How to Fail at SLM with Service Level Agreements

This post is for all of those unfortunate folk that have been told that they must produce a Service Level Agreement or not come home. It is my hope that you can use this article to send to your management team to explain that SLAs without the necessary support do not make good business sense. “Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.” ~Winston Churchill

China Goes Pink - Later This Year

Had a planning session this morning with George Spalding & Gary Case regarding the program for our first IT Service Management Conferences in China later this year. We'll be in Beijing on October 22-23 and Shanghai October 29-30. Yes, that's right - TWO major conferences in the same country. After all,...

Not A Great Start To A Trip!

This morning Troy DuMoulin and myself independently headed to Toronto airport for an early morning Air Canada flight to Mexico City. Coincidentally we both arrived too late and missed the flight! (The fact that I got there ahead of Troy didn't really count for much!) Anyway, we were headed to...

Process Implementation Equals Organizational Change

Implementing ITSM is much, much more than putting pen to paper! Many organizations that undertake programs to improve their core IT processes and service delivery capabilities experience the frustration of failure, or at best minor successes in the place of their ambitious goals. The failure of many improvement initiatives can be directly attributed to management's lack of understanding that by implementing horizontal processes within traditional hierarchal IT organizations they are in reality changing the IT culture and accountability structures.

Naming IT Services

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet." ~From Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2) Well actually I beg to differ with Shakespeare when it comes to defining IT Services. While there is room for the creative mind, the structure and naming convention should follow some basic rules.

Service Catalog Book Sold Out in 1 day!!

In an earlier post I mentioned the new book from Pink on how to develop Service Catalogs, written by Troy DuMoulin, Rodrigo Flores & Bill Fine. Well, as soon as the book went on sale the whole print run completely sold out in a single day! And we're talking 1000s of...