Become a Champion Thought Leader!

Earlier this month I had the great honour to be awarded the itSMF Australia ITSM Champion of the Year and the Thought Leader of the Year Awards (the latter together with my indomitable colleague @mmg9898).  Now, as thrilled as I am with this recognition and as much as I think it is a reward for my activities and commitment, it also got me thinking how we need more champions and thought leaders, in all organisations, at all levels!

Champions

I need to clarify that the word ‘champion’ in this context is not about being a winner (although on the Industry Awards night I certainly felt like one), but rather about being an advocate (i.e. ‘to speak or write in favor of; support or urge by argument; recommend publicly’- source: dictionary.com)!

In order to be a champion\advocate, firstly there needs to be an audience otherwise you are just ‘shouting in the desert’.  But, a champion provides a reminder to that audience about what (in this case) service management is, its correct application, new developments and other noteworthy aspects.

During the conference it was frequently mentioned that organisations need a kind of ‘Service Management coach’ (similar to an Agile coach etc.) to guide an organisation in its use of the many different service management practices available these days (as well as the staff applying them).

But … it goes further.  A champion is not necessarily a person with expert knowledge and capabilities or seniority, but can be ‘merely’ that one person in a team who is motivated about the practices in use, and advocates, encourages, guides, supports and influences the team members around them (regardless of hierarchic position).

We need those champions: from a global expert perspective, but also as an organisational coach or an operational enthusiast … BE A CHAMPION!

Thought Leaders

Apart from Champions, we also need more Thought Leaders.  I think sometimes people expect our ‘thought leaders’ to be exceptionally brilliant people who amaze the world\industry with creative and original ideas …

Far be it for me to say that this isn’t true for some luminary colleagues, however, I reckon that most thought leaders do not necessarily have all their original thoughts themselves.  Instead they observe their environment, the community they operate in and collect individual challenges, opportunities, thoughts and solutions.  They engage and interact with the community to gather and this information and proliferate, expand, share it in a novel & structured way that is recognised as ‘leading the way’.

It reminds me of the ‘Dancing Guy’ video from Derek Shivers, whereby the ‘lone nut’ is the person with the original idea but indeed is only a lone nut, until the ‘first followers’ validate the idea and start the movement.  Thought Leaders are these first followers who recognise and validate the potential of new ideas.

And with this comes the concept that ‘Continual Service Improvement’ is at the heart of any (service management) operating model and culture.  We need to question the status quo, we need to judiciously apply new practices and methods and constantly measure the value of our outcomes. 

Thus, if thought leaders do not need to be exceptional thinkers, and we all need to be thinking about bigger and better ways of operating … BE A THOUGHT LEADER!

Why do we need Champion Thought Leaders?

Now, all of the above has been true for some time, but I think that in this current day and age it is even more important to have Champion Thought Leaders.  First and foremost, as Service Management is a community that is fed by individuals contributing to the collective wisdom (as well as organisations, commercial or otherwise).  The more people that contribute, the larger the collective wisdom available to the community is.

I can see three current developments that increase the need for Champion Thought Leaders today:

1. Relevance

Unfortunately, a reality is that the field of traditional service management is losing its relevance.  Not so much in real terms (as in contributing to business outcomes and value) but in terms of the attention it gets (from the business, management but also prospective staff).  It is just not ‘sexy’, and definitely not when compared to agile practices or artificially intelligent technology!

I think this is partially because we view service management as operations only (i.e.  day-to-day, business-as-usual), rather than seeing the full scope of it, of the complete service lifecycle including strategy, design and transition.

And, regardless of whether this is true or not (and: it’s not!), service management is here, it’s not going away and all those agile projects, all those smart, connected technologies still need to be part of a service that delivers value to the consumer and need to be operated (and improved, and … well: managed).

Thus, we need Champion Thought Leaders to not only keep service management in the forefront of people’s thinking, but also to look for improvements & new practices (and that way linking service management to the more sexy agile, lean and innovation\transformation activities organisations are paying attention to).

2. Complexity

The days of the de-facto standard in service management are gone (the one ring to rule us all, to repeat another theme discussed during the itSMF conference) and instead we are bombarded with a myriad of practices, each promising to do things better or rather to focus on a particular area of service management (where pain is felt, improvements can be achieved or transitions made).

So, we need global experts to create and introduce these new practices, and then organisational ‘coaches’ to find the best ways to introduce and apply them, but it all starts with ‘local’, operational Champion Thought Leaders who see existing practices that need improving and are willing to expand their scope beyond the known\available\common theory.

3. Relevance (again)

Yes, I know that service management relevance (or rather the lack thereof) was my initial development necessitating Champion Thought Leaders but this one is more or less the opposite of that first one, as there is an increasing relevance of service management in the enterprise, i.e. outside of the IT department.

Enterprise Service Management is needed for those organisations tackling digital transformations (and let’s be honest: which organisation isn’t … or doesn’t want to?) as now we no longer have IT-services, but rather technology-enabled business services.  The end-to-end service covers the technology, but also the other enterprise aspects and thus service management capabilities need to be extended into the enterprise as well.

Now, back at the same conference where we were awarded the ITSM Champion and Thought Leader awards, we delivered a presentation on VeriSM™, as one of the new ITSM kids in town, especially focused on service management in a digital age and in an enterprise setting. 

Afterwards we got the question of who would talk to the business about this (i.e.  enterprise service management practices), and the answer is: ‘well … you of course!’

Become a Champion Thought Leader!

Service management is on the praecipe of a renaissance.  Emerging technologies (cloud, IoT, AI …) make IT service management less relevant, but technology enabled business services much more so.  Digital transformation is on everyone’s lips, including of the organisational decision makers (i.e. outside of, as well as over-and-above the IT department).

And because we’re entering unchartered territory, it is not the usual channels that will bring the message.  Not the globally recognised service management guru’s (or skeptics), not the spruikers of new practices and methodologies, not even the consulting organisations and researchers, like Forrester, Gartner and the like, that are usually keen to provide an insight of ‘where it’s at’.  Rather the message needs to come from ‘within’, from those that understand the business and preferably have some real life experience in this (warts and all, good and bad, lessons learned, pitfalls and all that). 

This is where you come in.  Service management is one of the things that we have actually done quite well within the IT environment, and it is our duty -and I mean: all of our duties … including you as the reader here- to share this with the business, advocate service management practices and lead the corporate thoughts on practices and structures … BE A CHAMPION THOUGHT LEADER !

THE NEW STEADY STATE IS CONSTANT FLUX

A few weeks ago I read Mark Smalley’s‘Kill DevOps’ on the back of a year of increasing interest in Devops, in particularly when compared to the slow-and-steady ITIL.

Mark finished his article with ‘The only desirable steady state is a constantly evolving state of mind.’ And thus rejecting basically any system or methodology, including DevOps which embraces change like no other.

And that got me thinking: do we need stability (for which we often strive)?

Human nature often makes us conservative (maybe along the lines of ‘better the devil you know?’).

A majority of people prefer the status quo, the familiarity of the existing practices, the security of knowing how to do something.

From an organisational point-of-view stability is also preferred. Very few business models welcome surprise and change and are normally based around a status quo (which can be expanded, enhanced or sometimes just maintained).

Even CSI, which is in essence continual change, is based on improving SOMETHING that is more-or-less stable, that can be benchmarked and baselined; and from there to improve efficiency & effectiveness of the status quo.

In fact many of the best practice concepts around Service Operations, are based around BAU (or Business As Usual). By thorough design and testing we avoid any surprises in operations, thus enabling us to deliver a dependable, repeatable (, measurable), guaranteed service … day-in-day out … the same every time.

Based on the renowned Ivor McFarlane I often explain the Operations is supposed to be a boring place to work and that as an Ops Manager, if your staff gets excited … you should get worried!

Or I use a fast food chain as an example of a process based organisation, where everyone (almost regardless of past experience) can create the same quality food (using the term lightly), anywhere on this planet!

But those later ones are certainly not attractive examples of stability: boredom and fast food do not rank particular high on most people’s wishlist.

And thus despite our preferences, we are looking for change, for excitement, for new experiences, new horizons … a bucket list to work through before the eternal stability of death reaches us.

DevOps advocates rapid change and Disruptive Technology hardly preaches a dull and secure application.

So, which one is it: the security of stability or the excitement of change.

As per usual the answer lies in the middle, a bit like bi-modal IT, merging DevOps and ITIL, having your cake and eating too, having the best of both worlds.

I think chaos is change without a solid foundation, thus neither improving nor deteriorating the situation (which BTW makes chaos a constantly changing status quo … ooh, that’s deep).

Stagnation on the other hand is stability for the sake of stability causing dogmatic, micro managed often overly-bureaucratic organisations.

I can accept that change is inevitable and that potentially change is a good thing (as good as a holiday I’m often told!). But not all change and not change for change’s sake.

I see benefit in distinguishing improvement (the same but better) and innovation (different) and both will need a place in a mature Service Management organisation.

It is true that ITIL does not really deal with innovation (a bit in CSI, a bit under ‘new technology’ in Capacity Management), but neither does DevOps (or COBIT or pretty much any best practice that I know of). And where DevOps supposedly signifies the death of ITIL, Mark poses that ultimately DevOps needs to die as well to keep changing/improving/innovating/evolving.

Ultimately everything must or will change, including ITIL and DevOps, but I don’t think we need to actively euthanise either of them (just yet).

Rather (and as always) we need to apply the common sense guidance of either methodology (, framework, or whatever you want to call them) where and how it applies best; and make sure you have the right objective in mind (, business goals, value, again many terms that can be applied here). If there are ‘blindspots’ (like innovation) than make sure you augment your organisation with the necessary structures to fill these in.

For innovation specifically ‘Google time’ comes to mind (20% of time spend on ‘personal’ projects, which got abandoned in 2013), or something I picked up as 7x7x7: 7 ideas are given $7,000 to work on for 7 weeks. This keeps the wildly creative and anarchical innovation within defined time (7 weeks) and budget (7x7=$49,000) constraints and cycles.

So, let’s embrace change but makes sure we have a clear understanding of the direction of this change. After all ‘let’s go left’ only makes sense if you know where you are and where your destination is!

And let’s not blame our ‘system’ or methodology for the lack of innovation but instead make sure innovation is covered within the system (and yes, that includes innovation OF the system).

Onwards and upwards!

(to boldly go …)

the ITIL Zealot

May 2016

The Power of Service

In preparation for my itSMF-A LEADit presentation in Canberra this year (‘Around ITIL in 30 analogies’), I was having a good look at the various analogies I use during my training and other ITSM related activities. I love the use of analogies as it is an easy way to explain complex, abstract concepts such as service management.

This was confirmed when last week I was delivering an ITIL Foundations course, using many of those analogies (sorry, you’ll have to come to the presentation to hear them all) and once more seeing their effect. In particular when explaining the concepts of service management and a service I spent a lot of time emphasising that this is not so much about ITIL, but more ‘zen’, a state of mind whereby the whole organisation is focused on delivering value to the customer, in a fixed-price, black-box, guaranteed, repeatable and managed way.

ITIL is merely a way of achieving this (and then only the Process-part of the 4 Ps). In the course we then move into the various processes and their intricacies. It is not until I reach the Service Desk function (in our course, on the last day, after all the lifecycles & processes) that I truly get to focus on the delivery of service again.

This of course as the Service Desk is the Single Point of Contact for the User and as such the visible part of the IT Service organisation. I have once before sung the praises of the Service Desk and how important it is to get it right [HERE]. But I extend this by explaining how important service (perception) is, far more important than (product) quality.

Take for instance a mobile phone (an easy to understand analogy, as most of us will have one). If you buy a mobile phone from shop X and it never fails, you would be a satisfied customer. And when it comes time to replace the phone, you may go back to shop X, but perhaps shop Y has a better offer at the time. The perfectly delivered product (meeting service targets/expectations) has not generated a particular relation\commitment with the provider.

On the other hand, if you buy a phone and it breaks, you’ll take it back to the shop. If this shop is hard to reached (closed, not answering phones, …), not friendly (‘have you touched it’, ‘it’s your fault’, …) and not good in their response (they’ll charge you, take forever to repair, …): you will never go back to this shop. A bad service has destroyed the relation.

But if, when you go back with your broken phone, the shop-assistant is most apologetic and offers you a satisfactory solution (replacement, credit, …), not only are you walking away a satisfied customer, but you will almost certainly come back to this shop for future purchases (provided of course the phone doesn’t break every month). The excellent service here has turned a negative (broken phone), into a positive: a satisfied customer with an improved relation with the provider.

Now, this part of the service is often called ‘service’ as well, although it is far more intangible, more about perception. It is the people-aspect put on top of the actual service delivery against its targets. This is things like the availability of the Service Desk, the friendliness of its staff, the response and follow-up provided.

A bad product (or service) will lose you customers, but a good one will not necessarily gain you any. People more or less expect this and you won’t get credit for something that work the way it is expected to. This is a similar issue as Problem Management faces, in particular the pro-active part: the better you do, the less people notice it!

However where bad service-perception will also lose you customers, good service will gain you. Perhaps not so much new customers, but it will cement and improve the relation with your existing ones. Hopefully improve this beyond the black and white numbers of the contract, but more into a mutually beneficial relationship whereby the IT Service Provider is truly able to provide service (and added value) to the business.

So, back to the starting point of explaining concepts: Whilst ITIL has a definition for service, and explains the function of the Service Desk … people (in my case course attendees) need to understand the true objective of a service, one that goes beyond ITIL, any of its process or functions and should be at the heart of all your staff and their actions: delivering value to your users\customers!

the ITIL Zealot
April 2013