I spoke to Claire Agutter & Dave Van Herpen last week to talk about their upcoming masterclass at the IT500 conference in June: DevOps & Agile In An ITSM World.
The workshop will look at how you can use DevOps and Agile if you’re already doing ITSM but want to do something new. Claire and Dave will look at how to use a blended approach to get the best results and will look at practical ways to improve whilst blitzing a process backlog.
The session will be interactive and will follow the why – what – how journey starting from looking at drivers and building the business case for transformation to interactive group sessions including:
Looking at the 3 ways of DevOps
Designing Kanban boards
Applying Scrum
Selling DevOps
Investigating opportunities and risks.
You should attend this conference if:
You want to become an ITSM ninja familiar with Agile and DevOps!
The official bit:
DevOps and Agile represent a new way of working, but it’s not all about throwing away everything that’s already in place. We will look at how these techniques can be applied alongside other methodologies including ITIL and investigate other propositions such as Value Stream Mapping, Kanban for IT Operations and the use of Scrum.
Are you starting to move from ITSM to Agile, DevOps and beyond? Let us know in the comments!
This article is a summary of the ITIL Manifesto session held at ITSM14. It was written by Rob Spencer, who has been coordinating, recording and agitating the discussions around this initiative after it was first discussed on twitter between Stuart Rance, Claire Agutter, Barclay Rae, Suresh GP, James Finister and Kaimar Karu.
Firstly thanks to itSMF for giving us a late-notice slot at ITSM14, to Barclay Rae and David Backham for introducing and facilitating the session, and Richard Horton for helping me communicate the ideas and progress behind the manifesto.
The session was a lively and (from my perspective as the person coordinating the ITIL Manifesto discussions) productive one. It’s important to me that I know what the community (you) want, so that in my role facilitating and coordinating discussions, I know our eventual objectives.
After Barclay’s introduction, I quickly played back the progress to date (using a variation of the Phase 2 Output Summary slides available on itil-manifesto.wikia.com) and Richard talked about some of the data and early analysis we’ve done based on some stats gathered from the time spent on tricider.com.
Then we opened for questions. It quickly became apparent that there were a lot of questions and a lot of people wanted to see this initiative done right. Here are some of the questions from the session or asked offline/afterwards, the responses we gave at the time (from memory and hastily scribbled notes) and some further thoughts.
1. What is the ITIL Manifesto?
We think that it’s the list of first principles that ITIL/we never had (but often came up with our own versions of). We think that it is part sales/promotion (for example if your CEO asks why business managers should bothered about ITIL), part check/balance, part philosophy/core beliefs about what ITIL should be, partly correcting how ITIL has been seen/positioned or even misrepresented to date.
2. What will it look like? Is ‘Manifesto’ even the right term?
We don’t know, but as a straw man I suggest that we come up with a principle for each of the key themes identified during the early stages of the ITIL manifesto initiative and then decide whether there needs to be a wrapper or summary statement on top of these. This is the structure used in similar initiatives. I suggest we keep the term manifesto for now, if this changes then we can decide this as a community before we publish it.
3. What will AXELOS do with ITIL Manifesto?
That depends on the quality of the content as well as the quality (and maybe breadth) of the community engagement. I had the chance to speak to Kaimar before the session and he remains supportive of the initiative and keen to see the products of the discussions.
4. This is about the 5th initiative on this or closely related topics – do we really need another one? Why can’t we just join this with SM Congress? How widely have you engaged?
The fact that this is about the 5th initiative tells me there is an itch that still needs scratching. That said, there’s no point reinventing the wheel. From what I’ve seen of SM Congress, it’s come up with some simple, clear statements of value plus a ton of community support. I always saw the ITIL Manifesto principles as being more descriptive than the simple “we value A over B” format of SM Congress or the Agile Manifesto (which inspired ITIL Manifesto).
The SM congress values were added to the ITIL manifesto tricider.com stream for voting and got some positive feedback (you can see votes and discussions of this on the Phase 1 Output page on the wiki).
The manifesto contributions to date have been focused in the UK, but I/we have been trying to widen the engagement. In the room (and contributing from the start) we had the president of ITSMF India, and we’ve had contributions from around the world via the Back2ITSM Facebook and Google+ groups. I do agree this needs pushing further though.
Since ITSM14, I’ve been introduced (virtually) to Charles Araujo (the head of itSMF USA and leader of the SM Congress initiative (thanks to Patrick Bolger for making the intro)) and we’re starting discussions about how to establish whether or not there’s an overlap and where we can work together. I’d like to do this on a public broadcast google hangout where we can take audience feedback and questions. This will be announced on the Back2ITSM groups and on twitter via the #itilmanifesto tag.
5. How will we test this with the customers?
Good question. I think there are two groups of customers, the most important being the business colleagues who we want to understand why we’re doing this and why we use ITIL. The other customers are of course us – the ITSM professionals who will (hopefully) use it. Coming back the the question, we do need find a way of testing the manifesto with the target audience – if anyone has any ideas on this, we’d be keen to hear.
One thing the entire room agreed on unanimously was that the manifesto must be phrased in business language.
6. Where’s the material?
On itil-manifesto.wikia.com. As wikia is a free (ad-supported) site, you will see adverts on the page – I’m looking now at moving this away to a more neutral platform. All of the material gathered to date is available on the wiki in both raw and interpreted/summarised variants. If you need helping finding anything specific, please let me know (contact details below).
7. What next?
I think we should focus on resolving 2 of the key questions asked in this session, namely:
What is the definition of the ITIL Manifesto (and what exactly is its purpose)?
How do we widen engagement and make use of initiatives which have gone before?
Either via a google hangout, or live twitter chat, or some other method. Again, keep an eye on the Back2ITSM Facebook and Google+ groups, and on twitter via #itilmanifesto. If you think you can help directly, please email me on rob@changeandrelease.com or on twitter via @changerelease.
Rob Spencer (centre), picking up his submission of the year award at the itSMF UK 2014 annual conference.
No time to read all the interesting info and news floating around social media and appearing in your inbox? Read our round up of what we’ve found interesting this week.
How to Navigate Office Politics and Avoid Needless Drama – Who doesn’t need to know how to do this?!? Read more here
The First Big SDN Data Breach is Just a Matter of Time says Alex Scroxton of Computer Weekly. Read more here
The IT Skeptic’s RealIT Radio Episode 5: Governance of IT – Dysfunctional families and IT organisations have a lot in common says Rob England. Listen here
Meet the CEO Who’s Never Fired Anyone – Jennifer Liberto talks to Peter Platzer, CEO of Spire, about performance reviews, career tests and career progression. Read more here
Put Yourself in Your Colleagues Shoes – Jorden Cohen wonders what else he would do differently if he looked at things from a different perspective. Read more here (via @GoNavvia)
Big Data on the Service Desk – Does Size Matter? – Of course not, it’s what you do with it that counts. Read more from MaryR at HP here
Got some interesting news to share – say hello via @gobbymidget
This was my very first visit to the itSMF UK conference. I arrived Sunday afternoon and got straight into the networking. Whenever I’ve been to an event before I have always attended with someone else and felt comfortable just meeting the occasional person.
It can be very intimidating attending conferences when you’re new to it as everyone seems to already know everyone else. I could have just relied upon my new colleagues to introduce me but I was determined to get out of my comfort zone and do it for myself.
Enter Twitter!
I sent a quick Tweet to say I had arrived and to query whether anyone else was around and within 5 minutes I had organised a meet up with Daniel Breston of Qriosity (someone I had never met before) in the bar.
That one connection led to meeting Stephen Griffiths of priSM and Brenda Peery of Tactare who in turn introduced me to countless others at the drinks reception. My advice to anyone attending an event for the first time is to be brave and get out there and meet people as soon as you can. You know you have at least one thing in common as you’re all at the conference. Mingle…it knocks an already rewarding experience right over the edge when you leave having made new friends and contacts.
The Conference
The Conference kicked off on Monday with Colin Rudd – itSMF UK Chairman, elucidating on why ITSM models of the future will change from Customer, Service Provider, Supplier to Service Broker, Service Integrator and that although the emphasis on service managers will change it will still be as important as ever.
Outgoing Chief Executive Ben Clacy introduced itSMF UK’s exciting new online Self Assessment and Benchmarking tool, MONITOR ITSM and the new Elite Volunteer Card which rewards itSMF UK volunteers with discounts and extra benefits.
The opening keynote speaker, Britain’s first female fast jet pilot – Jo Salter gave a very entertaining talk on the challenges she has met, how she has succeeded in the face of adversity and how peeing on demand is harder than it sounds. Everyone I’m sure will have taken away something from Jo’s insights and experiences but I feel it was especially beneficial for the female contingent in the room to see it recognised that not all inspirational people are men!
Unfortunately I couldn’t attend every session on the agenda for Day 1 (I’m only human), but below is an overview of the sessions that I did attend.
Suck It and See: Ingredients for Great Supplier Relationships – Cath Bartlett, Dyson
This session was full of real world learning and experience of maximising relationships with suppliers. Advice ranged from trying the ‘Good Cop, Bad Cop’ routine to ensuring you’re measuring the right things as you want to ensure that your green KPI’s match with the customers experiences of your service.
Quote from Cath Bartlett: ‘What gets measured gets managed’
Define what matters & what you really want & take your suppliers on your journey with you @cath_bartlett#itsm13
How Assessment and Benchmarking Techniques were used to Drive CSI and how this was Applied to Capacity Management at the Co-operative Group – Ian MacDonald
Submission of the Year and Service Management Project of the Year 2012 winners, Co-operative Group can probably add longest session title to their list of accolades.
Ian gave an interesting case study on how Co-operative changed their approach to Capacity Management using a the SatNav approach: Where are you going? Where are you starting from? When do you need to be there by?
His secret to success…’Be Ronseal – Do what you say on the tin’
Ian MacDonald @ Cooperative Banking – thinking you are good is no longer good enough #itsm13
The Big 4 agenda was discussed with questions thrown to the panel with a state-of-the-art system of red card/green card voting taking place. Technologically advanced, no…but perfectly adequate for the requirements.
Interactive plenary debating DevOps, is it a hippie, free love version of ITSM? #itsm13#ITSMbig4
Chris Williams of EE (where was Kevin Bacon?), Ignatious O’Doherty of Land and Property Services and Jacqueline Simmons and Amanda Rutledge of QBE all gave overviews of their submissions for the Project of the Year award. Each showed the trials and tribulations encountered with some very honest accounts of issues encountered.
Zoned change restrictions used by @EE during Olympics project. An interesting approach… #itsm13
Mark and Martin walked us through the difficulties of building a single IT function when faced with a complex legacy IT environment with no capacity for innovation, and how they overcame these to create the dynamic service now in place.
Service Integration is really hard…ITIL is not enough – JLR #itsm13
Day 1 Closing Keynote – A Forward Thinking Name for a Forward-Thinking Company – Axelos
Peter Hepworth and Frances Scarff of Axelos talked through their plans for the coming year referencing the Axelos ‘Onion’, encouraging everyone to come and visit their stand.
I admit to being surprised that I actually quite liked Edwina’s hosting. I do tend to think of politicians as rather bland individuals with no sense of humour, so I was pleased that she managed to make it both enjoyable and amusing.
A full list of the worthy winners (and finalists) can be found here. All of us here at the ITSM Review would like to congratulate both winners and finalists on their fantastic achievements. Well done to all.
Mrs Stuart won! Mrs Stuart won! Mrs Stuart won! Yay! Mrs Stuart won! Mrs Stuart won the Lifetime Achievement award!! @stuartrance#itsm13
The evening continued with a casino and disco which were enjoyed immensely by all, but the main attraction was the photo booth where you could look even sillier than normal by donning wigs, hats and glasses like the weird bunch in the picture>>>!
Later we were scuppered by the hotel in our attempts to have a piano sing-a-long with Barclay Rae, but we were treated instead to a harmonica solo by Kevin Holland.
The talk of the evening centered around Mr Rance’s fantastic achievement, explaining to our very own Glenn Thompson that Swindon is not in the Midlands, and various conspiracy theories on why Patrick Bolger was still sober. General consensus was that aliens had abducted him and left a decoy…they’re not fooling anyone!
In Summary
All in all a thoroughly enjoyable day. It was nice to see the presentations grouped into specific themes (e.g. Real world learning: Stories from Members on their ITSM experiences) so that if you were attending the conference for a particular reason you could easily identify the sessions that you wanted attend. However, if there was one thing I found a struggle it was getting from one session to the next on time if I needed a loo break in between! The venue was rather large.
Feedback on Day 1 of the event from Twitter was also positive:
First day #ITSM13. Enjoying the show and had lots of good chats. Tonight should be a good event too
itSMF UK’s new initiative for 2014, ‘The Big 4 Agenda’ kicked off last week with the first of the five scheduled Twitter Chats taking place. The chat featured Big4 Agenda Speaker and itSMF UK Vice-Chair John Windebank and was moderated by Kathryn Howard the pioneer of the #leadit Twitter Chats for itSMF Australia.
The Twitter Chat Model
The Twitter Chat model shows that itSMF UK are taking strides to be more current (using social media to engage with the community) and give new and exciting ways for people to get involved. One of my uber pet hates is that Service Desk staff have limited ways to involve themselves in the industry, being able in most cases to only attend one event per year if they’re lucky and in some cases never being unchained from their desk.
The direction itSMF UK is heading seems to be more inclusive and for that I am delighted. Now, if only we could get them to do something about their website!
The point of the Twitter Chats, in itSMF UK’s own words is ‘…firstly to identify the top four issues that you are facing in IT and then to provide discussion/help/expert opinion on each of these topics.’
People from all over joined in the chat, not just from the UK, suggesting that ITSM issues are the same regardless of where you connect to your WIFI.
The Twitter Chat itself
It started off with a few technical hitches and a lot of forgetting to add the hashtag #itSMBIG4, but once all were settled in comments started to flow, albeit with the slightly disjointed manner typical of many people discussing several things at the same time. The hour passed surprisingly fast and below is an overview of what I picked up as the main topics of the event:
Tweets from several contributors show that Problem Management is still a big issue in the industry with it being perceived as the Invisible Man to the Service Desks Superman…
I really like the way that itSMF UK are looking at new ways to engage and what’s more, not just with their members but with everyone in the industry and I hope that this will continue and at the next Twitter Chat and that more people will get involved.
Unfortunately a lot of the points raised were, as Claire Agutter said, just the same old issues that have been floating around for years.
@ClaireAgutter Suggest move away from "big 4" & focus on IT as SERVICE provider. Change focus/thought, success vs problems, what works. Hard
Having said that I’m very interested to see the results of the Big 4 Survey (voting now closed) and hope that it’s given some new and exciting insights into the current and future struggles of ITSM.
The comments from the Twitter Chat together with the results of the Big 4 Survey will confirm the 6 key topics that itSMF UK will take to the itSMF UK conference and Exhibition (4-5 November, Birmingham). These 6 topics are due to be announced this week. Then at the event a series of roundtable discussions will take place to narrow down those 6 topics to the top 4 – i.e. the Big 4 that itSMF UK will concentrate on in 2014.
Once announced a Twitter Chat for each of the individual topics will be held as follows:
November 13 – Big4 Topic 1
December 11 – Big4 Topic 2
January 15 – Big4 Topic 3
February 12 – Big4 Topic 4
I hope to see you either at the conference, or involved in the Twitter Chats, preferably both!
In this second article we’re going to look at how OBASHI fits in with other IT frameworks, standards and methodologies. If you missed part 1, read it here.
The modern business is a complex organisation. People, technology and processes work together to generate revenue and deliver business outcomes. Many businesses do not have a full picture of how all their component parts fit together. This creates risk, and can lead to real problems. OBASHI produces Business and IT diagrams (BIT diagrams) that are used to map business processes.
The OBASHI layers of ownership, business process, application, system, hardware and infrastructure show the business process and the IT that underpins it.
OBASHI can be applied to small, medium or large organisations. Larger organisations will need to factor in the number of stakeholders and the complexity of their processes and services when scoping the OBASHI project. They may benefit from using a tool to create the OBASHI outputs.
Smaller organisations will have fewer stakeholders, but may have more single points of failure in their processes as one person can have many roles. They may be able to produce their OBASHI outputs manually using paper or a simple flow chart application.
If you’re from an ITIL background, it’s tempting to look at OBASHI and think “oh it’s just configuration management”. This isn’t true – OBASHI includes the bigger business picture as well and supports conversations outside IT.
OBASHI in the wider environment
The decision about whether to adopt OBASHI shouldn’t be over-complicated. It’s not an either or decision – if you’re already doing ITIL, or COBIT, or ISO20000 you’re not going to throw away what you’ve got in order to adopt OBASHI. Instead, view OBASHI as a complementary methodology.
OBASHI will take inputs from your existing environment – if you’ve already got a service catalogue, or an asset register, then these will feed into your OBASHI project.
OBASHI diagrams can be tailored to the audience as required, masking complexity where it’s not needed and helping to make accurate business decisions quickly.
OBASHI and ITIL
I know a lot of ITSM Review readers are from an ITSM background, so it’s worth looking at OBASHI and ITIL in a bit more detail. From an ITIL perspective, Service Strategy and the processes it includes help an organisation to create and manage a service portfolio that will meet long-term business goals. The business and IT diagrams that OBASHI creates can help the organisation to prioritise investments, plan based on accurate information, and make sure IT services align with business processes.
In the Service Design lifecycle stage, new and changed services are designed. These services must meet business requirements for quality and cost, and must not have any unexpected negative impact on existing services.OBASHI can help to identify cost savings where existing services and components can be re-used, where appropriate.
Service Transition is the lifecycle phase that moves new or changed services into the live environment. OBASHI can help organisations to map their current state and also their desired future state.Change impact assessments can be carried out quickly and easily using the diagrams that OBASHI creates.
In Service Operation, live services are operated and maintained and support is offered to the business when incidents occur. OBASHI models can show the impact of downtime, who needs to be contacted in the event of downtime, and the cost to the business of a loss of availability. If customers can see we are working effectively to get them back online, we can maintain customer satisfaction – even during an incident.
The continual service improvement stage of the ITIL service lifecycle looks for improvement opportunities related to services, people, processes, structure. It’s well accepted that we need to understand something before we can improve it, and OBASHI helps to provide that understanding of the organisation.
“Premature optimisation is the root of all evil” Donald Knuth
OBASHI and Projects
Many organisations have a mature project management capability. OBASHI can provide support during the key stages in a project’s lifecycle, including:
Forming a project board
Writing a business case
Risk and quality management
Communication
Project planning
Project closure
OBASHI diagrams help to identify stakeholders, map current and desired dataflows, and are inputs to project planning and impact assessment. OBASHI supports project management and helps projects to deliver on time, on budget and at the right level of quality.
Getting Started with OBASHI
So, who should use OBASHI and why?
The short answer is, any type or size of organisation that wants to understand and optimise their dataflows.
Think about these statements:
Our organisation struggles to prioritise investments
Our risk and impact assessments aren’t based on accurate data
The business thinks IT doesn’t understand them
The business sees IT as a cost centre, not a valuable part of the organisation
We need to make cost efficiencies
We’re adopting Green IT/virtualising our infrastructure
We’re struggling to manage legacy applications/technology
If any of these relate to your organisation, OBASHI is going to be a very useful addition to your toolbox. It’s the only methodology that creates a common picture for the business and IT to work from.
Resources
To learn more about OBASHI, you can visit the official OBASHI website, where you will find some excellent case studies and presentations that you can tailor to your organisation. Additional resource can also be found on the training website. The OBASHI training scheme is run by APMG International, and Foundation training is available both in the classroom and online.
A year ago, asking the question “what is OBASHI®?” might have got you some interesting answers. A sneeze, a martial art, and rather brilliantly ‘OBAMA bashing’ are all suggestions we’ve had.
In the last 12 months, however, I’ve seen a turnaround. OBASHI is getting recognised for what it is – a simple, easy to adopt methodology that maps dataflow through a business and supports meaningful conversations about investment, improvement, and business outcomes.
I’m also really happy to see that this recognition is coming from the folk in ITSM who actually work with the business. Consultants, outsourcers and business relationship managers are all starting to realize how OBASHI can help the business/IT conversation move forward.
Background to OBASHI
“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it”. Frank Herbert
The OBASHI methodology allows organisations to clearly understand what is involved in supporting their business processes. Simple, powerful information can be used to support business decisions, financial decisions and strategic planning.
OBASHI creates visual maps of businesses and parts of businesses. The maps are simple, visual references that can be understood by staff at all levels. The maps help businesses to understand:
How the business works
What assets and components make the business work and support its business processes
What inter-dependencies exist between assets
How data flows around the business
OBASHI produces Business and IT diagrams (BIT diagrams) that are used to map business processes (see image below).
The OBASHI layers of ownership, business process, application, system, hardware and infrastructure show the business process and the IT that underpins it.
OBASHI’s origins
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe”. John Muir
The OBASHI methodology was originally developed in 2001 by Fergus Cloughley and Paul Wallis. It was inspired by the computer models used within manufacturing and process industries to control and simulate the operation of infrastructure and plants.
The costs and values of manufacturing flows can be mapped, allowing the assets that support them to be optimised in a way that encourages maximum business profitability.
OBASHI develops and builds on the existing methods for costing and valuing the flow of data in the process control industry, and applies it to the flow of data in all sectors – including IT.
OBASHI is used to “help business professionals easily understand the ‘dollar per second’ value of dataflow that supports their business services and processes, in a simple and meaningful way. OBASHI is the basis on which they can make better informed and more accurate strategic, operational, tactical and technical decisions.”
Context
OBASHI is an interesting methodology because it applies to all types, sizes and sectors of organisation. It’s not targeted at a particular audience or area like ITIL® and PRINCE2®, and can be easily understood by business or IT focused staff.
For me, the value that OBASHI brings is in the way it enables business and IT conversation. ITIL (maybe because of its name) can be perceived as being ‘IT focused’ – OBASHI is open to anyone. I feel that treating the business and IT as separate entities is a big mistake for the modern organisation – IT runs through and enables every business action and business process.
Building up a library of dataflows mapped using OBASHI helps business and IT staff to have conversations together about risk, impact, investment, strategy and growth.
Who is using OBASHI?
Early adopters of OBASHI include one of the world’s leading Formula 1 motorsport teams and the UK’s Civil Nuclear Constabulary, but perhaps one of the most interesting users of OBASHI is the global Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) project.
OBASHI Business and IT Diagram
At the behest of G20 group of nations and the Financial Stability Board, the Global LEI project has been created to proceed with development of a unique identification system for parties to financial transactions. For the past 12 months over 100 institutions from around the world have been working together on the project.
The largest financial project in the world, the Legal Entity Identifier, is a fundamental requirement if the process of addressing the systemic risks that caused the 2008 financial crisis is to have the best chance of success. The LEI will also help participants and regulators to analyse, quantify and understand systematic and operational risk across banking and other industries.
Operating in an environment where regulators and financial institutions operate within and across different jurisdictional boundaries, each with their own unique requirements, OBASHI provides:
A Governance framework language for LEI policy and system design
A Programme Management tool to help national, regional and political variations, both technically and operationally
A practical, easy to create model of all the relationships and dependencies between all the business and technology components of the global LEI system
OBASHI is being used to create and maintain clarity in the LEI project – a ‘Common Language’ for technical and non-technical people, from diverse nationalities and business cultures, to understand and communicate about the project. With OBASHI the stakeholders can see how people, process and technology will be required to fit together to make the Global LEI Systems operate, this is helping them make the best-informed decisions.
When the LEI system is up and running it will be used to identify any and every participant, in any and every financial transaction globally.
Set this into a global operational context of thousands of implementations, each jurisdiction conforming to regional legal and regulatory requirements, capturing data in multiple languages and scripts, and all of that being used to update data in every other local LEI system and you start to appreciate the scale of the project.
Although the LEI project takes complexity to the next level, it’s easy to see that most businesses are becoming increasingly connected and complexity rises accordingly. Creating clarity and being able to communicate clearly will become ever more important. This is where OBASHI is very useful.
Resources
To learn more about OBASHI, you can visit the official OBASHI website, where you will find some excellent case studies and presentations that you can tailor to your organisation. Additional resource can also be found on the training website. The OBASHI training scheme is run by APMG International, and Foundation training is available both in the classroom and online.
OBASHI® is a registered trademark in the United Kingdom and other countries
ITIL is a registered trademark of Axelos Ltd
PRINCE2 is a registered trademark of Axelos Ltd
A second blog will follow on where and how OBASHI fits in with other IT frameworks, standards, and methodologies, as well as taking a look at why an organisation might use OBASHI.
Word Cloud of all feedback from attendees Not just feedback listed in this article
Following on from the two-day AXELOS workshop, ITSM Review reached out to the attendees with three simple questions:
How did the workshop go?
What were the key achievements?
What do you think are the key opportunities for the future?
We also asked the AXELOS team to summarize their thoughts from the two days. The following article is an overview of everyone’s responses – common points made by attendees have been moved to the introductory paragraph of each section.
So, how was it?
The workshop was deemed a great first step from AXELOS (and hopefully the first of many). It was a dynamic, open and customer centric series of discussions and debates, which were received well by all those who provided feedback.
“Good to feel part of a team – level of consensus very encouraging” – Ivor MacFarlane, IBM
“The workshop was wonderful, it was a great opportunity to participate with other thought leaders”– Anthony Orr, BMC
“It was exciting. I’m now much more optimistic about the future of ITIL” – Claire Agutter, ATO Council
“It was refreshingly forward thinking. I felt that my input was listened to and all divergent views were given respect” – Sharon Taylor, Aspect Group Inc
“It was great to see AXELOS’ openness and receptiveness to suggestions and feedback from the workgroup for improving the highly successful ITIL framework” – Colin Rudd, itSMF UK
“I really enjoyed sharing thoughts, ideas, challenges and opportunities with other experts and I was amazed by how much consensus there was about most of the issues we faced” – Stuart Rance, HP
What were the Key Achievements?
The consensus was that the future of ITIL looks very positive. The collaborative approach was praised and the group felt that there was a real focus on increasing the success and value of ITIL to both businesses and individuals. AXELOS are listening (and they do realize that more input is needed from a wider cross-section of stakeholders from different geographies) and are clearly focused on opportunities to deliver value to the market without radical disruption or alarm. They also realize that market research and communication are critical before making decisions and open dialogue with the community is therefore very important.
“The key achievement for me was the recognition by AXELOS that our community is diverse and complex and that there will need to be extensive consultation and care to avoid unnecessary disruption to the services. It was clear that this is not an exercise of ‘fixing’ ITIL but of actively planning its future evolution to meet needs” – Sharon Taylor, Aspect Group Inc
“The biggest achievement was in listening to the “voice of the customer”, listening to those who actually use ITIL” – Andrea Kis, Tata Consultancy Services
“Lots of input provided from different perspectives, covering ITIL content, exams, training and ecosystem” – Stuart Rance, HP
“There was a welcome absence of politics and person agendas, it was all about the success of ITIL” – Jayne Groll, ITSM Academy
“The ‘role-diversity’ of attendees allowed us to not only see the bigger ITIL ecosystem but also to offer different perspectives on legacy issues” – Stephen Mann, ServiceNow
Where are the Key Opportunities moving forward?
Everybody agreed that AXELOS need to keep the momentum going and must continue to have open communication with ITIL users, stakeholders and the wider community. They need to remain committed to providing visibility of the ‘what’ and ‘why’ behind ITIL moving forward and must ensure that there are no surprises for the market by sharing with us their long term plans.
“There is a real opportunity to elevate value of ITIL to organizations, executives and community as a whole” – Anthony Orr, BMC
“For me, the key opportunity would be the “onion” layers of content that could be available to the community (some for free, some for a fee), including benchmarking and more practical application. Couple this with potential digital technology to deliver dynamic intellectual property and the industry becomes better able to adapt and supplement” – Jayne Groll, ITSM Academy
“The opportunity is to continue to collaborate with ITIL users, stakeholders and the community and use these discussions as a basis to improve and develop a business model that supports timely, well planned, inclusive, transparent and communicated information. The JV model releases former constraints of ITIL management and frees up the innovation opportunities to bring ITIL forward in step with need and not chasing them.” – Aspect Group Inc
“Global-best-practice looks like it could finally become global best practice” – Stephen Mann, ServiceNow
What did AXELOS have to say?
The workshop group on day 2
“The workshops tackled a vast array of content regarding the future of ITIL and PPM, all in a relatively short time. It was intense but we maintained a positive outlook, stayed focused on the future and left no elephants in the room.
It was good to move from listening to doing, in this case to work through the main priorities that need to be addressed. We’ll now factor those into the planning process for this year and for 2014 when AXELOS is fully operational.
Key achievements included the development of ideas and concepts like the “Onion” or “Doughnut” (for PPMers) that provides a framework to enable community collaboration, development of modular materials and potentially tackle “two speed ITIL”. It was also useful to discuss the needs of the wider global community and also what this all means to the end user or practitioner.
Where to next? Well it’s great to have crossed the start line and now these workshops have provided us with a script for wider stakeholder engagement. The skill is going to be in maintaining the momentum whilst focusing on the priorities and this is where AXELOS will need to demonstrate leadership.
Overall, great debates, great ideas and great opportunities.” – input provided by Chris Barrett, Director at AXELOS.
In Summary
It’s a great start. There was much consensus, risks and opportunities were agreed, and the two-day event ended on a very positive note.
AXELOS knows that it needs to elicit more, focused input, particularly from other regions, and that communication in general is critical.
So, there is still a lot to do, but on the evidence of this workshop it’s clear that AXELOS is doing all the right things – and AXELOS knows that the world is watching and waiting.
Again, if you have an opinion as to the future of ITIL, please respond to this blog or email AXELOS direct. You can also follow what’s happening by looking for their communications on Twitter or Google+
The following comment piece is contributed by Stuart Rance of HP and Stephen Mann of ServiceNow.
Yesterday a number of ITSM professionals convened in London to talk about the future of ITIL. From the get-go, it was stressed that the purpose of the meeting was to provide input to AXELOS’ thinking and not to make decisions.
Who was involved?
It was a passionate group of people that represented: ITIL authors, examiners, consultants, service providers, vendors, penguins, and AXELOS. The attendees were:
And of course ITSMPenguin. Everyone had opinions and ideas to share and it was a good mix of people.
Some attendees travelled a long way to attend: Anthony from Houston, Sharon from Canada, Jayne from Florida, and Rob Stroud would have attended from New York but for personal reasons. Even though most of the attendees reside in the UK, they work for global organizations and as such have global experience and global views. Not withstanding this, we all agreed on the need for more input across geography, culture, industry, and language.
If you wish to provide your input please respond to this blog (in the comments section) or email AXELOS direct.
Community input
You can already see much of the input from things people have already shared with the ITSM community:
The discussions included the scope, content, and structure of both ITIL and the ITIL exam system. And started with people suggesting ideas for strategy and principles for ITIL going forward. It was surprising how long this took (shouldn’t we already know this?) and not unsurprisingly everyone agreed that ITIL should be driven by business and customer needs.
Other suggestion related to:
Having a visible set of values
Separating architecture and structure from narrative and examples
Collaboration with a wide community of practitioners, examiners, trainers, consultants, vendors, and industry bodies across geographic and industry boundaries
An emphasis on relevance to end-user organizations
Quality being more important than time to market.
From a content perspective, AXELOS introduced the concept of what it calls the “Onion Model”, shown below, that encompasses the previous feedback on how there is a need for different types of content and, importantly, community input to the ongoing development of ITIL.
Where:
The centre has the very stable ITIL core
The next layer has modular content such as role or industry-specific information
And then further layers have more practical content such as templates, guides, and case studies
The very outside layer is community owned and community driven with AXELOS and the community curating and promoting this
Content is able to move inwards as it becomes accepted best practice.
Training and exams
The workshop group
We discussed the importance of people, culture, and organizational aspects. In particular the need for more practical guidance about how IT organizations can benefit from the experience of others, and how they can start to gain value from ITIL within their own organization.
There was a lot of passion around training and exams. An interesting point was the absence of guidance on the development of skills such as negotiation and management as part of effective IT service management. Everyone recognized the need to make the exam system more valuable to both individuals and employers. But there was a consensus that that any change requires more input, more time, and needs great care not to disrupt the status quo. Again, if you have an opinion as to the future of ITIL exams, please respond to this blog or email AXELOS direct.
Next steps
Following day two of this workshop (a second blog will follow), AXELOS will continue to seek out global community input.
If you want to follow what’s happening, please look for their communications on Twitter or Google+
