The Bitch is back....

I must admit I was worried....ITIL v3 came out and I was like...WTF!?!

I sort of slunk into my little hole and tried to ignore it as long as possible...I became one of those people who look at ITIL and frown, shake their head and ensure no eye contact is possible with the ITIL Preacher!

So....I travelled to that other side...I saw what they saw...I felt how they felt...and let me tell you something my ITIL Lovers....IT ain't to pretty being an ITIL avoid-er. In fact I can say with some certainty that no one actually wants to be there. And if they do it's just because they don't get it....because for the last two months, I did not get it at all!

But I have been forced to work within the version 3 confines...and can I tell you something...its exactly the same...Version 3 is now just stating the bits we have had to fill in ourselves in the past....its a refresh not a change....

Its still bloody common sense!

I'm love love lovin it!!!

Reflection Time...

Nothing pains more than that moment in an argument that you realise you are in fact wrong!
Personally for me its not just that moment that makes my skin crawl, more the whole idea and reality of being wrong about something!

Personal goal setting from the past has been to try accept correction with grace....practising this is hard considering I am hardly ever wrong! (You didn't think I would miss an opportunity for some ego boosting, did you?)

I guess as I have matured through the years, I have accepted my humanity more, and my idea's may not always be right, but hey at least I still have them.

In this reflective state I find myself in I realise that being wrong isn't the worst thing in the world. Not putting in the effort to making yourself right is! I may be wrong about some things, but my God my passion and driving force will never be, and although I have learnt to roll with the punches, every bruise I get I will remember and learn from!

Black Widow Spider

I am the Change Manager hear me roar!!
Rooooaaaaahhhhhh!! My partner would tell me that Rooooaaaahhhhhh!! Is Dinosaur for I love you, but for the subject matter I'm going to use poetic licence and say it's dinosaur for "Please take me seriously!"

I have sort of avoided talking about Change Management thus far, which I guess is strange as that's wear I cut my teeth in the service management world. Maybe I feel like its my baby, and it's hard to talk about your own without getting emotionally attached.......

Every organisation of certain size recognises that they need Change Management, they have and run change management, but do they buy into Change Management??? Considering I have been called a black widow spider while being a change manager, I'm guessing no!

But why? Are we not all working on the same team, is the insurmountable RFC form's benefits not obvious? Can they not all see that discussing change impact in CAB is what makes the process worth while.....

......Why oh why can't they see it!

I guess some people are harder to convince than others, and to put it quite bluntly....any IT organisation that's worth its mustard has process in the backbone, if you don't like process, go work at KFC.....but I hear even they have proven repeatable process that demands adherence.....

Change management has in so many organisations turned into a red tape bureaucratic monster, with rubber stamps of authorisation! I say let's take Change management by the horns and turn it into a lovely well tuned change enabler it so wants to be! Let there be efficiency in authorisation flows, let there be benefit in impact assessments and above all let there be light on the Change management that people want to have!

Cost De facto

Fancy words, fancy acronyms....bottom line....how much does it cost?

IT is expensive, and it costs oodles and oodles of money. And I know left to their own devices IT techie junkies would throw heaps and heaps of money at technology that may not always be necessary.

Within the ITIL framework there is a very reasonable section dedicated to the financial management of IT. YES! Gasp....a bad bad word, the management of finance....as in we need to manage the costs, balance the tables and make sense of the never ending money pit IT can become. Eeek! What a thought!

To make is short and sweet, and as relatively painless as possible, IT is now considered a SERVICE provider, (take a look at SERVERS VS SERVICES), a service has two main components:

1. Has a benefit
2. Costs money

Those two things are not on a balanced scale anymore. OH NO! Now a day’s benefit needs to out weight cost in order to win the business and the love of your business.

Deal with it, or hire a financial manager who knows IT.

:)

Lean Service Management

What an interesting concept that’s been born out of recession cash strapped times. (Apparently)

I know this is not a new concept but does seem to be gaining some serious attention at the moment, understandable considering we are apparently in the worst recession in living memory.
So Lean Service Management is about the bottom line, doing the same or more with less effort and expenditure.

My worry is that this not so new term which has of late become the prom queen of popularity, (dare I say a new ‘IT’ word) is actually showing previous IT Service Management up for being spendthrifts???
To be perfectly fair to Service Management as a whole, when were the service managers of old throwing the IT budget around like billionaires? I can only ever remember Service Management being the poor uncle of IT Infrastructure, who gets a menial allowance which only ever really gets fed into what is seen to be more important areas of Service Management and not some cash fly spender!

I am all for working more effectively, but I put before you that surely Service Management has always been lean? Is the true essence of Service Management to be focused on Business benefit and by that by default actually lean?

Another catch phrase I fear.....

Houston we have a Problem...

Baton down the hatches, keep your wits about you, the Problem Manager is back in town and he wants answers....ok he actually wants solutions, but you get the idea.

So what’s the problem with Problem Management?

Resource!!!

Yes we all pain to admit, but it’s true, the Problem Manager is a lone ranger in many respects, he is the outlaw who wants to lay down the law. Soooooooooooooo when do we really have a Problem?
In IT a Problem record would need to be raised after an incident or three are logged which are of similar or familiar type. Many little incidents resulting from one big whopper problem and the ‘problem’ is only where the headache begins.

Let’s recap....some mini whirlwind occurred, incident logged, restoration to service complete and incident closed....problem record created and now the lone ranger wants to know WHY.
Day to day our IT staff feel their work here is done. All is well, production is up why all the fuss? Do we really have to spend additional man hours looking into something that may never occur again, or in fact not be avoidable due to some ‘what ever’ reason?

The hard core honest answer, it depends! Ha I hear you cry, that is not a real answer. But it is! It depends on the benefit that creating a role to look into past related issues and root cause analysis brings. Is it worth the outlay, do we want to spend the money, the additional hours and effort to find the meaning of a 10 minute downtime to production. I tell you now, it depends on if that 10 minutes cost you $10 million or $10.00, and how important that lose is to the survival of your company.

I feel that the lone ranger has been given a raw deal, as most Problem managers are in fact gloried Incident and documentation junkies who never really get to make the impact that can be so beneficial to the company.

Is Problem management essential to a company? Yes, maybe not in the purest more officialised form. But whether we document it or not, if we admit it or pretend we don’t, we all can and will be a Problem manager at one time or another, so spare a thought to the lone ranger who wants a bit of your time. It might end up freeing your time up at a later stage.

Over and out!

The Young Manager – Why it is not all hot air

Within any industry there are the giants that rule over the land keeping things in order with the sometimes heavy hand of supreme experience.
This is when the world is in order.

However in the circle of life there must be change, (No RFC required). This change often comes in the form of some whipper snapper, the perpetual bull in the china shop so to speak, beaming with confidence ready to solve the problems of the world.

What is it about these young managers that cause so much friction? I suppose the bullish mentality that their ideas are new and innovative. That no one before them has thought about the steps to fix the problems, that they are unique!
In reality, the giants have done most of it all before, they also once upon a time they also had a spring in their step when talking about transformation and change. (In fact some giants still do)
So it’s easy to see why the young manager rubs so many people up the wrong way.

But I do persist, being that I in fact position myself in the aged handicapped that a lot of use can be made out of the young manager. Not all this hot air and fuss is over nothing. If only given the tools and creative vent to display all the excitement money can’t buy, this young manager might in fact create enough opportunities for the giants of the business world to see them through to retirement with no fear of redundancy. (Dunn Dunnnn Dunnnnnn - )

Yes, we (the insufficiently aged) are good for something. We can work hand in hand with the wise giants of the world, sap up the experience like a dry sponge, look, learn and be better....

....and eventually steal your jobs!