The Supplier Manager Is Like the Coach Of An Olympic Hockey Team

Its funny how our current focus areas are usually the product of several streams of consciousness. I suppose it all comes back to the old saying about the product of our efforts being greater than the sum of it parts.

As a Canadian I am still enjoying the afterglow of the most successful Winter Olympics in Canadian history, with a record breaking Gold Medal win. This feat was topped off by the entire nation watching the Canadian Hockey team win the final medal game in sudden death over time. (What a rush!)

My second stream of thought has been focused on the topic of Supplier Management. A subject I decided to research and write about early in the new year as it began to dawn on me that there is a growing strategic requirement to successfully integrate external suppliers of both classic and cloud based IT services into our IT value chain and management models.

I understand fully that we have been in the business of outsourcing both operational and strategic services to external suppliers for some time now. The question of course is how successful have we been at this up to this point. This is further complicated when we treat them like outsiders versus adopted family members. A challenge I have written on before:  Your IT Outsourcer - A Brother of Another Mother

The difference I see today is that this landscape is about to get a lot more complex now that we are also moving to off premise cloud services for both business and technical services.

Having just returned from a very successful Pink conference where I spoke on the topic of ITIL in the Clouds I made a statement that I had initially written on this blog: Choosing to use cloud services is a choice to outsource multiple slivers of your IT value chain. In my article on this subject as well as in my session I made the case that it is critical to integrate our suppliers into the ITSM Management processes for delivering services to our business partners in a secure, reliable and cost effective manner.

For this reason I personally believe that Supplier Management is the most important / strategic Service Design process for companies to get right for the next decade and beyond.

So how does the concept of Supplier Management relate to Olympic Hockey you might ask? (I was hoping you would )

Consider for a moment how an Olympic Hockey team is formed. A Senior Management group selects players from multiple teams and assembles the best possible talent from all of these different sources to create what they hope is a team cable of great success. However, the challenge that an Olympic hockey coach faces is that while they have assembled star players into this new team they come from very different hockey clubs. Each club has its unique style, culture and ways of getting the job done. What they have to do is to take these individual talents “suppliers” and get them to start playing as a cohesive team with a common play book. (Enter a company’s IT Management Framework)

In my weird way of looking at life the Coach for an Olympic Hockey team performs the same role as a Supplier Manager in multi-sourced IT Management environment. The Supplier Manager helps an organization to pick the right players for the value network and then ensures and contracts that they agree to operate by the common play book (ITSM Processes).

Otherwise what you get is a lot of individual talent moving the puck towards the goal as a team of isolated individuals. Any Olympic hockey team that cannot make this transition from talented individuals to a cohesive team approach will never get close to a medal round let alone ultimate success and glory.

If you think about it for a moment this scenario is exactly what we are faced with every day in IT organizations that have multiple suppliers that are not integrated well. 

To close this article let me share with you a case study that I picked up at the Pink conference this year.

As I was running from one of my speaking sessions to the next I was stopped in the hall by a person from a company that we had done ITSM consulting with in the past. He was very excited about telling me about a project related to Supplier Management that he had recently been involved in and asked if I would have some time to sit down and discuss it. Not being able to stop on route I made a lunch appointment with this person and I am so glad I did.

At lunch he let me see a manual that he and a team of people had created to help manage and consolidate over 81 separate supplier contracts in a sane and consistent way. In this manual they had created common Service Definitions. (Eg. Database Administration) Instead of each supplier providing their own definition and set of attributes for this service they were asked to bid on a single common definition. This allowed the organization to multi source the same service to several provides without risk or variance between serve offerings.

Also in this manual was a detailed description of the core ITIL processes that the organization had defined / deployed and the expectations of involvement that were required of all suppliers around policy, process, roles and key performance indicators. Example: Incident, Problem, Change, Service Asset & Config, Release and Deployment, etc) In short a common play book for all parties regardless of what team they originated from.

This was the most beautiful ITSM thing I have seen in a long time. (Sigh: I know but it’s the life I lead) I wish I could declare who this was but he asked for anonymity. My hope is that he can present this project at next years Pink’s 2011 Conference.

So in closing I would ask you if you have an Olympic Hockey Coach / Supplier Manager working on your team that is not only focused on getting the best players for the cheapest price but also defining a strategy to take individual talent and build it into a team with a common vision, goal and play book for success!

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

”Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” ~Andrew Carnegie

The Value And The Misunderstanding of ISO 20000

I am writing this blog post on my way back from a 2 week Pink Expert Forum Roadshow with stops in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Dubai and now have a 14 hour flight to capture some of my thoughts around what I heard and saw and reflect on the interesting interactions I had with various people in South East Asia and the Middle East.

One of the most memorable discussions I had was with a CIO who declared to me very proudly at a networking event that his organization was going to adopt and implement ISO 20000 in their IT organization. I thought this was a curious statement and proceed to ask some clarifying questions. I probed with a few gentle leading questions about whether what he really meant to say was that he was going to adopt ITIL practices for his organization and then go for an ISO 20k audit to verify and validate the improvements.

However, he was not going to be deviated from his declared goal and insisted that his organization was going to Implement ISO 20k and that he had no business case justification for ITIL. Hearing his insistence on this goal I did my best to explain the relationship between ITIL the Best Practice Framework and ISO 20 the Code of Practice (Check list) used by auditors to assess an organization’s compliance to 14 IT Service Management processes but there was no shaking this gentleman from his dogged focus on ISO 20k as the goal.

Interested in why he wanted this goal so badly I asked him why he was so interested in ISO 20k. His reply was very candid and frank. He told me quite clearly that his goal was to obtain the certification as proof to his customers that their IT processes were mature and followed best practice. After unsuccessfully trying to explain the difference between an ISO audit for compliance and a process maturity assessment (ISO audits do not measure maturity) I finally said with some regretted exasperation. “So what you really want ISO 20k for is a marketing tool for your clients” his answer to me was “yes that’s correct”

Feeling that this conversation was not being very productive for either of us I took one final stab at trying to explain the difference between ITIL and ISO 20k. I told him that the real detail was to be found in the ITIL Library and that the ISO 20k Code of practice was only 42 pages long and that it could not possibly have enough detail in it to provide guidance on how to adopt the processes and elements it describes for audit purposes. Perhaps this statement was a bit over the top and for that I am sorry since it ended our conversation quite abruptly and the gentleman walked away towards the food and beverage tables. A third person that had been part of this exchange looked at me and said something to effect. “What many Executives wan’t out of ISO 20k in this region is the industrial password that will get them new business or increase their organization’s status.”

Now don’t get me wrong, neither of these goals are necessarily bad in and of themselves but my personal belief is that the goal should be to improve your IT organization and services first and then if you have done the heroic feat of actually adopting and implementing 14 IT Service Management processes described in ISO 20k across the full scope of your IT organization then by all means celebrate this achievement by having an ISO 20k audit validate all the hard work your organization has done.

There is a purpose and use for process frameworks like ITIL as well as ISO standards but it is important not to confuse the ends with the means.

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes. ~Douglas Adams

Launching A Cloud Computing Strategy Means Outsourcing Multiple Slivers of Your IT Service Value Chain

[Young Cosette - Les Miserables]

There is a castle on a cloud,
I like to go there in my sleep,
Aren’t any floors for me to sweep,
Not in my castle on a cloud.

Rhetorical Question: But wait I thought that cloud computing strategies are meant to simplify IT service provisioning? I cut the supplier a check and they take care of rest right?

Response: In one sense this is a correct, since you are paying an external supplier to provide a complete service outcome. The service can come in the form of an account for a hosted software service, a development platform or a set of virtual infrastructure components without you having to own or manage the physical assets.  However, on the other side of coin it is critical to understand that what you are also doing is introducing a new set of players into your existing IT management processes. Just as Young Cosette discovered in the musical Les-Miserables we still have to sweep the floors and take care of business even when we live in the clouds.

[At The End Of The Day - Les Miserables]

At the end of the day you get nothing for nothing
Sitting flat on your butt doesn’t buy any bread

What the IT Community is quickly coming to realize is that to deploy a cloud strategy within their organization successfully a number of processes and IT Service Management elements have to be defined - and better yet - automated from request through verified provisioning and then keep running as long as needed.

Take the following list as an example:

• Service Catalog: The cloud based service needs to be documented, managed and published in an actionable service catalog for IT customers to order from.
• Request Fulfillment: The cloud service has requestable components which require a process to support request approval and integrated workflow automation for request provisioning.
• Change Management: The infrastructure service is now a component service to other business services and changes to the virtual infrastructure must go through Change Management whether you or the cloud supplier makes the change.
• Service Asset and Configuration Management: While you may not choose to model a SaaS service within your CMDB, the infrastructure-as-a-service components play a critical dependency role in understanding component failure impact analysis and provides key information to many other processes.
• Incident & Problem Management: Congratulations! By outsourcing your IT services to a cloud provider they have now become part of your 2nd and 3rd level support organization and need to be integrated into your support agreements and internal operational level agreements.
• Release and Deployment Management: Many cloud providers make scheduled and unschedule releases to their offerings on a regular basis. This requires you to manage these new releases to your customers in a formal maner since the user interface, service functionality and underlying integrations can change at any point.
• Access Management: Just because your service is in the cloud does not mean you don’t have to be concerned about who can order a service component, what level of access / role the requestor / approver has to have, or support your employee on boarding and off boarding processes.
• Event Management: Your sourced cloud services need to be monitored and integrated into your NOC processes.
• Service Level Management: The SLA you negotiate with your cloud provider will need to support your customer SLA’s (This will be particularly interesting if your customer has executed a business process outsourcing arrangement based on SaaS/cloud and then turns to you to “manage” and integrate with the remaining IT infrastructure, data, and applications).
• Supplier Management: Using multiple cloud providers means managing a growing set of external suppliers as part of your internal IT value chain that all need to follow your established policies and processes to ensure consistent delivery of IT services. (see SLM)
• Financial Management: Thanks to the ease of use ordering up new cloud service units many organizations receive a shocking bill quite quickly. Keeping track of your financial obligations around accounts payable is critical. Else beware of “Cloud Sprawl”. Just because a cloud service has been purchased, doesn’t remove your old hardware and software or the lease payments, remaining maintenance, or book value associated with them. 
• Availability & Capacity Management:Thanks to elastic capacity and cloud support for failover and dynamic routing you can use cloud services to enhance both of these processes for service design, just be aware of the true external as well as internal costs. And what about that link you have to the cloud? How diverse/redundant is it? How dynamic is it’s routing and capacity?
• IT Service Continuity: Cloud services offer a great opportunity to support Disaster Recovery and off site storage requirements. However your strategy and process needs to be defined in order to use these services strategically (see Availability and Capacity)
• Information Security: Public or Private Cloud does not matter, Information Security remains a concern regardless of where your data resides. (Won’t even touch legislation and privacy laws)
• Etc. Etc. Etc......

The key message I believe you may be picking up from this post is that the more complex your value chain of suppliers becomes, the more necessary it is to have defined, repeatable processes to support them. In the end moving to Cloud Services is a form of strategic outsourcing and comes with all the challenges and benefits of what that means.

Don’t make the classic mistake of believing that once you outsource something you no longer have to worry about it (You are still concerned that the floors get swept). The old model of outsourcing your problem’s does not work in this model either.

By all means look strategically at integrating alternative suppliers into your IT value chain, just be aware of what that means. For more thoughts on integrating external suppliers successfully take a look t the article I wrote:  Your IT Outsourcer - A Brother of Another Mother

[Finale - Les Miserables]

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring
When tomorrow comes!

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.” ~Alan Perlis

Transformation Efforts are Always Most Successful When Led from Top Down

Here we are in the middle of November with the US Thanksgiving just around the corner and I find myself thankful for a very busy 4th Quarter leading into the holiday season.
While it means that I and my team are on the road, it also is very encouraging to see the evidence of our Economy turning in a positive direction.

Over the last few weeks I have been meeting with the Senior Leadership teams of several of our customers across the continent who are all re-starting their ITIL projects or finally taking the first steps into the ITSM adventure. My observation it that the Senior Leadership responsible for an ITIL program really benefit from a 1 day working session with their peers where the people, process, technology and governance considerations are discussed and addressed. This type of kick of session serves to put everyone on the same page so to speak as well as provide the leadership with a vision of how to accomplish the Service Management program they are envisioning.

The Agenda for this 1 day Executive Workshop typically looks like this:

Learn about the IT Service Life cycle as well as the business drivers for service management and key trends that are impacting IT Service Organizations. This one day executive session focuses on what senior managers need to understand about the life cycle approach and how it links to business value generation and IT strategy.

Workshop Agenda

Strategic ITSM Overview

• Introduction To Service Management & ITIL
• ITIL Benefits
• Business drivers for ITIL adoption
• Linking IT Service Management and business value

The IT Service Management Lifecycle

• High-level overview of the structure, components and processes of the five core ITIL books (Service Strategy; Service Design; Service Transition; Service Operation; Continual Service Improvement)

Process Governance & Organizational Considerations

• Process Governance / Ownership / Management
• Service Ownership
• Business Engagement Roles

Roadmap To Adopt ITIL

• Suggested ITSM Roadmap

IT Management Tools & Process Automation

• Process automation and integration considerations
• Industry trends and vendor positions
• Developing a tool architecture strategy

Facilitated Discussion About Next Steps

In fact we believe so strongly in this workshop we are offering it at our annual conference in February as a pre-conference 1 day Executive Session:

Link: https://www.pinkelephant.com/ITM10/Workshops/PreWorkshops.htm

Other News of Interest:

While the past couple of months have indeed been busy I have had the opportunity to participate in a couple of interesting Multi Media sessions.

Interview by Rob England (The IT Skeptic): Follow this link to listen to a recorded interview and for a preview of a conference session I am doing on “5 Tips For Developing An ITSM Strategic Road Map”

Speaking of Rob England and keeping in tune with the Theme of this blog post I highly recommend Rob’s book “Owning ITIL: A Skeptical Guide for Decision Makers” which has specifically been written for those individuals who have been given an ITIL project to sponsor or run and are now wondering what they have gotten themselves into!

Service Catalog Certification: At Pink we are proud to have participated in the development of the new Service Catalog certification and the following link will take you to a short video clip where I am interviewed as part of this new certification launch.  http://www.uk.kaliinteractive.com/

Well onward and upward my friends as we power though November and into December!

Troy’s Thoughts What Are yours?

If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. The more things you do, the more you can do. ~Lucille Ball

One Size Fits All Is Not A Viable Strategy For Footwear or Leadership!

A consistent observation one can make about human nature is that we tend to lean heavily on what we know works for us and avoid areas where we are less sure or comfortable. Of course there are those rare individuals that throw caution to the wind, damm the torpedoes and throw themselves at new challenges, methods and approaches without blinking an eye.

However for most of us, our personalities, culture, environment and past experiences shape how we look at life and become the filter by which we make decisions and take on new tasks. Each of these elements contribute to and mold a person’s primary leadership style or at least the default way we try to influence the behaviours of others.

The challenge with this concept is that our default leadership style while effective in certain circumstances will totally backfire in others and unless we recognize this challenge the project or opportunity you have been asked to take on will have a limited chance of success and you may not even realize why.

This leadership challenge is the basis of Ken Blanchard’s model called “Situational Leadership” The premiss of Blanchard’s model is that at various points in a team’s evolution a different type of leadership approach is required.

This article will provide an example of this model in light of an IT Service Management Transformation project.

First lets start with a few Definitions from Situational Leadership:

• Leadership - A process by which a person works to influence others; working with people to accomplish their goals and the goals of the organization
• Leadership Style – a pattern of behaviours you use with others as perceived by them
• Directive Behaviour – Telling rather than asking, focused on structure, goal setting, organizing and asking others to follow
• Supportive Behaviour – Enabling others, focused on taking time to explain and facilitate the learning and growth or your teams

Four Leadership Styles:

1. Directing – high directive, low supportive behaviours
2. Coaching – high directive, high supportive behaviours
3. Supporting – low directive, high supportive behaviours
4. Delegating – low directive, low supportive behaviours

• Enthusiasm - The level of openness and excitement a person has for a task or responsibility
• Capability - The level of skill, competency, history and experience a person has for a specific task or responsibility

The ITSM Application:

Ok now that we have the basic definitions out of the way let me share with you the model and how it applies to transformation projects and specifically ITSM initiatives.

The Story: You have been asked to take on an ITSM Improvement Project and and been provided with a team of people to participate in the process design and tool configuration work. You have had an in-house training session (hopefully provided by Pink ) and now everyone is on the same page about what ITSM is all about and the basic elements of a specific process such as Incident or Change Management. Though they have taken the ITIL class they still don’t have the practical experience of ever attempting a project such as this. They know enough to be “Enthusiastic Beginners” about the task but not much more. At this point they think that given a few weeks designing the process and configuring the tool they will all be done and happily return to the lives they knew before. Your team naively believes this should be a walk in the park and maybe even a welcome break from their routine work. At this point their enthusiasm is high but their capability is low.

However, a few weeks head down in a conference room facing both passive and active resistance to changing anything let alone adopting this foreign concept of common process begins to take the shine off their naivety. They now begin to understand that there is a lot more that has to be done other than documenting processes and implementing tools. They now begin to see that what they have been assigned to is a transformation project targeting the heart of the current IT culture and accepted values and beliefs. What at first looked like an interesting project now looks almost impossible and they still don’t really know how to get it done. Your enthusiastic team now have become ”Disillusioned Learners” and start looking for ways to transfer out of their current tour of duty.

When it becomes apparent that they are in this for the long haul they begin to roll up their sleeves and begin learning the trade of ITSM improvement projects. Some things they intuit, others they get outside help for and some things they learn the hard way by making mistakes and having to re-do it the right way. Slowly but surely the team begins to regain some of their initial enthusiasm as they see successes and their capability for certain tasks grow. However give them a new hurtle to cross which they have not seen before and they quickly revert to the previous stage. Your team has now become “Capable But Cautious and will veer up and down on the enthusiasm and capability scale depending what you have asked them to do and their percieved ability to achieve the specific task or responsibility.

Eventually if you have been able to sustain the initiative and keep a hold of your team members you will have a battle weary but hardened set of process improvement veterans who have come out the other side of your ITIL project as survivors with many lessons learned and the scars to show for it. That being said they now are subject matter experts on the specific ITIL process you have adopted and have learned the skills required to navigate the transformation jungle. They in essence have become change agents and process advocates and can now be viewed as ”Self-Reliant Achievers” capable of being told to head in a certain direction and take that hill while leading others over the perilous terrain.

Applying The Right Leadership Style To The Right Stage

The key message of Situational Leadership is that you need to apply the right leadership style at each stage of your team evolution through each of these distinct development phases. Apply the wrong style at the wrong time at your peril if not the project’s likelihood of success.

For example if you naturally have a delegation approach to leadership. “They are professionals and should be able to figure this out on their own” and you apply this to a team that is at a stage 1 or 2 then they will simply stand there looking at you with a lost look in their eyes. I knew a consultant like that once, the guy’s first meeting with a new client was to sit them in a circle and ask what they wanted out of a service catalog and how they though a service catalog should look and function. The results of that meeting let alone the project was to be expected.

For a early development stages you need to be directive, giving clear directions and “A-B-C” steps for the team to move. At this point they don’t know what they don’t know.

Once they hit stage 2 now you still need to directive but also need to turn up the empathy putting your arm around their shoulder as their counsellor and tell them that it really is possible to get there from here laying out clearly the step by step approach the task will be accomplished.  Pointing at the other organizations that have overcome the challenges and been successful. (conferences and trade shows are great for this).

Eventually they begin to gain individual capabilities and increased enthusiasm.  At this point you need to be the sports coach operating from the side lines calling the general direction of the play but leaving the actual means to execute in the hands of your team members. They begin to charge off and getting things done even when not specifically directed to.  That being said there will still be points where they hit new tasks and you will have to revert to a supportive model.

Finally once they have each been through the first three stages and they are the hardened and grizzled veterans you can use the delegation model of leadership knowing that you just need to set the direction and your team will blaze the way forward while you focus on other areas. At this stage if you use directive leadership your team will be resentful of what they perceive as lack of trust or micro management. Try being supportive and they will think you condescending and overly concerned with the details.

The key point of this article is that while each of us will have a default leadership style that comes naturally to us based on our personalities and history we need to recognize the situation we are dealing with and learn to apply different styles at different times of our team’s evolution.

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

“A leader who confines his role to his people’s experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people’s experience runs the risk of not being understood.”
- Henry A. Kissinger

Change Is A Process With A Beginning A Middle And End and A New Beginning!

The longer I work in the field of IT Service Management the more I understand that the single most important contributor towards the success of an ITIL project is the act of facilitating and managing the necessary changes of belief, values and actions that are required to adopt ITSM principles. This is the 2nd in a series of 3 articles that focuses on the primary goal of transformation versus focusing on such things as documenting ITIL processes and configuring tools. (Both necessary enablers but not the goal itself).

For more on this concept please read: Establishing Or Assessing an ITSM Program

While the concept of Service versus Technology Management is the compass providing direction and the ITIL process framework is the map providing the journey context and detail we still need to motivate, fuel and move the people to begin and continue on the journey. You can invest in ITIL geography lessons (ITIL certification classes) and that helps to abate the anxiety of the unknown shores and shoals. You can even invest in printed process maps and transportation in the form of ITSM tools to get you to your destination faster and more efficiently.

However you still need to get people to buy the ticket, board the mode of transportation and begin the journey that will likely take them the rest of their IT careers since Service Management is more about a way of life versus a fixed destination. So ultimately the challenge is to get your people off the comfortable couch of now, move out their door of the present and start towards a new normal. All of this new activity represents a departure from the status quo and often results in a grieving process for what has been left behind even when their current situation was not all positive your people are used to it and they like or at least are comfortable with what they are used to!!

Looking at change as a grieving process is not a new concept but one I would like to revisit with the readers of this blog.

The following model comes from the research of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and was originally developed to help understand the stages of grief people transition through as they cope with the loss of a family member or loved one. The interesting thing is that this same model can be applied directly to understanding the emotional state of the people you are guiding through the transformational change and who experience very real emotions of anger, loss, depression through to the eventual acceptance and integration of the change. 

Understanding The Grieving Process and Its Application To ITSM Transformation Projects:

Denial: When you first start your ITSM awareness activities many people don’t believe you are really serious and that what you are telling them about will “actually” ever happen. They have seen these quality programs come and go many times and very rarely have they actually amounted to much. They look at your ITIL project as just another set of acronyms that will come and go in time without changing their lives in any significant way. So the people you invite to your town hall meetings, lunch and learns, process design workshops nod and smile enjoy your pizza and eat your coffee and donuts without any real sign of outward aggravation assuming that your effort will drown under the organizational complexities and crash into the political boundaries.

Anger: However this good will soon vanishes for many people when they realize that you are actually serious about the changes you are proposing and they see Senior Management commitment start moving beyond just standing up in a meeting to say they endorse this new idea. At this point many people who were initially positive go into self protection mode and show real anger at what they see as changes to their current existence, new levels of accountability and potential loss of power and prestige. It is at this stage of the grieving process you can expect people to demonstrate either very active or passive resistance hoping to kill the project under the weight of lethargy.

Negotiation: Realizing that their direct attacks or indirect attempts to subvert the change are not working the people going through the process now begin to barter and negotiate a middle ground where they are able to maintain some level of the autonomy, influence, and their current ways of doing things.  The cry “but we are different”, “I will do this one thing but I will never go that far!” They reengage with the change program but not because they are now supporters of the change but primarily to preserve some level of their current state believing it is better to be at the bargaining table rather than be left out of the negotiation process.

DIP: The dip represents the person’s or organization’s acceptance of the change as inevitable, inescapable and as something to be stoically endured but hated. Don’t expect them to be happy about the change, they will often now attend you meetings grudgingly providing input and feedback but they largely resent the change as something they have no further power (at the moment) to avoid but are required to support.

Exploring Possibilities: The time spent in the dip of depression will largely depend on how long it takes for the individuals and groups to begin realizing personal benefits from the change. At some point the hope is that the realization of the change will have a positive impact which is recognized by those going through the transformation which in turns begins to slowly turn the attitude from negative resentment into positive possibilities. The earlier these benefits are seen and experienced the better which of course is a strong argument to look for quick wins that can be put into place with speed before the full activities are of the change are completed.

Integration: There comes a point in all transformations when the changes that have been put in place are no longer seen as new, nor are they seen as specifically positive or negative but simply as the way things are done. At this point the transformation will have become integrated into the daily lives, routines of the people and it will be hard to consider going back to a previous state. Consider that all new things that transform society go through this trend. At some point Microwaves and Digital Cameras are just part of the landscape and it becomes difficult and even silly to consider going back to processed film except for specialized applications. The world has simply moved on and is set for the next transformation and the next beginning.

For those of us who have been through ITIL projects this curve is a familiar experience, one that takes time and to some degree re-starts for each new initiative undertaken based on the amount of change required. A key to successfully navigating this cycle of grief and acceptance is understanding it is normal, to be expected and planned for. Also consider that your style of leadership will need to change depending on where people are in the grieving process. Use the wrong messaging or leadership style at the wrong time and you could potentially pour gas on the fire and loose everything up in smoke.  Ken Blanchard’s model of “Situational Leadership” provides wisdom for us all to apply during these times of change.

My next post will describe Blanchard’s model and why and when to use the four styles of leadership (Directive, Supportive, Coaching, Delegation) during a transformation project

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

“To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.” ~ Erich Fromm

The Road To IT Service Management Has Several Cultural Shifts

A few months back I wrote an article called the “Incident, Problem, Change Dance” which has as its central premise the claim that while ITIL is now over 20 years old most organizations have struggled to adopt Service Management best practices beyond a few of the operational and service transition processes.

This article and screencast is focused on providing an explanation for this interesting fact and is based on an observation that demonstrates that there are significant cultural and governance shifts that must first occur before and organization is ready to successfully to adopt certain practices.

For several years I have spoken and written about an ITIL adoption roadmap based on the logical sequencing of process and data dependancies. For those who are interested you can find some of my writings on this subject on a series of blog posts starting with: ITIL Implementation Roadmap. However, it is my personal experience and belief that logic alone is not adequate for establishing an ITIL roadmap. To fully develop an ITIL adoption strategy the cultural readiness of an organization must be taken into account. Also related to this understanding is the discussion of whether you believe IT needs to be “aligned” or “integrated” with the business organization.

In the spirit of switching media formats from time to time I have prepared a short Screencast on my thoughts.

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours

“If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.  ~Rita Mae Brown

A Health Check For ITSM Program Success

IT projects do not have a great track record of success. Various studies published by the Standish Group, KPMG or Robbins-Gioia all conclude that the likelihood of IT projects delivering on their promised value proposition is no higher than 54%. 

At Pink Elephant our experience shows us that IT Service Management projects falter at even higher rates due to their high dependency on organizational and behavioral change and their tendency to be misunderstood, underestimated and under-managed.

The tangible tasks of creating process documents, and configuring service management tools is the easy part and is not by the way the goal of a service management project. The primary risk to ITIL project success is the political and cultural ability to deploy the process and policy changes across the non-aligned, separately managed IT towers and technology silos that make up a typical IT organization. Without the ability to drive real change across these political and often external boundaries the project returns almost no value and the money spent on process design and tools is a wasted investment.

To avoid this trend we need more than our best intentions. The following lessons learned from failed projects can help us open our minds to managing risks and planning to succeed rather than become yet another statistic

• IT Service Management/ITIL projects are actually transformation programs requiring significant shifts in behavior and cultural change across multiple groups.
• Process documentation is not worth the paper it is printed on without the ability and will to enforce its use.
• An IT Service Management tool alone will never enforce new behaviors or best practices.
• Most organizations fail at their initial process improvement efforts by focusing on the technology or tool elements of the project and underestimating the effort required to address the softer people and governance issues brought by the transformation effort.
• Most projects reveal clear, early warning signs that the project is at risk but these signs are missed, ignored or not managed.

Many organizations that undertake programs to improve their IT Service Management processes and service delivery capabilities are frustrated by a general lack of results or the overriding failure to achieve their ambitious goals. 

Much of that frustration can be directly attributed to a single, pervading factor:

Leadership’s inability or unwillingness to understand that adopting service management concepts and processes within traditional siloed focused IT organizations means some degree of change to a large part of the current function’s structures, work practice, values, and measurement systems.

Certainly these two elements are necessary and even critical but they are still only enablers - not the goal itself.

• Documenting processes is a necessary step due to a quirk of human nature that believes that unless a practice is written down and enforced it remains un-defined and open to argument and interpretation.
• The Service Management tool certainly contributes to the goal by lifting the process from paper and making it tangible, visible, measureable and hopefully more efficient. (Though not always the case)

Building Blocks for ITSM Programs
When developing a transformation strategy in an ITSM project or improvement effort it is necessary to ensure that your plan (or the consulting proposal you are evaluating) takes into account all of these core elements:

1. 1) An ITSM transformation program must include:
1. Governance for the Project and Ongoing Process
2. People (awareness, communication, and training)
3. Process (design, feedback, documentation and approval)
4. Technology (selection, configuration, testing and ongoing management)
2. That ITSM improvement opportunities (big or small) must be run as a formal project with IT executive support and involvement to gain acceptance across the various functions that will need to participate and comply.
3. The drivers for change need to be grounded in the business:
1. Well defined and mapped back to a strategic business direction or decision
2. Understood and communicated to ensure a shared sense of urgency and buy in to the project objectives
3. Requirements and designs are driven by and tested against the change drivers
4. The people participating directly and indirectly in both the project and ongoing process will be evaluated based on their contribution to the development, deployment and ongoing execution of the new practices and processes.

The key to managing successful ITSM programs is understanding the building blocks to success!

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

“It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes (tools and process documentation)” ~Douglas Adams with my artistic add

A Need Will Always Find A Way!

From the earliest days of speaking and teaching about ITIL around the world a common question has always been asked of the bright-eyed ITIL champion, trainer or consultant.

“That’s really interesting but what tools support this model?”

It’s not surprising really! Apart from the fact that we who work in IT are generally enamored with our gadgets and technologies, there really is no getting away from the very real need for integrated IT Management tools. Lets face it, to even get close to the level of process integration, measurement and workflow that ITIL processes hint at you need some serious automation.

It is for this very reason that 10 years ago Pink Elephant developed an independent ITIL software assessment method called PinkVERIFY, which owes its birth and invention to necessity.  Simply put – PinkVERIFY does two things:

1. Describes the requirements for tools to support good IT service management, on a process-by-process basis.
2. Lists tools we have “verified” to meet those requirements for each process.

However it was not our initial desire to tread this path alone, we first approached both the OGC and ITSMF about providing this service but at that time they showed no interest. David Ratcliffe describes the drivers and history well in his blog post “Why PinkVERIFY?”

For the last decade it has been a lonely road and as you can imagine we have received our fair share of praise and critique from our advocates and detractors but a key point is that we continued to develop PinkVERIFY, always publishing everything openly so that anyone could see how the method worked and suggest improvements.  The value of PinkVERIFY is attested by the fact that today we have over 30 IT management vendors, who have voluntarily submitted their tools for “verification”; and presence on the PinkVERIFY list has become an essential requirement for tools to make the short-list on many organizations RFPs.

However as ITIL itself has matured over the last 20 years the value of what PinkVERIFY promises has now been acknowledged by the bodies that govern the ITIL framework. The big news is that on May 1st 2009 the OGC launched a program to officially recognize that there’s value in assigning an “ITIL badge” to software assessment services such as PinkVERIFY. Note that OGC has NOT developed a software assessment service itself, but has simply established criteria and requirements for how software assessments should be done by organizations which offer this service. (This is exactly how the “official” ITIL education programs are promoted – OGC sets standards and training organizations apply to be accredited to deliver programs that meet those standards). So, organizations, like Pink, who have an interest in conducting software assessments for IT Management tools can now apply to be officially recognized as licensed assessors under this new software accreditation scheme and the vendor and practitioner communities can then have confidence that OGC has undertaken some diligence on their behalf, ensuring that the software assessment scheme has some merit.

Well, we always knew that PinkVERIFY was useful – the vendors and practitioners have been telling us so for over 10 years! – but it will be nice to also have OGC’s blessing too, and so Pink Elephant has submitted an application to OGC to become accredited under the new software assessment scheme. I look forward to posting again in a few weeks with an announcement that PinkVERIFY has been recognized by OGC and that Pink Elephant has become a Licensed Software Assessor.

ITIL Software Scheme

1st May 2009, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, UK… The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) are announcing The ITIL® Software Scheme - a new software endorsement scheme which allows software tool vendors to submit their ITIL based software tools for assessment to a Licensed Software Assessor....

In order to become a Licensed Software Assessor, an organisation must successfully pass an audit. They can then assess tools and forward recommendations to The APM Group. Licensed Software Assessors must meet eligibility criteria and include certain core assessment criteria within their assessment models.  They are monitored to ensure they are working to standards set by OGC. 

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

“Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.” Arnold H. Glasgow

“The Service Catalog - Cornerstone of IT Service Management”

Having just landed from our 3 week PinkPERSPECTIVE tour (and boy my arms are tired) I would like to comment about the exciting news on the ITIL education front that broke on Monday of this week.

Since the launch of the ITIL v3 certification model two years ago we have heard of the coming introduction of accredited course offerings recognized by the owners of ITIL as “complementary guidance.” The concept of recognized and accredited courses that provide specific and targeted knowledge on key subjects makes a lot of sense for individuals who have a specific role to play within an IT Service Management context or are tasked with the design and deployment of a focused element of ITSM practices.

It seems fitting and right that one of the first courses to be recognized under this new model would focus on the service catalog which stands at the heart of any IT Service Management program. Pink is proud to be a part of the group of companies that participated in the development and launch of this new certification announced by APMG this week.

As an organization we have been teaching a course on the Service Catalog for several years. ITIL Practitioner: How To Define & Implement A Service Catalog According To ITIL Best Practices based on ITIL and a book on the subject I co-wrote with Rodrgio Flores and Bill Fine of newScale. “Defining IT Success Through The Service Catalog”

As lead of our consulting practice I know that this subject is the most frequently requested service we get ask to help organizations with in 2009 so the timing is right for an ITIL accredited course on this important subject.

Here is a part of the Press Release from APMG’s Website:

Link: APMG-International to launch new Complementary Qualification

15 June 2009, APMG-International, High Wycombe, UK announces the release of a Qualification for Service Catalogue. The qualification initiated by market leaders newScale, headquartered in San Francisco and Pink Elephant in Toronto, Canada, has been developed over the last several months and is the second complimentary qualification for the ITIL Qualification Portfolio.

The Service Catalogue qualification was subject to independent review and scrutiny by the International Qualifications Committee of itSMF International, the leading Service Management movement with 52 different Chapters.

Colin Rudd, itSMFI Director of Professional Qualifications and Certifications said, “The importance of an accurate Service Catalogue cannot be underestimated. Candidates can now gain a recognized qualification in this discipline whilst working towards their ITIL Expert Certification.”

Service Catalogue is a new qualification that looks at new ways to control demand, publish and track service pricing and cost, and automate service request management and fulfilment. Service Catalogue also looks at ways to help reduce cycle time. Implementing workflow can reduce the time it takes to fulfil services, saving numerous hours per request. Organizations can thus reallocate precious staff time to more strategic initiatives.

Rodrigo Flores, CTO and Founder of newScale says “The Service Catalogue is the engine that drives IT Service Management and we are delighted to support the launch of a global certification programme establishing professional credential for this core process. Based on our experience, organisations are saving millions of dollars a year through effective Service Catalogue and this will be critical for organisations as we move out of recession.”

AVP of Product Strategy at Pink Elephant, Troy DuMoulin says, “Having spent many years teaching and assisting organizations in adopting IT Service Management, we’re pleased to be associated with the launch of this new certification. Our experience and client feedback confirms that the Service Catalogue is the cornerstone of any ITIL initiative. We’re encouraged by this exciting development in the professionalism of Service Management.”

Richard Pharro, CEO of APM Group says, “We are thrilled to have been chosen by newScale and PINK to take over the Service Catalogue Certification and to create an international standard for one of the key tools in service management.”

Sharon Taylor, ITIL V3 Chief Examiner says, “qualifications which help further promote specialized knowledge from within ITIL practices will be a welcomed addition to the overall Qualification Scheme. We are pleased to continue to offer more choices for ITIL certification.”

To see Pink’s Press Release with more detail around the certification and the number of credits awarded to the new certification visit our site: Pink Elephant Press Release

These are exciting times and I am looking forward to seeing other key topics recognized in the ITIL model for Complementary Guidance.

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

”Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them. ~Henry Steele Commager”

“Changes In the Wind For the ITSM Tool Community”

As I prepare to join my fellow Pinkers on this years multi-city PinkPERSPECTIVE Roadshow, my thoughts wander to the many technology changes that are impacting the collective lives of those of us who are involved in IT Service Management. Aside from the obvious impact of the economic climate there are several disruptive technologies that are changing the rules of the game we have known until now.

The Impact of Software As A Service: (Sometimes it make sense to rent versus own)

The growing popularity of Software As A Service (SaaS) models and the maturing of the concept of Cloud Computing as an alternative model for purchasing IT Services is driving many changes in the options available to ITIL project managers looking for an ITSM solution. Whether it is a short term or long term strategy SaaS has many compelling arguments to consider such as speed to implement, limited capital investment in infrastructure, predictability in costs, etc..

In the ITSM Tool space vendors such as Service-Now have pioneered this model and many of their traditional client server based competitors are now following suit by offering their tools in a hosted model. This is particularly true of those tools which are based on Web and browser technologies versus a traditional installed client model. I have been watching Service-Now’s development with interest over the last few years as they have grown their client base with many impressive wins and have driven change in the rest of the ITSM Tool space with an innovative solution that has been developed based on ITIL best practices from day 1. In a recent article posted by Rhett Glauser “An expensive compliment from a friend” Rhett describes Service-Now’s challenges with and thoughts on the question of Tool Certification and their upcoming engagement with our PinkVERIFY service.

The Growing Popularity of Living In The Clouds

On a related topic my friend Rodrigo Flores of NewScale has launched a new blog called “Cloud Front Office” where he discusses the concepts of public and private cloud computing strategies as a powerful tool to support the rapid deployment and provisioning of IT services in a virtual environment. The concept of Cloud Computing combined with SaaS has been gaining in popularity and maturity for several years. With the emergence of private clouds where you can contract with a provider to create a Cloud environment within the safety and security of your own IT walls many of the last resistance factors are quickly fading away. When the average metric for a hosting service is around 12 cents a CPU hour and the added pressure of not having the same latitude as in years past to spend on IT infrastructure without constraints, the concept of turning to cloud based solutions for both development and production environments is coming of age.

The Emergence of Open Source ITSM Tools

One of my personal rants for the past several years as been about the lack of movement towards an open data model or architecture for ITSM tools. We have had the CMDB Consortium around for years, The World Wide Web Consortium (W3) has been working on a Service Modeling Language (SML), and recently another group was formed to develop a standard Service Portfolio and Catalog Language (SPACL).  Lots of action but little movement if you know what I mean! In my view this is largely due to a general lack of an Open-source tool community in the ITSM space. It is my perspective that only when the vendor community is faced with a strong open alternative will they move to adopt open standards. At our conference in February I was delivering this traditional cry of frustration when I was approached by a person claiming to have worked on the development of one of the first Open Source ITSM Tools sets. OTRS stands for Open source Ticket Request System and is available for free for those who are of a mind to try their hand at its configuration. I realize it is early days in this category but it is nice to see the emergence of Open Source alternatives.

We plan to talk about these interesting developments at our PinkPERSPECTIVE events over the next two weeks and look forward to dialoging with those of you whom I meet on our 8 City Tour.

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

”Disruptive technologies: These are wild and unexpected technological breakthroughs that require corporations to radically rethink their very existence.” ~Christensen

When Defining IT Service Start From A Top Down Perspective

Knowing where to start is half the battle and when it comes to defining IT services it is even more important. One of the frequently asked questions I hear when talking to people about defining IT Services in preparation for a service catalog project is “Where do I start”?

Left to our own devices we will often start with what we know best, “Technology” and struggle to articulate IT services from a bottom up approach. The challenge with this approach is that very rarely if never will a service be limited to a specific technology or component. Even a basic IT Service Offering such as Desktop Productivity which is usually manifested to the customer as a desktop or laptop computer is not solely comprised up of just the laptop itself. As the last blog post establishes any service is usually a combination of service elements (intangible) and products (tangible).  The tangible laptop product is only one component of the Desktop Productivity service which has bundled into it other key service elements such as security, virus management, image management, service desk support, etc.. This is the reason that the laptop down at the local Big Box technology store costs only $400.00 while your laptop has a unit cost of $1800.00.

To mix things up a bit I have put together podcast on the Service Definition Process which represents a summary of one of the sections out of the Pink Elephant book “Defining IT Success Through The Service Catalog”

In summary when defining IT Services break away from the mode of starting with technology and first seek to understand the business you support.

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

“The bird that would soar above the plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. “ ~ Douglas Adams

I Say Apple you Say Orange - not exactly the same thing but they are both fruit.

The debate over terminology rings on as the IT Service industry grapples with an agreement of terms and the gradual settling on a Lingua Franca. One such dialog that I and my follow Pinkers have been engaged with more than once is the difference between the concept of an IT Product versus Service. This debate is further heated due to the fact that many organizations have people whose title includes the word product (e.g.: Product Manager, Product Analysts).

With the release of ITIL V3 and its focus on the Service Lifecycle, this clarity has not been improved, with some books such as Service Strategy using the word ‘Product’ and others (almost every other book) focusing on the concept of an IT Service. Sadly, the official ITIL glossary does not clarify the confusion, since it uses the term multiple times but neglects to shed any light on the definition of what a product is versus a service.

Some may argue (which they do) that a product and service are synonymous and should be considered interchangeable as expressions of what IT delivers to its customers (users, business unit, other IT groups and the external consumer). However, I am uneasy with this approach and unsatisfied with this vague answer. Since the ITIL books do not shed light on this confusion of terms we need to look at other sources for this particular question.

We don’t have to go far for clarity on these concepts. You can reference marketing and product management text books if you wish, but I particularly like the definitions found in a book titled “Reaching The Goal” by John Arther Ricketts (IBM) Theory of Constraints for Services Organizations

The overall premise of this book is how to apply the concept of Goldratt’s Theory Of Constraints (TOC) to IT Services and Processes, which is a subject worth its own discourse that I have written on in the past:
The Theory Of Constraints and Continual Improvement

I have taken the liberty to quote a few choice paragraphs from John’s book for your consideration. Also, for the purposes of this post, substitute “products” for “goods” in the first paragraph. I trust you will find them as useful as I have. Thank you John for your wisdom here.

“Basic differences between goods (products) and services are easy to see: Goods (products) are tangible and can be consumed now or later, while services are intangible and cannot be produced in advance. Of course, many purchases consist of a mix of goods (products) and services. Restaurants are roughly balanced. Gasoline purchases are 99 percent goods if you count the occasional once-over with a squeegee as a service. Airline flights are 99 percent services if you count refreshments as goods (products). So pure goods (products) and pure services are just end points on a continuum of possibilities.”

As a services enterprise moves from services as available to services on demand, many things have to change, including the way people perform their jobs. To appreciate roles, however, it’s helpful to understand a few other terms:

• Project— A set of finite-duration tasks that must be performed in a specified sequence to produce a desired result within a prescribed time and budget, such as building an information system.
• Deliverable— Things created by projects, such as consulting reports or computer software.
• Process— A set of activities performed continuously or on a frequently recurring schedule over an indefinite period, such as preparing paychecks.
• Service Level— The results of a process, such as its cycle time, quality, and cost.
• Client— A customer of a service provider.
• Solution— A combination of products and services that solve a client’s problem.
• Engagement— An agreement (contract) between a client and service provider to deliver solutions.
• Practice— A unit within the service provider that specializes in delivering particular solutions or serving particular clients.

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

One fundamental difference between industry and services is that services cannot start until the customer arrives. Of course, some preparations can be made without a customer, but the service itself can’t. For example, a restaurant can prepare certain foods in advance, and perhaps even distribute dishes to multiple venues from a central kitchen, but the core service doesn’t start until a hungry customer shows up. This contrasts with industry, where many workers rarely if ever meet consumers of their products.

Another difference concerns inventory. In industry, inventory issues are pervasive: Figuring out the right amount of raw material inventory to hold, the right amount of finished goods inventory to manufacture, and where it should be distributed are core problems. In contrast, there can be no inventory of completed services because as soon as there’s something to ship, it’s more like a product than a service. For example, when a manufactured product breaks under warranty, manufacturers often prefer to exchange it for a remanufactured unit instead of performing a repair service because such services require different management. Even when manufacturers do offer repair services, those services may actually be provided by subcontractors, business partners, or a separately managed services unit within the manufacturer’s enterprise.

A third difference between industry and some services is less often discussed: customization. In industry, customization of products makes it harder to manage constraints, so a preferred TOC strategy is to serve as many distinct market segments as possible with as few product variations as possible. Many services, such as health care and education, also benefit from standardization for constraint management and other purposes, such as quality control.

On the other hand, Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services (PSTS) are always customized to some degree. When a client engages an advertising firm to devise a new campaign, hires a research firm to conduct a scientific study, or utilizes an information technology services firm to build a website, it’s counting on those service providers to meet its unique requirements. So at the very least, the deliverables have be different from previous deliverables. But the projects or processes the service providers use to produce those deliverables often have to be customized, too. This customization makes it hard for service providers to find one constraint, marshal the nonconstraints around it, and keep the constraint from floating. This has largely kept TOC out of PSTS.

For me John’s approach to the concept of Product and Services provides clarity around two terms which are integral to understanding and applying the principles of Service Management, since what we provide to our customers is a solution which is a mix of products and services. Understanding this helps us to better define and publish IT’s value proposition.

For those of of you who are fans of the Theory Of Constraints or are looking for an interesting way to evaluate and measure the delivery of IT Services at a very detailed level I recommend John’s book, which can be purchased on Amazon. 

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

”Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” ~Chinese Proverbs

The Long Sustained Road To Success

Another successful Pink ITSM conference is now a few weeks behind us but we are already hard at work developing the schedule for next year’s event. One of the sessions that I am looking forward to delivering next year is a review and reflection on the well known business book “Good To Great” by Jim Collins.  Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap...And Others Don’t

It seems like the message is already getting out there since I received an excellent question in my inbox the other day:

“Troy, I was checking out the Pink 2010 conference website and saw you were doing a session on “Good to Great.” I would agree the book has some good concepts, but was curious how you would address the authors selection of Circuit City as one of the key companies, considering that Circuit City no longer exists. It would certainly contradict his “Build to Last” concept.

Just looking for your thoughts.

Rob”

Rob you ask a fair question and here is a considered response based on the opportunities I have had to work with many organization on their ITSM journey over the last 12 years. The most difficult challenge that companies face over the long haul is the ability to sustain momentum for their initiatives. I have seen time and time again that something well started falters over time based on leadership changes (which changes culture and values) or leadership focus. The principal of sustainability is a major deliverable of governance that is often lacking in many companies.

I recently wrote blog post on this very subject: 7 Enablers for ITSM Expanded - Program Momentum

In order to sustain “greatness”, the principles/best practices discussed in the books need to be implemented over and over again (Continuous Improvement and Process Maturity are key to ongoing success). The reason Circuit City (and a couple of others in Collins’ book like Fannie Mae) ran into major trouble is they STOPPED practicing the principles that made them “great”.

I think what his book (and other best practice business books – including ITIL) imply is that there are some principles that can help a company/department succeed, but future success is dependent on the condition that these companies/departments continue to follow the same practices and that they implement continuous improvement best practices.

I have seen this played out time and again in organizations that have adopted IT Service Management. They literally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars if not more on their goals only to abandon their objectives due to a shift in leadership and or leadership values. I suppose the average CIO retention rate in North America of 18 months does not help this challenge much.

So perhaps companies like Circuit City forgot their own recipe of success, or took some risks that were not in line with their principles. We need to remember that companies/departments are constantly evolving and therefore liable to change their leadership/personality/culture/vision that got them to the place they were before they changed. The Home Depot case study is a prime example of this culture switch. Initially a family oriented culture established by the founders of the company, but very different now with the introduction of new leadership with very different values.

Best selling business books provide examples of organizations at a point in time. Look at all the books that reflect on GE under Jack Welch’s leadership but very little is written about that organization today if you catch my meaning. If you can manage to replicate the philosophy of what made an organization great in your business/department and then sustain it with the good old Dr. Deming’s (Plan, Do Check, Act) circle of continual improvement a company has a better chance at “Long Term” success.

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

“Leadership is the wise use of power. Power is the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it.” Warren G. Bennis

You Can Only Afford Bad or No Processes When You Have Lots of Cash!

A couple of years ago during the height of the Dot-com tech bubble I remember an interesting conversation I had with a Sr. Manager of an online investment firm. We were discussing (I was selling) the need for formal and repeatable processes for IT Management in light of the obvious dependency of their business model on robust, secure and reliable IT services. Thinking that this gentleman of all people should understand this requirement in that millions of dollars of financial transactions a day were supported by the services he managed I expected him to readily agree with a hearty Amen.

However, to my surprise he looked me in the eye and said “We don’t have time or money for bureaucracy. We have built our IT systems with plenty of excess capacity and with fail over redundancy at all points of potential failure.” It was at that moment in my career that I realized that an organization can buy themselves protection/insurance from bad or total lack of process!

Over the years I have seen this fact represented in many ways:

• Multiple Service Desks all with their own tools and separate processes
• Massive amounts of wasted server capacity due to a lack of capacity and demand management
• Redundant and duplicate IT Management tools being purchased by various IT departments in the same organization
• Shadow IT groups and stealth data centers being built by “independent” parts of the business
• Multiple Change Management Processes due to political boundaries
• A willingness to solve the same incidents 1000’s of times without looking at the root of the problem
• Losing track of 10’s of thousands of dollars of IT assets due to poor tracking controls and inventory processes
• Supplier contracts expiring without knowledge until an incident occurs
• A willingness to supply multiple / duplicate versions of the same services
• The loss of massive amounts of business productivity due to Incident tickets which disappear into the IT back office black hole until someone shouts loud enough
• The total lack of ability to provide visibility into the cost of an IT Service
• The list goes on.......

The sad truth of the matter is that when times are good we don’t really look at waste in the same way. The concept of “Green” only becomes important when we run out of the resources we have taken for granted. History shows us that during times of duress and general lack of disposable funds we look hard at where we can trim the fat and find inefficiencies. (We don’t have to look too far)

We have only to look back at the last deep recession to see the very same pattern. Many of the readers of this blog may remember when quality was the buzzword of the day in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Significant effort was put into quality initiatives and the study of the Japanese manufacturing model that was eating the lunch of the US Auto and Electronics industry. (Another déjà vu)

Many organizations established quality/efficiency departments and Tiger Teams to address the issues facing the failing economy and days of double digit interest rates. So where was IT during this time of cost cutting and head count reduction? We were safely ensconced in the glass room with our lab coats and pocket protectors secure in the knowledge that we represented the future hope of the business. At this point in our history IT controls and processes were deeply entrenched and no one touched the mainframe without filling out paper work in triplicate.  Costs were clearly understood and visible to all concerned.

Of course it was shortly after this that we saw the rise of the distributed IT empire when everyone and anyone could buy their own mini-mainframes (servers) and personal computers. With this new found freedom from the glass room culture went most of the controls and processes. The IT buying spree reached its pinnacle in 1999 with the Y2K party and with the dawn of the new century the economy got even stronger. Throughout the last two decades we have continued to build, buy and hire without strong governance structures, long term plans or financial goals other than “spend your budget or else you won’t get as much next year.”

Now however we have come full circle, resources are scarce and cost savings is once again the primary topic around the office water cooler. Perhaps it is time to realize that we can no longer afford excess capacity, redundancy and inefficient processes. If this is true, I predict a rise of interest in quality, Continual Service Improvement and a realization that going “Green” also means reducing waste in delivering IT services and the processes that are critical for their efficient delivery.

For a related article on this topic take a look at the post: Balancing Process Formality With Innovation

Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?

”Waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality, nothing will do, and with them everything.” ~ Benjamin Franklin