Another ITIL or ITSM based Linkedin Group… why should I join? September 24, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in itil, itsm.Tags: experience, IT Service Management, itil, ITIL expert, itsm, Linkedin, service management, sharing, success
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Today we created a new group on Linkedin, called:
SERVICE TALK – the true ITIL & ITSM experience
I say ‘we’ as this is not an Art of Service initiative – this is an idea that Chris Dancy (@serviceSphere on twitter) and I came up with last week. The trigger was the fact that we started discussing our experiences around centuries of ITIL and ITSM implementations, consultancy and education via twitter and email. (yes – both of our experiences started with ITIL and ITSM started in the last century.)
Then it dawned on us… we never even considered sharing these experiences on any of the current Linkedin groups because they are filled with commercial messages. Most Linkedin groups that I am a member of seemed to have turned into those “networking” functions we all hate: the ones where sweaty sales reps approach you with the business card sticking out way in front of them. They are not interested in connecting with YOU.. they have a target: “must get rid of 100 business cards today”.
This Linkedin Group is different – this one is policed. When a member adds unsolicited commercial notifications in the group, the message will be deleted and the second time it happens, the member will be blocked from participating in the group. It’s as simple as that!
Be part of the Service Talk Group on Linkedin
Hope you enjoy being part of this group and sharing true experiences from the daily struggles and victories in implementing ITIL and ITSM.
What ITIL Service Managers can learn from a Wall Street Stockbroker who ended up in Jail… September 1, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in business, itsm.Tags: business, ethics, NLP, Sales, success
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WOW – that’s all I can say at the moment. I just returned back into the office after attending a lunch function. The speaker was Jordan Belfort, and I must admit that until 1 month ago I had never heard of him. But I knew this presentation was coming up so I bought his books in preparation of this event.
The topic of his presentation was how to be a successful person in business and in life and not make the mistakes he made.
There are 4 basics that he identified as being the foundation of his successful business:
The Knowledge that we can manage the state that we’re in,
the understanding that we all have beliefs that throttle or improve our achievements,
the strategy to be educated enough to know what we are supposed to be doing,
and the level of standard that enables us to grow at all levels.
Why is this important to us in the IT Industry? Well, first of all I think it’s important for everybody to understand these concepts as they don’t just deal with the business side of a person but also influence your personal and family life.
Second of all, I think that many people in the IT industry can take these wise words and learn from them.
We are like all living creatures; we either grow or die. And I don’t know about you – but I’d much rather grow!
In this email are a number of growth opportunities for you: ways to manage your strategy on reaching your goals. eLearning is a great way to get ahead and absorb the knowledge that you need to make the right decisions in a very short time frame.
This knowledge gives you the power to make the right choice in relation to your current career, or the direction you want to take your IT Department. It might even help you in setting up your own company and be extra ordinary in the way you deliver value to your customers.
So go ahead, don’t limit yourself by thinking that you’re too old, too busy, too technical, too distracted, or whatever you may come up with. Ask the right question: What will make you a better person? What action do you need to take to get that pay rise, or promotion, or new job, or respect, or business opportunity, or…
It might be as simple as signing up for the ITIL V3 eLearning programs…
Ivanka
<<copied from the email newsletter I sent to our clients today>>
ITIL V3 Certification Passrates close to 100% August 26, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in itil, itsm.Tags: certification, exam, IT Service Management, ITIL expert, ITIL V3, success, the art of service
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Many people ask for passrates of our students, and to be quite honest there is no complete answer to this question. Reason being that most of our ITIL V3 Foundation students organise their exams independently via Prometric test centres. We don’t get the feedback on how they performed (apart from a select few who send us happy emails, flowers and boxes of chocolate to say thank you!)
But you ask, and we aim to please, so we provide the most up to date information we have in the form of a graph etc.
We are extremly happy and proud of the results (and feedback) with regards to all our programs – in particular the Intermediate programs which have been a resounding success, most course achieving close to 100% pass rates.
Managing Across the Lifecycle is quite a different exam from the rest of the Intermediate exams – there is a lot more practical work experience required to be successful in this exam! (don’t think lightly about this exam – even an 8 question exam can be very tricky and difficult!). Our trainers passed the exam in their first sitting, but that is only due to the fact that they have a lot of experience in this field, know the ITIL methodology inside out and listen to the examples from students every day of the week.
So when you’re getting ready for this exam: make sure you’re prepared!
The secret of ITIL (hint: it’s a virtue) August 25, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in Uncategorized.Tags: certification, IT Service Management, ITIL V3, itsm, success, the art of service
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Patience.
Google was a very good search engine for two years before you started using it.
I got my ITIL Managers Certification almost 20 years ago. Many IT Managers and Professionals tried similar routes but it didn’t work right away. So they gave up. Blackberry is the most popular “phone” in the world because they never gave up.
The irony of ITIL is that the tactics work really quickly. You write a call script for a Help Desk and within a day resolution times are shortened. Bang.
But the strategy still takes forever. The strategy is the hard part, not the tactics.
I discovered a lucky secret the hard way about 25 years ago: you can outlast the other guys if you try. If you stick at stuff that bores them, it accrues. Drip, drip, drip you win.
We’ve all heard about the runaway success of ideas that seem to spread almost overnight, but those events are rare. In reality, success comes more like it did for 90s pop band Pulp, which lead singer Jarvis Cocker once described as “an overnight success that took 16 years”.
It still takes at least ten years to become a success, whatever you do. The frustrating part is that you see your tactics fail right away. The good news is that over time, (no not days, weeks or months but years) you get the satisfaction of watching those tactics succeed right away.
The trap: Show up at a itSMF Meeting, invest two hours, be really aggressive with people, make some noise and then leave in disgust.
The trap: Use all your money to strengthen your personal network and leave no money or patience for ITIL Expert Certification you’ll need to do.
The trap: Read the blogs and fall in love with the quick wins and loose focus on the long-term investments that deliver real value.
The trap: Jump from framework to framework, without achieving anything for the long term.
People want overnight successes. It’s natural. Ignore them; ignore that voice in your head. Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision, and invest in your ITIL v3 Certification for the long haul. Because that’s how long it’s going to take.
Every time, you pick up your ITIL Book and log into eLearning in your hotel room, and work on IT Service Management Skills for an hour instead of zoning out watching Idols, is another right decision, another small step towards excellence, and success.
Patience is really just making the decision not to quit over and over and over again.
ITIL V3 Operational Support and Analysis (OSA) Full Certification
ITIL V3 Release, Control and Validation (RCV) Full Certification
ITIL v3 Service Offerings and Agreements (SOA)
ITIL V3 Planning, Protection and Optimization (PPO) Full Certification
ITIL V3 Intermediate Lifecycle program: Service Strategy SS
ITIL V3 MALC – Managing Across the Lifecycle Full Certification
ITIL v3 Service Operation (SO) Certification
ITIL v3 Service Transition (ST) Certification
ITIL v3 Intermediate:Continual Service Improvement Lifecycle Program
EKKA 2009 – 1 year celebration, and random thoughts on the success of ITIL implementation August 12, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in itil, itsm.Tags: EKKA, IT Service Management, itil, ITIL V3, project, success
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Last year I started a series of blogs on a public holiday for the EKKA, or the Royal Brisbane Agricultural Show. It started due to the fact that I couldn’t comprehend why people need an annual leave day to go to a show. (you can read my very first post here )
Exactly 12 months later (yup – today is Wednesday.. people’s day at the Ekka and thus a public holiday for all employees in Brisbane) and I still don’t understand it. But as with so many things, you grow to accept that this is the way things are happening.
But hang on… isn’t this the root of all evil, procrastination and failed ITIL implementation projects? If only we wait long enough, we get used to the status quo and take it for granted…
It’s easy to see how this way of thinking hinders our progress, and our aim to achieve more within our IT organization. Yes, in the beginning we spoke about how things didn’t make sense, and how we could improve these things. But over time we stopped talking about it because we were busy fighting fires and dealing with an overload of operational issues. And after a few months we were used to the situation… ” this is how we do things around here” . We stop looking into our processes from the outside, and don’t see the forest for the trees. We stop complaining and ‘ just get on with it’… Until there is a new manager, a new co-worker or a new consultant that comes in and asks the $64,000 question: “WHY do you do the things this way?”
It’s important that we all know the answer to this question, and there is no ONE correct answer. There could be many correct answers – ranging from : “we chose to do it this way because of budget constraints” to ” We chose to do it this way because we investigated various options and this one worked best in our corporate environment”. The only answer that would not be satisfactory is: ” Err.. .I don’t know.. we sort of always have been doing it this way…”
That type of complacency does a lot of damage, and when we simply accept the status quo we will not improve our services or our delivery. The fact that we haven’t done it any differently doesn’t mean our current way is correct or the most optimum way!
Imagine what the world would look like if the Monks in the Middle Ages accepted that they would be hand writing the books, or people would have accepted that travel was done by horse drawn carriage… simply accepted this notion without thinking about other solutions or different ways.
Be careful what you wish for… about setting goals and have success June 1, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in business.Tags: business, goal, success, target
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Today I flew Business Class to Hong Kong. For some people that is not a big deal, but for me it is! A few years ago I set myself a goal of flying business class before the age of 40, but had no idea that this was really achievable.
Now – you have to remember that I am Dutch, so by default I am very sceptical about spending money on ‘frivolous things’. I can’t help it… it’s in my genes!! So when I set this goal for myself it was very ‘out there’…. not something that would be easy to achieve, and most people who know me well would argue that it was a ridiculous goal to set as I would NEVER achieve it! But today, about 14 months later and 1 week before my 39th birthday here I am… sitting in Business Class flying to Hong Kong.
So what happened? Well – a couple of things really…
- I verbalised the goal and talked about it to other people
- I figured out the type of activities I needed to do to achieve the goal.
- I stuck with it and chipped away at it… one frequent flyer point at the time… !
- I set myself the goal but that was not enough! I needed to put it into an action plan.
About 14 months ago I would only dream of flying Business Class and hope that it would happen someday. But like my mentor always says: “Hope is NOT a strategy”
So I signed up for a frequent flyer program and started collecting points towards upgrades etc. And now I have my first upgrade.. I achieved my goal! One year and one week ahead of schedule!!! So, what can we take away from this? Well, apart from signing up for a frequent flyer program… it is very important to write our goals down. What is it that we want to achieve? Just talking about it isn’t enough.. WRITE IT DOWN! For some weird reason that is a lot more powerful. Write down your personal goals for the next 12 months… your business goals or your career goals…
Once you’ve written them down you can start talking about it with other people to shape the way you want to achieve your goal (notice that I no longer talk about a dream?!?! A dream doesn’t have an action plan…. goals do!) This stage is important as it will help you identify what you will need to do to make it happen.. what actions do you need to take? What activities and habits do you need to start? Now that you know what you need to do, the hard work is done.. all there is left is simply following your action plan! One day at a time.. .do the little baby steps.
One day you will get there.. believe me! It works for me…
But remember: ”BE CAREFULL WHAT YOU WISH FOR!”
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!
There is more to ITIL Service Management implementation than most project Managers think… January 13, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in itil, itsm.Tags: business, implementation, IT Service Management, itil, ITIL V3, itsm, management, Project management, success, the art of service, value
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This post is a little bit different because today is a special day for me… my latest book got published! (first on Mobipocket as an eBook, but it will show up on Amazon soon enough as a paperback).
Reason why I am writing here about it, is twofold:
- Of course I am proud about this book – and this one even has my face on the cover so the pressure was even higher than normally!!
- The subject is dear to me, and I will tell you why:
I have been in the IT Service Management industry for more than 12 years now (coming from an internal auditing and quality background) and it has always surprised and amazed me how many IT Managers, IT Directors, CIO’s and even Project Managers still view ITIL Service Management implementation on par with technology projects.
I don’t get it… ITIL is a framework! It is not a piece of software that you install, nor is it a technology that needs to be deployed. It is at its core organizational change – it is about changing the way people perform certain tasks so that you can improve (increase?) the level of control and management of the IT Service Delivery.
Students who have been in my classes have heard me say this over and over again: “defining the process is the easy bit: you can do that on a Friday afternoon while drinking a bottle of red”… It is the actual adoption of the processes in the real environment, and by real people which makes it challenging and interesting. And this is the reason why it takes a lot longer! The tangible deliverable of an ITIL implementation project will be a nice, pretty set of process documentation (with associated procedures and work instructions), and probably one or more new tools and applications to work with. But the intangible deliverables are new or updated processes with new activity steps that people really use, and that help to achieve the company’s goals.
It is the intangible part that takes a lot longer! And it is this intangible part that makes ITIL Service Management to valuable to the business! This is the bit that makes the IT organisation a more valued partner at the discussion table, a peer to the other departments in the organisation and a strategic asset to the company. Not the pretty documents or the tools that have been implemented along the way!…
Food for thought? Exactly! And that is why I wrote this book…
Two weeks down… 50 more to go! Control, governance and metrics are on my mind… January 10, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in business, itil, itsm.Tags: 2009, business, goals, IT Service Management, itil, ITIL V3, success, targets, the art of service
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It is Friday afternoon on the first week back in the office after 2 weeks of holiday. So basically this is the end of week 2.. only 50 more to go to reach our goals and targets! It is so easy to get into a false sense of security by saying.. “oh, we are a service based company, we don’t need weekly targets… ” OR.. “our clients are still on Summer vacations, we don’t need to start planning until week 3 or 4…”
This is so easy to do, and yet so wrong! When we want to control our future, when WE want to be in control of our targets and goals, we need to get off our behinds and start doing things… Get in touch with your clients, get an overview of your numbers, and financials so you gain solid control again of what is ahead of you!
Yes – this is true for business owners, but also for IT Directors, IT Service Managers and CIO’s. Remember: IT Service Management is helping you to run your IT shop as a business. And running a business is not that difficult when you consider the things that really matter:
- You have clients who need your products and services
- The Service you deliver, they can’t get anywhere else
- You keep your house in order, you are in control of governance and management
- You need ongoing metrics to see how you are doing. Not just backwards looking “lag-measures” , but also forward looking “lead-measures”
You won’t find this sort of stuff in the ITIL books (irrespective of them being V2 or V3) – you will need to use your common business sense to achieve this. And if you struggle with it… get a Board of advisers around you to help you with these type of issues!!!
Don’t struggle on your own, you only have 50 more weeks to go to make it happen! So, start today…
Good luck!
Ivanka
PS: if you’d like some help from somebody who is running a business and been through all these issues before…. shoot me an email! 
After all, I have been running The Art of Service for nearly 9 years now, and we are an IT Service Management company!!!
Bragging time… ITIL Certification Passrates January 9, 2009
Posted by ivankamenken in itil, itsm.Tags: certification, exam, EXIN, IT Service Management, itil, itsm, success, the art of service
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I know… I know… my mother always told me not to brag about things. But sometimes you’re a little bit proud of your team achievements that you just have to share with someone…
Yesterday I came across the EXIN overview of the 2008 passrates. And because I am a very curious person, I asked one of the girls in the office to check how The Art of Service students did in 2008. And it turned out that our students did very well!
Why am I so excited? Well, see for yourself: (and yes – there is still room for improvement and we are working on this!)
The Exin percentage shows the Global total, as reported by EXIN.
In summary: The Art of Service courses score well above the Global benchmark:
Foundation TAOS – 84%
Foundation Partners – 87%
Foundation TAOS & Partners – 86%
EXIN – 79%
Foundation Bridge TAOS – 97%
Foundation Bridge Partner – 82%
Foundation Bridge TAOS & Partners – 87%
EXIN – 74%
IPAD TAOS – 100%
EXIN – 57%
IPPI TAOS – 100%
EXIN – 44%
IPSR TAOS – 67%
EXIN – 68%
IPRC TAOS – 100%
EXIN – 58%
Service Support TAOS – 50%
Service Support Partners – 54%
Service Support TAOS & Partners – 52%
Service Support EXIN – 46%
Service Delivery TAOS – 75%
Service Delivery Partners – 59%
Service Delivery TAOS & Partners – 61%
Service Delivery EXIN – 43%
Managers Bridge TAOS – 71%
Managers Bridge Partners – 100%
Managers Bridge TAOS & Partner – 80%
Managers Bridge EXIN – 69%
