At the end of the second world war, the inhabitants of several pacific islands thought that if they emulated the behaviours of the colonists and forces personnel they had been observing and interacting with, they […]
Author: Rob Spencer
Service Management Consultant.
#toolhacking for fun and ITSM – Release Planning with Trello
I love Trello. For those unfamiliar, Trello is a SaaS kanban board / taskboard. It’s free (mostly) and is virtually idiot-proof to set up and start using. You don’t have to adopt the kanban methodology […]
The ITIL Manifesto v1.0
The ITIL Manifesto is available here: The ITILManifesto 1.0 In my last post, I said we were going to have a vote on distilled principles, but we didn’t get many, so I’ve included all of […]
Publishing an ITIL Manifesto
The ITIL Manifesto initiative has been running for a little under a year. We have: 107 ideas grouped 6 ways to align with the 6 ITIL value propositions A draft vision/mission statement We don’t have: […]
The ITIL Manifesto – what it is and why you should get involved
A few weeks ago, a discussion on twitter led to the suggestion of an ITIL Manifesto. An attempt to codify and simplify the core tenets of ITIL from the triple perspectives of experience, theory and […]
The real problem with frequent emergency changes
Changes are decisions, balancing risk and reward. In the language of Decision Theory, they are classed as normative or prescriptive decisions (i.e. identifying the best decision to take) which rely on access to good information […]
New ITSM Events listing site
Having read a few posts on various social media sites about people looking for combined lists of ITSM events and not finding much apart from the vendors’ own sites, I decided to make one. Bear […]
Becoming an ITIL Expert
The ITIL® Expert qualification, the penultimate award in the ITIL stack, is not easy, but it is achievable, and if you put in the study time, and pay attention, then it is fairly straightforward. Contrary […]
DevOps and ITIL: Continuous Delivery doesn’t stop at software
DevOps. The next saviour of the world. A combination of agile delivery and super-effective provisioning scripts with a sprinkling of software-defined (virtual) infrastructure. Whilst ITIL v3 and 2011 seem (on the surface at least) to […]
What happens when you ignore service design and acceptance.
I recently discussed service support / operations on twitter with someone frustrated at being asked to provide support for a public cloud service he had very little ability to. Not technical capability, because he seemed capable enough, but access to the systems to do more fundamental fixes. We didn’t get far into the details, but it seemed he was being asked to deal with something which hadn’t been thought about when the service was provisioned.
This is sadly not an uncommon situation among support teams who often have no say in the choice of system/service, no time to get familiar with it, and no means of pushing back on critical gaps even if they do get a chance to see it beforehand. These are often gaps that a 5 year old could often spot, let alone experienced engineers but which seem to be frequently ignored by people whose shopping list only has one thing on it: functionality.
