Measure what matters

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I don’t try to be controversial, but this whole metrics and SLA thing is problematic. To be blunt: so many organizations measure and report on a great many things, most of which just doesn’t matter. In this article, I’m going to share what I’ve learned about measurement and reporting in my years in Service Management. …

Change Management is Not CAB

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I’ve helped a lot of organizations improve their Change Management capability. When coming in from the outside, it’s important to quickly size up the culture and context to the best of your ability.  One of the ways I’ve done this is paying attention to language. In the Change Management space, if and how “CAB” is …

Who said Best Practices are best for everyone?

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I’ve seen several articles recently railing against the very idea of best practices. In this article, I’ll take a closer look at where this criticism is coming from and take it head on. I recently read a classic executive-targeted article article from CIO.com by Bob Lewis, Why every IT leader should avoid ‘best practices’. His …

Agile-izing ITSM, Part 2

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If there’s one thing that describes successful organizations in our time, it’s “agility” – the ability to quickly detect and rapidly act on change in ways beneficial to the organization.  For its part, IT has had agile intentions for some time, but it still eludes many, and how to agile-ize ITSM remains a common challenge …

Agile-izing ITSM, Part 1

Agile izing ITSM Pin it

There’s no doubt about it; we’re in the Age of Agile. We’re kind of late into it, yet, I’m frequently asked how we can ‘agilize our ITSM.’ Why isn’t ITSM agile? ITSM has taken a beating in the Age of Agile; stood up as a bit of straw man; the slow and bureaucratic nemesis of …

Is Change Management Obsolete… again?

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Change Management has again returned to the headlines, though you may not have heard it that way. Two years ago in Change Management in the age of DevOps, I wrote about the profound business impact of failed changes when Facebook and Target both had significant change-related outages. Financial markets reacted immediately, with significant financial impact …

“ITIL® is Insufficient”

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Here we go again. Announced this week – Axelos – the company who owns ITIL is being sold to PeopleCert. Industry response varied greatly, but nearly eclipsed another significant announcement.  IT Revolution quietly published A Framework for Incident Response. How these two relate and what it means is the subject of much industry chatter presently. The words of …

“Control” Offensive? I’m throwing the flag

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There’s been a great deal of discussion recently about the phrase “Change Control” – especially  with ITIL® 4 switching from Change Management to Change Control in the initial release of the foundation book. I wrote about it in What’s with Change Control in ITIL4. But shortly thereafter, it somewhat unceremoniously changed to Change Enablement. Akshay …