Friday, January 27, 2012

Conference Optimizer - Issue 2

Hi!  George Spalding here again – your Pink Conference Host.

This is my second in a series of Conference Optimizers; I’m back with more tips for getting the most out of your conference experience in Vegas. If you missed my first one, click here.

1. Check Out The Pre- & Post-Conference Courses & Workshops

Tip: Maximize your learning by attending one of our pre- or post-conference courses/workshops starting on February 15, 2012. Over 200 attendees have already registered so be sure to register before classes fill up!

Here are just a few you may want to consider:

Executive Strategic Workshop: This one-day executive session focuses on what senior managers need to understand about the ITSM lifecycle approach and how it links to business value generation and IT strategy

ITIL® Practitioner: How To Define & Implement A Service Catalog According To ITIL Best Practices: For managers who want to learn why the Service Catalog and its underlying service structure is the cornerstone of any ITSM program as well as how to map IT services to business processes and functions

The Implementation Road Map For IT Service Management: Address all the important activities of ITSM including where you should start; how to justify and communicate your plans; how to define the supporting structure of your organization; the critical success factors for implementing each process; how to integrate processes and move up the capability maturity model (CMM) process scale; and how to identify the right tools to support your environment
Click here to view the full line-up.

Don’t forget! We offer a discount if you attend both the conference and a pre- or post-conference course! Click here to read more.

2. Are You A Platinum Pass Holder?

Tip: Upgrade to Platinum Pass to maximize your conference experience.

If you are a Platinum Pass holder here is a recap of what you are entitled to during the conference:

Reserved seating in the General Session room
Access to the special Platinum Lounge where you can grab a beverage and relax, and network with speakers and other Platinum Pass holders
“Front-Of-The-Line” Platinum Registration counter
Dedicated Platinum Concierge and Customer Service counter
Platinum Dining Room where you can have lunch, network and engage with speakers, keynotes and other Platinum Pass holders
Already registered but didn’t get the Platinum Pass? It’s not too late to upgrade! Give our Customer Service Center a call and we would be happy to upgrade your pass.

You can reach our Customer Service Center at 1-888-273-PINK or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

3. Discounted Show Tickets!

Tip: Take advantage of discounted show tickets to maximize your time in Vegas.

Pink Elephant has partnered with Just ask. Where® to provide complimentary concierge services to all attendees and exhibitors. Assistance with restaurant reservations, show tickets, golf, spas and tours will be available both onsite at the show and in advance via the web site at http://wheretraveler.com/pinkelephant/us/nv/las-vegas/.

Contact Just ask. Where® at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or by phone at (702) 635-3000 or (702) 338-4025.

Many discount offers are available. Don’t delay! Make your reservations today.

4. Hold “Debriefing Meetings” At The Conference

Tip: Make sure to get your team together daily to share notes and ideas.

Many of our customers send teams to our annual conference. It’s a good idea to have daily team debriefs to share information and the day’s experiences. At least once each day at a convenient time, plan to hold team meetings to review key learning points from the sessions each team member has attended. It’s also a good idea to document these in preparation for sharing them with others upon returning to work.  Start an “Action List” of the great ideas you’ve heard about from each session and Exhibitors that you want to explore further.

That’s it for now, but stay tuned for more tips and conference optimizers to come.

Regards,
George Spalding
Executive VP
Pink Elephant
Telephone: 905-331-5060
Toll Free: 1-888-273-PINK

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Situation Constraints - Which To Fix First - The PQR Blog

Pink Question Reflection (PQR) Blog #3

Pink Elephant has been collecting Attitude, Behavior and Culture (ABC) exercise data in our classes and consulting engagements for almost a year now and have collected well over a thousand data points. The question for this blog is: “What Attitude, Behavior, and Culture situations did we expect our students and clients to select in their ABC exercises that are NOT being selected?”

Background: Management of people and partners requires an understanding and careful management of Attitude, Culture, and Behavior (ABC). I assert that Behavior is largely the result of Attitude and Culture. The ABC exercises use a deck of 57 cards with words and pictures describing various IT and business situations classified in four principal areas: Attitude, Behavior, Culture, and Stakeholders; and five secondary areas: Partners, People, Performance, Process, and Product. The participants work in small groups to select one card with the description that best fits their organizations’ current situation. These are the Problem situations. We follow-up with a second exercise asking the participants use the cards again to select the situation that best represents the resistance they will encounter when attempting to improve the organization to eliminate or mitigate the Problem. These are the Resistance situations. We tally the selected situations to better understand the Problems and Resistance factors in individual IT organizations and among IT organizations as a whole.

Back to the question: Of the 57 situations available, many we expected to be selected have indeed appeared in the top 10 lists below. I had four culture situations on my sure-to-be-high-profile-issues list based on experience and cultural bias. The top four culture situations on my list have a strong and unfortunate association with management practices – particularly among the many managers firmly cemented in place at the peak of their Peter Principle arc. The basis for my cultural bias is centuries of observation expressed in literature and art in cultures around round the world presenting managers as ambitious fools. Current pop culture examples include Scott Adams’ Pointy Haired Boss (PHB) in the Dilbert comic strip and the managers in the US and UK The Office TV comedies. Surely the inappropriate cultures these managers establish are reflected in our ABC exercise data!

I was very wrong. The cultural situations I most expected to be represented are NOT reflected in the data! (But wait! If they cast no reflection in the data, can we stretch and mix the metaphor even further and infer that these inappropriate work place cultures are blood sucking vampires creating new generations of poor management that can live forever? Perhaps, but better not to go there.) Here are the actual results from more than a thousand exercise data points:

“Hero culture” has never been selected as a Problem situation, and was selected only two times as a Resistance situation.
“Blame culture” Hah! Tied for 10th place among Problems, but—- was never selected as a Resistance factor.
“Punishment culture” selected only once as a Problem and never for Resistance  
“Avoidance culture” selected only eight times as a Problem and four times for resistance.

Does this mean that these situations can safely be ignored? I do not think so. However, of all the things that are not as favorable as they could be, these (except perhaps Blame) are noise - windmills tempting our quixotic spirit. More important, their relative absence tells us that the common complaints about <insert insulting adjective here> managers are relatively unimportant and that time, political capital and energy spent attempting to improve them is probably wasted. Best to focus on the greater constraints we have uncovered in our ABC exercises listed at the bottom of this blog.

We have been blogging and talking about our ABC data and published a Translating Knowledge Into Results white paper in May, 2011. Since then the data has yielded more insight - and sometimes surprising - observations and findings such as the above. The implications and application of the findings will be discussed in sessions in our 16th Annual International Conference, in Las Vegas in February, and at our 4th Annual Conference in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore in July.

The most current tally of the most selected Problems and cultural Resistance areas are listed below in order from most selected to least selected.

The situations most selected in our ABC Problem and Resistance exercises by ABC area

Most selected Problem situations:

Total Problem Behavior situations (41% of all responses)
Problem Behavior situations in the top 10 (23% of all responses)
• Everything has the highest priority….according to the users
• Maybe we should have tested that change first
• The solution the customer sees isn’t the one that IT sees
• Never mind about following procedures….just do what we usually do
• Throwing solutions (ITIL) over the wall and HOPING people will use them

Total Problem Culture situations (25% of all responses)
Problem Culture situations in the top 10 (19% of all responses)
• Not my responsibility
• Plan, Do, stop….no real continual improvement culture
• Them and Us culture—opposing and competing forces
• Internally focused
• Blame culture

Total Problem Attitude situations (25% of all responses)
Problem Attitude situation in the top 10 (11% of all responses)
• (IT has) no understanding of business impact & priority

Most selected Resistance situations:

Total Resistance Behavior situations (51% of all responses)
Resistance Behavior situations in the top 10 (43% of all responses)
• Never mind about following procedures….just do what we usually do (12%!)
• No management commitment
• Everything has the highest priority….according to the users
• Throwing solutions (ITIL) over the wall and HOPING people will use them
• We don’t measure our value contribution to strategy
• The solution the customer sees isn’t the one that IT sees
• Saying “Yes” but meaning “No”

Total Resistance Attitude situations (25% of all responses)
Resistance Attitude situations in the top 10 (12% of all responses)
• ITIL never work here
• (IT has) no understanding of business impact & priority

Total Resistance Culture situations (16% of all responses)
Resistance Chosen situation in the top 10 (3% of all responses)
• Plan, Do, stop….no real continual improvement culture

A preview of CyberOverload

A few months ago we interviewed Dr Joanne Cantor about her upcoming presentation at the conference: Conquer CyberOverload: Strategies For Sanity & Success .  You can hear Dr Cantor here as she talks about her book and a preview of the presentation at the conference.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Conference Optimizer - Issue 1

Hello to our Conference Attendees!

This is the first in a series of messages aimed at highlighting important points related to our upcoming annual event in Las Vegas. My name is George Spalding and I’ll be your Conference Host onsite.

1. Start Building Your Agenda Now!

Tip: Do not wait until you are onsite to study the agenda. 

This year there are 15 tracks with more than 160 sessions to choose from with a vast array of compelling topics.  It can be a bit overwhelming, especially at the last minute.  If you haven’t already done so, visit the Agenda Builder.  It’s available via the conference virtual site at http://conferences.pinkelephant.com and you can login using the credentials provided in your confirmation letter.

If you have any problems logging in call our Customer Service Desk at 1-888-273-PINK. Once you’re in, take some time to look through all the sessions and the presenters, make some choices, decide on your path and print out your agenda.  You can always go in and change it later.

It’s good practice to change your password once you login to the Conference Attendee Website. To change your password, please go to the ‘Change Password’ tab located at the top of the website’s homepage.

Experience has shown us that this is the most valuable tip I can share to get the maximum return from your conference investment. And, don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions about the program.

2. Use Our Sample Conference Itineraries

Tip: Another way that Pink helps you navigate around the jam-packed agenda is with our “sample conference itineraries.” 

We’ve suggested sessions you may want to attend based on your specific role within your organization, and your level of ITSM knowledge.  We have received feedback from previous attendees who have found these very helpful.  Check out the sample itineraries. You’ll find sample itineraries for:

CIOs/Senior IT Managers
Beginner ITIL® and ITSM Knowledge
Advanced ITIL and ITSM Knowledge
Program/Project Managers
Service Desk Management

3. Hold A Team Meeting Before Leaving For The Conference

Tip: Get your team together in advance of the conference to review the agenda and establish clear goal and objectives.

Once again, a high number of attending organizations have chosen to bring a team to Pink’s annual conference.  If you’re one of these organizations, holding “agenda coverage” meetings in advance, before arriving onsite allows you to spend the needed time to establish clear goals, and pin-point specific deliverables you need to bring back to the workplace in order to make the investment of time and money a success. Whether you are coming alone or bringing a team, be sure to take time now to define your goals for attending – devise a strategy around the agenda and identify key deliverables. With over 160 sessions and 15 tracks, it’s important that you get the most out of your team’s participation.

That’s it for now, but stay tuned for more tips and conference optimizers to come.

Regards,
George Spalding
Executive VP
Pink Elephant
Telephone: 905-331-5060
Toll Free: 1-888-273-PINK

Friday, January 20, 2012

The Inside Skinny On Pink12

Following on from our recent tips of what you might see at this year’s conference, here’s the inside skinny on how the numbers are progressing, and other insights.  “Skinny” isn’t a word used a lot around me, but the Pink President David Ratcliffe is pretty trim.  Listen in as he gives us insight into the planning of the Pink Elephant conferences, some of the philosophy behind them, the registration numbers, and - yes - the theme.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Some advance tips on what we will see at Pink12

To do is to be.	Socrates
To be is to do.	Jean-Paul Sartre, Plato
To be or not to be.	William Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Do be a Do Bee, don’t be a Don’t Bee.	Miss Connie from Romper Room
Scooby Dooby Doo.	Scooby Doo
Yabba Dabba Doo.	Fred Flintstone
Inka Dinka Doo.	Jimmy Durante
Boop Boop be Doop	Betty Boop
De do do do, de da da da.	The Police
Doo Wah Diddy.	Manfred Mann

...and of course Do-be-do-be-do from Frank Sinatra.

Collected by Tex Texin

What has this to do with this year’s ITSM Conference?  Everything.

Twitter is a-flutter with hints, or should I say Twitter is crooning with hints of what is to come at this year’s ITSM Conference.

Every year the Conference has had a theme, and in recent years the theme has been related to some musical concept - either an artist or famous album.  The last two years we had the Beach Boys and then Jimmy Buffett’s “Changes In Latitudes; Changes in Attitudes”.  Before that it was Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall”, and the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper...  but this time there isn’t a prominent musical theme. That’s so last year! Instead while we’ll certainly have musical threads running throughout the Conference no one artist will dominate, except perhaps when it comes to Pinky!

Regular Conference attendees will be familiar with the annual Special Edition Pinky - the little stress elephant that all attendees receive.  There are many dedicated collectors of this much anticipated souvenir (I have two as well as two sizes of the regular Pinky). Well, this year sees the introduction of - Crooner Pinky!

Do-be-do-be-do indeed.

The curious coincidence is that the New Zealand itSMF national conference for 2012 has the theme of “I did ITsm my way”.  I blame the Mayans.

Other hints on Twitter of what we might see? 

• Pattie Langtree tells us the Bellagio fountains have learned new dances. (And “Bellagio’s Tower $70M room remodel, 2,568 newly redesigned Rooms is complete!”)
• David Ratcliffe, the Pink Pres, tweeted “Just been brainstorming with @GSpalding11 [George Spalding of Pink] the possibility of a world record attempt at #PINK12 - curious? See you there!”
• And Rhett Glauser of ServiceNow tweeted “According to @pinkerdavid, #pink12 will be a more open community of vendors, practitioners & even competing consultants.”  Now what could that look like?  Be there.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Pink Elephant IT Management Metrics Benchmark Service Blog – Change Mgmt Update December, 2011

Pink Elephant IT Management Metrics Benchmark Service Blog – Change Management Update December, 2011

This is an update on the Change Management Benchmarks from the Pink Elephant IT Management Metrics Benchmarks Service. With more Change Management (CHG) Benchmark Survey responses in hand, we have new Benchmarks presented below. The more participants in all our metrics benchmark surveys, the better!

We welcome your feedback. Please comment on this blog post to let us know what you think.

Observations:
> The newer data includes data from a broad array of organizations. While the mean number of RFCs has dropped slightly, the median number of users supported has more than doubled and the mean has grown by 30%.
> The average RFC Life Expectancy (Interval from Submission to Closure) is 3 to 5 weeks (median and mean, respectively). At this time, we take this as an indication that organizations’ Change Control requires significant lead time to ensure adequate notice to prevent conflicts.
> The Emergency RFCs percentage has not changed and remains fairly low.
> Correlations:
- IT Staff FTEs and RFCs per month, .72 – This relationship strengthened by 10%. IT FTEs are indicative of the size of the IT environment. Certainly the larger the environment, the more changes would be going on.
- % RFCs Right First Time and % RFCs without processing issues, .69 – This reinforces the expectation that organizations with well managed changes enjoy high change success rates.
- % Emergency RFCs and IT Staff Size, .35 – The fact that this correlation is lower than the RFC correlation is a sign that larger IT environments have proportionately fewer Emergency Changes than smaller environments.
- % RFCs Right First Time and Years Change Management Deployed, .26 – This correlation dropped from .69 in the earlier data undermining the assertion that the longer an organization has been managing changes in a defined process, the better the change success rate.

Change Management Metrics Benchmarks
RFCs per Month: Median: 525, Mean: 1,791, Min: <50, Max: >5,000
% of RFCs with No process Issues: Median: 93%, Mean: 86%, Min: <70%, Max: >97%
% of RFCs Completed Successfully the First Time as Scheduled: Median: 93%, Mean: 88%, Min: <80%, Max: >97%
% of RFCs that are Emergency RFCs: Median: 7%, Mean: 9%, Min: <1%, Max: >15%
RFC Submission to Closure Interval (days): Median: 22.5,  Mean: 37.6, Min: <3, Max: >120
RFCs per Month per Service User*: Median: .03, Mean: .23, Min: <.0001, Max: >3.18
RFCs per Month per IT FTE*: Median: 1.5,  Mean: 1.9, Min: <.33, Max: >6.67
*based on heuristics drawn from survey response data:

Attributes of Survey Participant Organizations
Years Change Management Process Has Been Deployed: Median: 3, Mean: 5.5, Min: <2, Max: >10
Service Users Supported: Median: 40,000, Mean 101,500, Min: <100, Max: >300,000
IT Full Time Equivalent Workers (IT FTE): Median: 125, Mean 439, Min: <10, Max: >1,500
Industries: Financial and Insurance (25%), Public Administration (20%), Manufacturing (12%), Other (43%) [Construction, Education, Health Care & Social Assistance, Information, Retail Trade, Transportation & Warehousing, Utilities, & na]
Locations: Europe, Latin America, North America
Data qualification/rationale:
The metrics and the organizational attributes in the CHG survey responses cover a wide spectrum. All survey response options have been selected by participants with no strong bias to any one response to any question. Medians and Means are approximate as they are based on range mid-points and estimated minima and maxima where required.

Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Organizational change lessons from the golf course

A buddy of mine and his wife own a consulting company – Susan Van Vleet Consultants. Their firm specializes in consulting and education about understanding and managing the unique interpersonal relationships. These are the workplace challenges and people issues that in general we navigate every day not only in the corporate world and personal life. John and Susan publish a monthly newsletter and in a recent edition there was a featured article by Robin Elston – Elston Consulting – entitled “Golf Lessons”. In the article Robin describes a recent golf outing with her husband and two close friends.

Everyone but Robin were experienced and accomplished golfers. They were playing in a scramble format tournament (a scramble is where everyone plays a shot and the team decides the best shot and its location for everyone to hit their next shot). Anyway, Robin was having her usual golfing challenges but her teammates were very supportive of her, encouraging her and never criticizing. Contrast that with the “experts” who were providing a continuous stream of “constructive criticism” for each other. By the end of the day, Robin was playing the game of her life and committing to play more. That wasn’t the case for the rest of the team.
The premise of the article triggered some thoughts that I’d like to share.

A number of years ago I met Dr Johnson who ran a Help Desk Institute at Purdue. (Sadly, when I scanned the Purdue website it doesn’t appear that Dr Johnson or the Institute are still at Purdue). Anyway, part of Dr Johnson’s pitch was the importance of customer service and the benefits of positive reinforcement. He cited a statistic that makes so much sense and I think we validate every day. He said that it takes 20 good customer experiences to overcome one bad one.

In customer service that makes great sense. But if you think about the impact of negative reinforcement in the golf match, even though they thought they were being helpful, it sounds like Robin’s playing partners were practicing plenty of negative reinforcement – they definitely didn’t seem to be helping each other and, ultimately, were reinforcing bad results. Robin, on the other hand, was getting plenty of positive strokes and the benefit of their support definitely played itself out. I suspect that it would have only taken one or two “helpful” suggestions before her day was ruined. The golf course was an interesting laboratory for Dr Johnson’s metric.

I recently did a presentation based on Chip and Dan Heath’s book “Switch – How to change things when change is hard”- great book. Without boring you with the details, Chip and Dan point out two very powerful motivating (or demotivating) factors. The first had to do with “Find the Bright Spots” in change.

Finding the Bright Spots in a change means seeking out those small events where you can find examples of when things are working right and then actively reinforcing the Bright Spot. Change, any change, is very emotionally charged. As such we can talk ourselves out of changing – e.g. wanting to play golf because it “might” be enjoyable but deciding not to do so because we have always experienced failure. The idea of the Bright Spot is that if we can find some glimmer of the positive when things worked we can get on board and the change will snowball. Much more powerful to say – great shot, you hit that well (even though the shot didn’t go far) than “too bad, try loosing your grip”. Robin found she wanted to step up to the next shot rather than staying in the cart.
Last point – the Heath’s made was about Finding the Feeling of a change and the power of both negative and positive emotions. One of the most powerful human emotions is fear. Chip and Dan cite the “burning platform” analogy and talk about how ineffective fear or “pointing out the downside” is to change. Fear might provide an immediate path forward – jump or burn – but fear-based change is not sustainable. Whereas positive emotions are more suited to the long run – if you feel good about yourself and the upcoming change, maybe it makes sense to keep at the new behaviors.

I am not suggesting that Robin’s playing partners were in a burning platform scenario but I have to believe that constantly giving “constructive criticism” sure felt negative to the “victim”. And having shanked enough balls myself, I know Robin’s golfmates talked themselves out of hitting the next shot well because of their the “fear of a bad shot” based on their past failures – “I hit it bad off the tee and I sure hope I don’t miss this one as well”. Robin on the other hand, didn’t start off well but with the positive feedback, began to believe that a good shot was possible. And the fact that she wants to keep at it seems to underscore the points the Heath’s were making.

The question I have for much of what we do every day in service management and orchestrating change is “how do you reinforce the desired new behaviors”? Are you thinking of Robin or sharing your “wisdom”  - how we approach the emotions of a change makes a difference.

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

Multitasking

It is amazing how low my personal productivity while at my desk has fallen of late.  A New Year’s resolution of mine is to get back to the “Seven Habits”, in particular making time for the big tasks, and in particular in particular cutting off those nasty diversions of email, twitter, google+ and blog-comments from my daily work time (oh! and telephone, though nowadays it seldom rings), so that I can concentrate on one task at a time.

In a couple of panel discussions in recent years I have been howled down as a Luddite for suggesting the younger generations should be restrained from networking while working.  I got to a final warning with one employee before he realised I was serious that he was not to chat with his girlfriend while manning the service desk phones.  When I tell that story, I’m berated as an old curmudgeon who fails to understand my youngers and - apparently - betters, who are wizards of multitasking.

Image © Canstockphoto.com


Rubbish.  And hopefully Dr. Joanne Cantor is going to tell us so in her conference session on Conquer Cyber-Overload.

Dr Cantor’s view is not a fringe view.  It is the consensus of science and business.

Go back to Drucker in 1967, with The Effective Executive, which warned against fragmentation, and promoted “a fairly large quantum of [uninterrupted] time” for most tasks.

From there, read any or all of the following:

• Death by Information Overload, Paul Hemp, HBR
• Take Back Control of Your Work (and Your Life), Tony Schwartz, HBR Blog
• You Can’t Multitask, So Stop Trying, Paul Atchley, HBR Blog
• Going under, Chris Erikson, NY Post
• Recovering from information overload, Derek Dean and Caroline Webb. McKinsey Quarterly
• Multitasking Makes You Stupid, Sue Shellenbarger, Wall Street Journal
• The dark side of information: overload, anxiety and other paradoxes and pathologies, David Bawden and Lyn Robinson, Journal of Information Science
• Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime, Matt Richtel, NY Times
• Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform,  Edward M. Hallowell, HBR
• The Productivity Paradox: How Sony Pictures Gets More Out of People by Demanding Less, Tony Schwartz, HBR

...and so on.

When you are done there, you might like my guide to multitasking at the conference for some light relief.

And don’t take any baloney from these young brats: teach them to concentrate… or else.