Category: Process

  • How to present value in business terms in the real world

    A few years ago, I found myself in a two day meeting with a sales person, a technical presales person, and a client’s IT executive team. The company I worked for sold IT Service Management software and the client was a rather important client. The client as it turns out had attempted to purchase four…

  • Operations and Development Tear Down That Wall

    Many IT organizations suffer from less than optimal communication between development and operations groups. This happens so often that a special term has been created to describe what happens during the transition process. IT people say that developed software is “thrown over the wall” from development to operations. The result is that in house development…

  • Great Release Management Requires Project Management

    Release management impacts every process area in the production environment. In addition its effectiveness and professionalism contributes significantly to the general perception of the development group. The most finely developed product ever is considered useless by the business if it can not be effectively deployed. As such it is critical that release management

  • Create a Loop to Measure Change Management

    How do you know if an individual change or the change process as a whole was successful? This question can be answered by creating a feedback loop. The components of this loop are incident records, problem records, and RFCs (change records). By linking these three components together, we can begin to

  • One Change Management for all of IT

    Many IT organizations have change processes that are specific to different parts of the organization. For instance, development may have its own change process, and each operational technical silo may have a change process of its own. While this may have worked in the past, the current state of technology interdependence makes this type of…

  • The Clash of Incident and Problem Management

    The critical distinction between Incident Management and Problem Management can be defined by their contradictory goals. Incident Management is concerned with restoring service as quickly as possible and maintaining SLA targets, while Problem Management is concerned with finding root causes and eliminating errors from the infrastructure. Root cause investigation often requires extended periods of unplanned…

  • Incident Problem and Known-Error Relationships

    An error in the infrastructure causes a disruption in service. This disruption causes an end-user to call the Service Desk and create an incident record. If the incident can not be resolved, or if it indicates an underlying problem that needs to be addressed, then a problem record is opened and associated with the incident.…

  • Introduction to Service Desk

    Extending the Range of IT Services – In ITIL the Service Desk is considered to be a function, not a process, and it does more than simply log and resolve incidents. Service Desk and incident management are intimately connected but Service Desk has a larger role such that it handles more than just incidents. The…

  • Why focus on Process?

    In the effort to produce competitive advantage there are three primary resources that IT managers have at their disposal to meet business requirements. They are People, Process, and Technology. Companies already do everything in their power to hire the best people and deploy the best technologies. They compete in an open market for existing talent…

  • Who Cares what a Process is?

    Process is a series of related activities aimed at achieving a set of objectives in a measurable, usually repeatable manner. It has defined information inputs and outputs, consumes resources and is subjected to management controls over time, cost and quality. Processes are the basic building blocks of business. Companies make millions of dollars from creating…