testing receives test criteria from demand management and the service design processes. These criteria will be based on the Service Package description and especially the Service Level Package descriptions. Based on these criteria, appropriate type and levels of testing are designed to ensure that we can predict the performance of the service and if it is in line with the demand requirements stated by the customers.
- Change Management plays an important role in the overall control of the IT organization. It has to ensure that changes in the infrastructure, processes or services do not negatively influence the service delivery performance. Change Management actively controls and coordinates changes made to Configuration Items, including critical documentation like service catalogues and descriptions of PBA’s.
Service Operation:
- Event Management enables the operations to perform a lot of the support monitoring tasks automatically. This is important in the context of demand management as the event management systems may pick up variations in the use of the IT Service that haven’t been noticed by the Business Relationship Manager or Customers. The reports coming from Event Management will help to identify variations and differentiations within the PBA’s.
- Problem Management, especially proactive problem management will be asked to provide input into Demand Management. Problem Management will analyze demand requirements and compare this to current known issues and hotspots in the IT environment, it also does trend analysis on incidents and feeds this information to Business Relationship Manager for discussion with the customers.
Continual Service Improvement:
- Service Level Management not only works within the Service Design phase where it is involved in negotiating and agreeing on Service Levels, it also plays an important role in the continual improvement lifecycle phase. As a result of ongoing performance monitoring we know where unexpected flaws are and can plan for improvements toward better ‘business outcome based delivery’.
- Measurement & Reporting works with all other processes but demand management specifically needs standards and guidance on measurement, metrics and reporting to ensure that the demand expectations based on the analysis of the Business processes is measured consistently and doesn’t differ from month to month due to inconsistent reporting processes.
ITIL Service Management – or how to deal with customers who say: “I want – I want – I want…” January 12, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in business, itil, itsm.Tags: business, IT Service Management, itil, service, service management, SLA, SLM, the art of service
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I had a brain wave yesterday… (!) All of a sudden it dawned on me that a ‘want’ is not the same as a ‘need’… It is quite OK to have ‘wants’ as long as you understand that you can easily live without any of them. (Although a friend of mine commented that ‘wants’ are really ‘needs’ at some level, which I thought was really funny!)
So what does this mean for Service Level Management?
Well, we all know that we need to discuss with our customers what their needs are and when you read the ITIL books there is a differentiation between stated needs and natural needs. Needs are important when we discuss the Services and Service Levels with our customers. When we discuss new services with the customer we need to find out the Needs and needs levels, in other words: Service Requirements, of the customer for this service. But, if Service Requirements Statements are about the customer’s needs, then why do we so often end up debating the customers ‘wants’?
Do you really NEED 100% availability of your email capability? Or is that a WANT?
How critical is this IT Service for the continuity of your business processes?
For some clients the answer to this question is: “It is 100% mission critical. All our business processes start with an email”. Well, in that case you talk about a NEED. But I’d like to argue that in most cases email capability is a WANT and not so much a NEED. We can still sell without email… we can send faxes or, hang on – this is a novel idea: call people on the phone and meet them in person!! (Yes, again – not possible for some organizations, but very true for most…)
Don’t get me wrong… I have nothing against WANTS. After all, I am a girl who loves to shop 
But it has to be clear to both IT supplier and customer that we are discussing WANTS and not NEEDS, and that additional WANTS have a pricetag. Especially when it interacts with the mission critical services and systems.
Maybe we could re-write the ITIL books! Rather than talking about a business Service Catalogue and a Technical Service Catalogue, we need to develop a NEEDS catalogue and a WANTS/ Nice to have’s Catalogue.
Do you think that would make it easier for the average Service Catalogue Manager and Service Level Manager out there??
Set your service Free!! or: Free Willy – the ITIL way… December 10, 2008
Posted by ivankamenken in itil, itsm.Tags: IT Service Management, itil, itsm, Release Management, service
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Yesterday was day 2 of the Service Transition course and we were discussing the following processes:
- Transition Planning & Support
- Service Asset & Configuration Management
- Change Management
- Release & Deployment Management
We had some fantastic discussions, shared valuable experiences and had an overall good time! Then… somebody asked what the difference was between ‘releasing’ something into the operational environment and ‘deploying’ something into operations.
As none of us have English as their first language (this course is running in Mexico City) – we were in for an interesting discussion!
One of the students went back to Spanish for an explanation: Release Management in Spanish is: gestión de la liberación.
Oh, that got my creative juices flowing!! HA – liberación… set the software free! set the service free! Free willy!! Unshackle the bounds of the development and test environment! Set it freeeeeeeee!!!
But when you think about it… that is exactly what the ITIL Service Management process of Release Management is all about! Setting the new or changed service free in the Operational environment. Without scratches and without anybody (or anything) getting hurt! At the end of the Free Willy movie the little boy really felt that he had made a difference; releasing Willy was an accomplishment!
And isn’t that what we are trying to create? A better world for us and our Business clients, by setting our services free in the operational world.
How we do that… well, that’s a question of deployment options…
Now that is service with a capital S! November 5, 2008
Posted by ivankamenken in business, itil.Tags: business, excellence, itil, itsm, service, service management
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I feel like I have entered in a scene of that Frasier episode where they discover ‘the platinum door’ …!
Every time when I travel things get better and better… first there was airline travel and shopping at the airport which is great! But then there was the Airline lounge where you could relax and unwind in between flights (as well as catching up on emails and work in general) but yesterday I entered the relaxation grotto!! HAHA – and I have no intentions of going through the platinum door (for those of you who have seen the episode) I am quite happy where I am now!
I organised a hotel pickup and expected – as per usual – to be picked up after baggage collection and customs clearance. BUT NO – this time I was picked up from the gate and delivered to a private customs clearance and a lounge where I could relax and unwind from the long flight while my baggage was collected and deposited into the back of the car. All I had to do was confirm that indeed this was my baggage…
Enter at the hotel and the service is Superb! During checking your personal assistant gives you something to drink while you wait and when things take a bit longer to process, keeps you occupied by asking questions and general chit chat so you are not getting annoyed by the time you’re standing at the check in desk..
Oh and it continues when you arrive at the room: The same assistant shows you where the powerpoints are, checks that the power-plug you have for your laptop fits and if not SHE calls housekeeping to organise an adapter plug. She also points out the fact that the large window in the bathroom means that you will be exposed to the world so word of advice to close the blinds before you take a bath.
Being in the IT Service industry we can learn some valuable lessons from this:
- People have expectations – try to surprise them! This doesn’t have to cost a lot of money, mainly creativity.
- The devil is in the detail – but heaven is as well! Little things make all the difference. A smile in the voice of the person on the helpdesk, cleaning the keys on the laptop when it comes in for repairs.. I don’t know; you’ll be able to figure it out.
- Know what your customers are going to need and preempt their questions or complaints by showing them where to find things. Many end-users will complain about the lack of service from IT because they don’t know how to use the applications and/or systems. Show them – be part of induction programs etc.
Learn from other industries about service; look around in hotels, bars and restaurants. What works for you and what doesn’t? Reflect on this and use the knowledge in the IT Service Delivery model you utilize.. and isn’t this what makes the difference between implementing ITIL processes and offering excellent IT Services?
ENJOY!
What to do in times of recession and economic downturn? October 28, 2008
Posted by ivankamenken in business.Tags: business, economy, profit, recession, service
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You start a business!
Yes – you read that correctly… this is the ideal time to start up a new business. Many people are feeling less secure about employment and Seek.com published their survey results this week that 14% of people are worried about losing their job.
My husband and I started The Art of Service in Australia in 2000. We had no idea that this was a really bad timing!!! Most organisations had already spent their entire IT budget for the year and everybody was very stressed about the GST that was just coming into effect that year.
But because we were a new company and basically had a very low cost base, coupled with a unique selling point we soon became a successful company that started employing additional staff members.
So when you are thinking about starting a business what would it be? What are the requirements, and the things you need to consider?
- Depending on where you are your decision may be different. Currently the Australian Dollar is really low against the US dollar so starting an import business is probably NOT a good idea at the moment. Exporting on the other hand is very profitable, and it is relatively simple to achieve a competitive advantage due to the generous exchange rate.
When you live in the US at the moment you may wish to look into importing… - What do people need/want in times of duress?
- PIZZA and other (cheap) comfort food
- ways to forget that they are depressed or in a difficult financial situation
- More cost effective solutions to health issues
- LEGAL addictions, like coffee, chocolate, beer, lottery tickets (assuming it is legal where you live!!)
- stress relieve (massages, fitness groups, counseling)
… I am sure you can think of other things that people really need in this environment.
Now, take that idea and think of ideas to do it better/smarter/faster/cheaper and focus on SERVICE. Without service you are nowhere… people can get bad service anywhere at the moment, why would they go to you?
Give people a smile (it’s FREE) and good service as well as a product that they want and need and you’re up and running!!!
Good luck and enjoy!
Economic downturn? Keep the service coming! September 30, 2008
Posted by ivankamenken in business.Tags: business, cashflow, economy, finance, service
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Even while we are on a family holiday, we keep talking about Service Management ( I know.. occupational hazard I suppose!) as it is very obvious around us… things are changing with the US economy going down. We are in Hawaii at a resort that is famous for its restaurants and service and we were wondering what the impact of the economy would be. Well, the first impressions are:
- The resort is approx. 25% occupied… great for us because it is quite relaxed and not crowded at all! But not so good for a resort as the fixed cost would be HUGE! This would bring a cash flow issue with it – I’m sure of that…
- The resort restaurants have split the work between them: some restaurants are only open for breakfast and lunch, and others only for dinner
- There are not many US people on holiday here.. we mainly hear foreign languages and accents
- The prices have NOT dropped / changed
- Don’t lower your prices – there will always be people who will pay for your services. Lowering prices means lowering service standards (usually) and this is the start of a vicious circle of fewer clients and less cash
- Cut back on the amount of services you offer – do your research to find out where people go and what they do and offer the most popular ones. Close the other offerings temporarily so you can still offer the same level of service and still make money
- Be flexible and have the ability to change quickly. Change the marketing message to link in with what people really find important and are willing to spend money on. Also, change who you are marketing to… there is always a group of people still willing to purchase what you have to offer, you just have to look for them in a different spot, that’s all!
