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Category: ITSM Concepts Series

Making IT Work episode 10: The Agile Mindset

If 2020 has taught us anything it is that We don’t know what we don’t know.

Welcome to the world of Agile. This year has offered the world the opportunity to learn the most important mindset lessons from Agile: listening, collaboration, progress toward solutions not fixed results.

The Agile Mindset is not limited to programming but should inform the culture of the entire business as Patrick von Schlag makes clear in this episode of Making IT Work: The Agile Mindset.

For another look at Agile please see The Great Convergence

Making IT Work episode 6 Customer Journeys: Offer part 2

Cost justified, competitive bids result from understanding both our customers and our own costs, capabilities, and services.  What sounds like a confusing flood of information is laid into a coherent development plan walking you through  service blueprinting, service interaction and bidding.

In this episode Patrick von Schlag takes a high-level viewpoint to discuss how Best Practice frameworks  impact the design of service offerings and structure bid development.  Among the components discussed are the

LEAN principles of the Value Proposition, cost and risks, and mapping value streams;

Agile development options, bottle necks, weakest links,  MVP, iterative solutions, capabilities, enablers, feedback loops and the benefits of a pull versus push system;

Dev-Ops AB testing, canary releases and the new

ITIL 4 High Velocity IT principles integrating Design Thinking to improve customer experience and outcomes.

Customer Journeys: Offer part 2

Making IT Work episode 5 Customer Journeys: Offer

In the next leg of our Customer Journey: Offer  the customer and provider have gotten to know each other’s capabilities and needs as well as built sufficient trust to move forward toward working together. What should be written into their businesses cases to demonstrate and optimize the value of working together? What is a minimum viable product? What techniques can be used to explore and clarify what the customer needs from a service use perspective rather than a system? Patrick also provides a clear explanation and use of the acronyms: INVEST, MOSCOW, and WSJF. Please join us for Customer Journey: Offer.

Making IT Work Customer Journeys: Engage Relationships

What are the types of Service Relationships and what needs to be evaluated to establish, develop, and build an effective and mutually beneficial long-term relationship between customers and suppliers. Everyone benefits when a long-term relationship is built on clear understandings of needs and capabilities. Patrick von Schlag explores both the types of relationships and how strong profitable relationships can be developed in this episode of Making IT Work Customer Journey.

Mapping the Customer Journey Part 1

Mapping the Customer Journey provides a basic template for understanding how a customer feels at each stage of a service engagement. While it may look like a sales cycle from the outside, the magic of a well-executed Customer Journey lies in the insight provided by this fundamental perspective shift. In this short video Patrick von Schlag begins walking us through the aspects of the Customer Journey.

The ITIL 4 Journey – One Year In

Blog post – The ITIL 4 Journey – One Year In

Axelos was nice enough to ask me to write an ITIL 4 blog post a little while ago on the Managing Professional certificate. I was happy to do it; you can read a little more about what we came up with at https://www.axelos.com/news/blogs/december-2019/itil-4-mp-transition-a-transformed-framework

It’s been a couple of months since I worked with them on this post, and I’ve had a chance to reflect a bit on what we’ve learned in this first year of ITIL 4, and as part of this ongoing transition. A few lessons seem to keep coming up again and again, and I thought I’d share them with you.

  1. Value Stream Mapping is a game changer for IT organizational practices. While many people and organizations have leveraged LEAN practices for years, there is unique value to using it in the context of IT service delivery. Most compellingly, it gets IT organizations thinking cross-functionally and, even more importantly, across many different ITIL practice areas. I have been a long term proponent of “working backwards” from the customer and desired outcomes to how and what we do to help facilitate service value creation. Most of my customers struggle with cross-functional alignment and, when they have been able to operate successfully in a cross-functional model, do so in the context of a process or two, like incident management or change management. ITIL 4 emphasizes and demonstrates that many practices contribute to each and every service value chain, and that organizations must look at how (and how much) practice support they require to deliver the desired business outcomes.
  2. This focus on value is reinforced by the emphasis on Customer Journeys as part of the Driving Stakeholder Value guidance. Very few people in an enterprise actually understand the entire journey that a customer takes to co-creating value, and in most instances confuse success at a particular touchpoint with success in facilitating an excellent customer experience. So much of IT culture has traditionally been reactive (‘no news is good news”) that we often accept a lack of active complaints as a substitute for real validation of an excellent customer experience. Modern social media culture has taught us the compelling value of engagement with stakeholders through the entire journey, and that customer feedback is the shortest path to compelling improvements.
  3. The emphasis on high-velocity IT is critical, but only if it is velocity to value, not just velocity to more “stuff.” IT organizations continue at times to confuse features with benefits, and speed to market with use and value conversion. If organizations adopt Agile practices such as value-based prioritization of backlogs and teams focusing on delivering the highest value solutions first, all the time, they will avoid this challenge. However, sometimes organizations find themselves trapped by the desire for “low-hanging fruit;’ many times the fruit may be low-hanging, but low value too. Also critical is that the customer is driving the prioritization, and is accountable for optimizing the value delivery for the business.

There are countless new areas of guidance in ITIL 4 that will help you during your digital transformation journey. If you haven’t explored some of the new ITIL Specialist and ITIL Strategist programs, I encourage you to take a look. If you haven’t read the new ITIL books, they go far beyond traditional ITIL practice guidance to help you improve customer value and optimizing organizational resources. Take a look and reach out to us if we can help you on your journey.