ITIL Blog - Featuring ITIL Training and Online ITIL Resources

Double Your Income Doing What You Love

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Goal planning and the achievement of goals has been written about by thousands of authors over the last few years - but never has 'achievement' been more important than in today's economic and business climate.

As markets continue to mature and global competition grows more fierce the need for every individual to contribute, and be able to measure their contribution, is critical.

One of my favourite ITIL books (if pushed) remains the now fairly rare volume called, "Planning To Implement Service Management".

You may remember this was the ITIL V2 green book. Inside we were introduced to a core theme of ITIL which was carried forwards into ITIL V3 (and the ITIL Foundation Training) which was:

• What is the vision?
• Where are we now?
• Where do we want to be?
• How do we get where we want to be?
• How do we check our milestones have been reached?
• How do we keep the momentum going?

This core theme is central to the whole ITIL V3 Continual Service Improvement book.

This 6 step model for CSI has been taught, learnt and instilled in many of us over the last 10 years in our ITIL Training.

The problem is that, however useful we find this model, the core ITIL texts do not have the bandwidth or appetite to take a deeper dive and examine how we, as human beings with aspirations, strenghts, talents and limited resources at our disposal can best leverage and adapt underpinning elements of the model for our own personal use.

That's a bit of a long way of saying - how can "I" personally leverage this model, from my own perspective and role in my organization to do the right things, at the right time in an efficient and effective way.

Well, as part of my IT Service Coaching and Mentoring work with several clients, I regularly research and present new tools, techniques and methods to help individuals overcome such challenges.

One great resource I found (pretty much by accident, see the PDF below for how I came across it!) provides a much more humanistic and personal approach to visioning, goal setting, planning and the achievement of goals.



This is a recent book called, "Double Your Income Doing What You Love", by Raymond Aaron. Don't let the title put you off - it's really not about some goofy 'get rich quick' schemes or selling you 'snake oil'.

Although, it's not really something that sounds like it should be associated with either a professional environment or IT Service Management, trust me on this, there are many useful and easily adaptable tools in here that will help.

Rather than me taking up too much space here - why not download the free 10 page PDF report that I've put together.

In the right frame of mind, you will discover more about you, your talents, what you 'love' doing (and what you don't) and how to get to where you need to be - from a personal perspective.

I've produced a free 10 page report that covers the key take-aways, the tools, the techniques and a summary of each chapter.

Download double_your_income.pdf


I've also provided a Mind map summary in .mmap (Mindjet MindManager) format for anyone who prefers 'bubbling'.

Download double_your_income.mmap


I would be really interested to learn what you think about this book, its tools and techniques and whether you have any further recommendations for this important topic... why not click 'comments' (below) and have your say?

OnRamps to IT Service Management.

Looking for an OnRamp to ITSM? Try Cross-Silo Service Monitoring.

A guest article by John Worthington.

Having seen many clients wrestling with Change and Configuration Management, engaging in deep technical debates about CMDB design and heavy into process modeling and analysis, I'd like to stir the pot a bit by offering another view.

Of course, Change and Configuration Management - and (eventually) a well designed CMDB - are very important milestones along the ITSM journey they are not the easiest or the fastest route to achieving a service orientation; nor are they necessarily the most rapid way towards achieving ROI in ITSM.

I've beat the drum before on the importance of Stakeholder Analysis (see Teams of Rivals: The Importance of Stakeholder Analysis in IT Service Management Implementations) so I won't repeat that rant here.

Another critical task that must begin early and continue throughout your quality journey is Service Definition; understanding what IT components make up end-to-end business services.

Implementing end-to-end monitoring (with the right APM tool) can go a long way towards having individual IT silos achieve a service oriented perspective; certainly much faster than attempting to implement a CMDB and cross-silo change management.

By taking the time to conduct formal stakeholder analysis and identifying several initial service targets, via Stakeholder and Services Targeting Workshops, customers can position the CSIP program to conduct end-to-end service infrastructure base lines of a few service targets while assessments are conducted for ITIL process (which of course will include people, process and tools).

The result is a crystal clear picture of:-

- The stakeholders involved in using and supporting the target services

- The current performance base line of the target services

- Prioritization requirements of the ITIL Road Map for the target

Services based on real data

- Accurate CI relationship information for architecting the CMDB

As process improvements take place, the visibility that a service monitor provides across IT silos re-enforces the paradigm shift that must occur, keeping the awareness of ITSM 'front and center' in the minds of the staff.

I've been blogging at http://eginnovations.blogspot.com/ (N-tiers without the tears) about a product from eG Innovations.

See also "The Case for Service-Oriented Monitoring as the first step in an ITIL initiative"

http://www.eginnovations.com/whitepaper/whitepaper-request.htm )

If you are going to purchase a tool to accelerate the migration to service-oriented management, the case eG makes for beginning with service monitoring is a strong one.

By creating what is essentially a virtual, intelligent operations bridge, eG Innovations can immediately focus on where many customer IT organizations are already spending the most time and money -- isolation and diagnosis of complex, n-tier infrastructure problems.

While this does not obviate the need for a CMDB, it does deliver several significant advantages over starting with a CMDB tool. First, the eG Enterprise CDB (capacity database) can be implemented much quicker than any CMDB tools I have seen.

Secondly, the correlation intelligence and virtual manager architecture provides extremely rapid migration to a service management paradigm and proactive problem management.

Finally, many ITIL 'road maps' have left capacity, availability and continuity management (the strategic planning quadrant) as the last core process areas to be addressed. eG Innovations' establishment of a service-oriented CDB puts a strategic planning element into your ITIL implementation program right up front. This makes sense, since strategic planning is fundamental to IT/business alignment.

Beginning with service monitoring may not only save you time and money, it could also improve the quality of your CMDB design by ensuring that all ITIL process areas are considered and all stakeholders and services have clearly identified baselines of performance.

MyServiceMonitor offers affordable Stakeholder and Services Targeting Workshops that can position customers for both formal ITIL assessment and gap analysis as well as cross-silo baselines of performance for targeted services.

This approach can provide an effective OnRamp to IT Service Management best practice, accelerate the paradigm shift to a service orientation and save customers money at the same time.

Written by John Worthington.

http://www.myservicemonitor.com

The 80/20 on ITIL - Using Pareto's Law To Help Ensure Service Success

Here's the 80/20 on ITIL - courtesy of Vilfredo Pareto the Italian Economist.

This post contains a small slide deck that you can download right now and is just designed to get your creative juices flowing on where (and why!) the 80/20 'rule' can and should be applied to many aspects of ITIL implementations and the way we manage our service processes.

You can easily use the application of Pareto in conjunction with many other 'tools' you already have in your management kitbag and it doesn't have to be statisically based - just whole numbers.

Although this isn't a deeply mathematical six sigma type exercise - far from it - I have used Pareto style thinking (and charts) VERY successfully in recent years. Two examples spring to mind: (a) proved to a big Client that there was a big problem that was caused by a relatively small part of the Service Operation and more specifically, (b) 87% of all recurring non major incidents (some 13,000 per month) are actually related to 12% of incident caused-by category labels. Something to go on there!

Anyway, this is something to think about. [Although - when I was putting the slide deck together last night - I was actually more worried about the relevancy of the Pay Check stat!]

Download Pareto-Law-Presentation.ppt   

Tools that Underpin ITIL Implementation and Enhancement

Whenever you're planning to implement an ITIL Process for the first time, or your are progressing against your Service Improvement Plan, it's important to be able to understand -in depth - the true picture about the 'today' position.

For example, planning to Implement Problem Management will commence with a situation assessment of the current organization, asking questions such as:-

• How are Problems accepted, processed and eliminated today?
• Who is responsible for this?
• How much time (and cost) is this consuming?
• What activities and tasks take place to make this a reality?
• How effective is the current function in achieving their defined goals?
• What measurements are collected and how are these presented?
• Who reads the results and what decisions are taken?
• What 'gaps', challenges and obsatacles exist?
• What data and information is readily available to understand the today position?

Answering these questions (and others!) will assist in determining a crystal clear picture of the today position.

When we get down to the detail - we all need tools.

Not always from the big Vendors, not always integrated toolsets. What I mean here is 'tools' and techniques to help us understand what's going on today and what solid foundation should we lay down to help us efficiently and effectively manage the future.

Yesterday I came accross (by accident) this old link to a tools page - that contains a brief description of over 350 such tools. Some are ancient and offer little value when considering ITIL. Others are perfectly relevant to today's world. Admitedly, there's some I've never heard of! But I've promised myself to have a fish around and learn some more.

The original page seems to be accredited to Bart-Jan Hommes who looks like he was doing some important research at the Deft University of Technology a few years back.

Why not grab a Latte and dive in for 5 minutes and see if there's anything there that will assist you? You can access the main index here.

If you know of any other valuable sites that contains useful tools - please leave a comment and let our other readers know. Many Thanks!

IT Service Today - Enhancements

Announcing several new enhancements to IT Service Today.

Since its launch over four weeks ago we've received many pieces of interesting feedback on how we can make your #1 Service Search Engine even better.

So, we've been very busy making your ideas a reality!

If you would like to see a quick overview of all the new features - please open the slide below.

Download Introducing-the-new-IT-Service-Today.ppt

Did you notice the FREE Top 20 Hot ITIL Links Bonus?

Well, it took us a whole days worth of research to dig deep and find the best of the best in terms of relevant White Papers and PDF's on a range of value-adding ITIL topics.

Each link was carefully researched and after visiting over 120 different sites we decided that these were the highest quality and most useful.

If you want to get your own copy of these specially researched and highly relevant ITIL links then visit here now.

Please let us know what you think of the enhanced site - why not leave a comment on this Blog?

Introducing IT Service Today

It didn't exist - so I had to invent it!

I got tired of searching through multiple screens and using lots of different search engines to find the research I needed - so I decided to create a practical and focussed Search Engine - come - research tool - that's dedicated to us IT Service folks.

The result can be seen at www.ITServiceToday.com

It features links out to the usually most searched for items - plus its got this great feature called QuickView that allows true window-in-window viewing of other sites. Saves a lot of time.

The other thing is - it's got ITIL and ITSM 'hard-wired' into it's code. Search for Articles and Whitepapers and you'll get the latest list.

I'm going to add lots more functionality to this site pretty soon - so why not bookmark it and take another look today?