Monday, May 30, 2011
In implementing a dashboard for Incident Management, what type of metrics should be considered?
There are many metrics you can collect for incident management, all of which will have value. Start by focusing on a few basic ones and add as needed and as these prompt questions or dialogue:
• How many Incidents logged for the period
• How many open Incidents at close of period
• How many logged Incidents by priority
• How many escalated Incidents
• How many Incidents remained open past their SLA target
Friday, May 27, 2011
What classification of companies use ITIL and how many processes do they implement?
With classification being a general term, we’ll address that from two perspectives: industry vertical and organization size. The ITIL guidance is in use today across all industry verticals including Finance, HealthCare, Education, Retail, Manufacturing and many others. It has been implemented in small to medium sized businesses, as well as large international ones. The vast majority of organizations focus on three processes: Incident, Change and Problem Management, with more mature organizations beginning to move into processes like Service Level, Information Security and Release & Deployment Management.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
ITSM can contribute to the community
One of the more interesting outcomes of the 2010 conference was ITSM Extreme Makeover 2011. Each participating IT service provider will donate products and services with a total combined value expected to exceed at least US $250K. The objective of the extreme makeover is to show how an IT Service Management (ITSM) organization can be transformed using best practices and good program management.
The chosen organisation was announced recently: the winner is The University of Texas Health Science Center. Their journey will be chronicled and shared across the globe on video, blogs and social networking sites. The outcome will be presented at Pink Elephant’s 16th Annual International IT Service Management Conference.
Watch George Spalding make a surprise visit to let them know the good news:
What fascinates me is the number of organisations applying for help - there were an awful lot. This set me thinking. Just about all not-for-profit organisations must be service providers. And many of them, especially the smaller ones, probably don’t have a lot of service management knowledge. How much more efficient and effective could they be with an injection of SM expertise? They are all strapped for cash. SM could help them get more from their dollars.
Altruism is a rare thing in our world. The ITSM Extreme Makeover team of Pink Elephant and Hornbill, along with participating sponsors HDI, Gaming Works, and Loyalist, have set a fine example to us all. Let’s take this as a call to action to share some of our success with those who could put it to good use. We should examine our own neighbourhood and network, and see what we can do ourselves to share some of our own capabilities with organisations that could use it for good.
I have decided I will seek out a vehicle for offering SM advice to charities in my own home town, Wellington, New Zealand. Perhaps someone like the NZ Computer Society or the Institute of Directors. I think local firms could be encouraged to sponsor software and consulting.
Look around your own country and city. Consider how you might do something similar.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
A guide to multi-tasking at Pink12
No doubt you want to get the most out of attending the Pink Elephant IT Service Management Conference next year, and we want you to get the most too. One way is to maximise your productivity, so here are a few tips to help.
During sessions:
- Keep your laptop open to check for incoming emails. Don’t worry about the screen - it only seems to cut you off from the speaker, and the glow during darkened sessions gives other attendees something to look at. Modern keyboards are so quiet they’ll hardly hear you typing. Look at the speaker and nod occasionally to encourage them to keep going.
- Keep your phone below table level when texting. That way others may not guess what you are doing. They may think you just have a personal problem of some sort. Reportedly some kids can thumb-type without looking - this would be a useful skill, as once again it pays to look at the speaker occasionally else they get discouraged.
- During periods when you are actually listening, be sure to tweet any useful or profound points. As well as sharing the idea with those in other sessions, typing the tweet helps reinforce the concept for you, even if you do miss the subsequent point while tweeting. Capturing a cool idea in 140 characters is at least as important as hearing about its implications or pondering its consequences for your organisation.
- Don’t ask questions. There is a good chance the speaker has covered the answer already, which can be embarrassing. Remember the key to multitasking is to create the illusion that you are actually paying attention to the speaker.
- Always download the slides and recording of the session so you can go through it later when email is quieter. Otherwise, why bother going?
Between sessions:
- Answering a call during a session is considered intrusive by nearly everyone, except for those whose work is even more important than other people’s concentration. Even by modern standards, calling someone else on your phone during a session is considered acceptable by only a tiny minority of extremely important people. (NB. many people don’t consider it rude to listen to voicemail during a session - clearly community standards are shifting here. One needs to track these social mores closely to keep up.) So the breaks between sessions are the time to make phonecalls. The fact that those around you have come from other states and countries to be at the conference is rendered irrelevant by modern technologies - you’ll likely get a chance to network online with them some day. Most phone calls are more important than meeting new people.
- When all the phone-calls are done, don’t let up. Wifi is there to be used: process those emails. We are IT professionals: we don’t need mental rest. Besides you can relax the brain a little when back in session: close attention is not required when we have powerpoints to take away.
After sessions:
- One of the advantages of staying at the conference venue is the ease with which you can go back to your room for serious work. After all we are process experts, so we know none of our processes will continue to work without our constant daily attention.
- The best time to do this is during the networking events, dinners and exhibit hall openings. As you know, chatting with people is a great waste of time and an inefficient way of transfering information. We in IT discovered long ago that it is best to avoid people altogether - computers are a much more efficient use of our time.
- The Bellagio room-service is good, if a little pricey. But a burger fits within most expense allowances, and billing it to your room will save valuable time later when filing your expenses.
To read more on Pink12 and multitasking, click here.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Not Many People Win A Pink Elephant Conference Award Three Times
Stephen Wrenn is pretty special. Actually I suspect he’s pretty special in a number of ways but the one I’m refering to is the fact that he has won the Pink Elephant conference award for ITIL Case Study of the Year three times!
In 2005, when at Liberty Mutual.
In 2007, jointly with Dalibor Petrovic, Deloitte and Sheila Kelley, Liberty Mutual.
And in 2011, when at CVS Caremark.
So I went to find out more.
Steve, you are on a winning streak with the Case Study Award, having won it three times now. Everyone is going to be wondering what is the “secret” of a winning case study. Is there any advice you can offer to others? Are you consciously using any technique or ideas to make your case studies so successful?
Not sure I can offer any “advice” in this area. From reading the reviews I believe it is a combination of having actually methodically followed a process that delivered business results in the real world, having the data and knowledge to discuss that, and then doing it in a way that makes it meaningful to everyone (a mix of common sense and understanding that this is not rocket science)
Audiences obviously love your work. How much of the appeal is in the content and how much in the presentation?
My opinion is that you can’t have one without the other. The world is full of brilliant people that can’t get their message across, and it is equally full of people that are a mile wide but an inch deep, which makes them very superficial and lacking in substance
How much effort does it take preparing the case studies? Obviously you think it is worth it.
You know, since my teams and myself live and breathe this every day, and obviously plan, manage and measure everything we do, it really isn’t hard to put together the case studies. The hardest part is culling down the information to a short deliverable format because we have so much stuff to talk about.
Other than winning the Award, what other benefits are there to doing a case study?
It really causes me to reflect back on did we do it right, what lessons did we learn, which ones are repeatable and which ones would we like to forget ever happened ...OK, I mean not do again.
Are you a “natural presenter”? Do you like presenting to an audience?
I wouldn’t say a natural presenter, it’s years worth of practice that has made me comfortable doing presentations. I look at it as part of “Change Management”, the ability to paint a picture for the audience. Doesn’t hurt that I’ve been an Adjunct Professor in the MBA program at the University of New Hampshire the past 10 years either.
Will you be back next year?
Most certainly. I look at it as my one planned “sharpen the saw” event where I still actually learn from others, and I wouldn’t miss the David and George show for the world!
Neither would I. Let’s see what Steve comes up with in 2012. Clearly it will be a session not be missed.
Thursday, May 05, 2011
Cowboys
I’m writing a presentation called “Cowboys, Acrobats and Rainmakers” - all about how we are losing control of the core of IT Production - for itSMF in Ottawa, Canada.
On the topic of cowboys, I just loved this poster:
ServiceSphere (Chris Dancy) found this image - it is originally from MemeCreator