by Gina Headden Until recently, ITIL hovered at the edge of my known universe. Imagine my surprise, when on secondment to the team, I discovered that ITIL plays a crucial role in the University. Like the sun in our solar system, it’s central to maintaining order in what might otherwise be chaos – whether we’re […]

A Catalogue Is Born At the start 2016, the Library and IT “catalogue” was an A-Z with 159 “services”. They were not all services. A management spreadsheet had reduced this list to 108 candidate entries. Clearly everyone and everything was declaring “I’m a service”. Of course, people will shout “But we did have a catalogue!”. […]

Who? Sir Dave Brailsford famously led Team GB to cycling success in the 2012 Olympics, following a focus on “marginal gains”, making many small improvements that, taken together, added up to a significant and startling performance improvement. Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian scientist who noted in 1906 that 80% of Italian wealth belonged to just […]

‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’  George Santayana Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner’s, 1905, page 284   People ask for dashboards and reports to show what has happened. Ideally we would see what is probably going to happen.  In the September 2020 blog “Do We Know What […]

Hello, remember us? ITIL Tattle? We’ve been gone for a while and during that time Autumn has well and truly arrived. We’re now all adjusted to the new world and ways of working, our students are back studying and we’ve achieved a lot of great things since James last blogged back in September. In his last […]

This time last year the blog post I Know What You Did Last September looked at 2018 data and made predictions for September 2019. At that point I was confident that the September 2019 data would inform the September 2020 data… but back in March the world was turned upside down. As an aside, when such calamitous […]

I wrote last year about the benefits of reducing duplication in my article “Please Submit in Triplicate”, and the idea behind the article was to look at the ways we might reduce the amount of unnecessary work that we do. The article was very much focussed on paperwork, as the title suggests, and took a […]

The concept of a team that primarily deals with Service Management best practice and process development is not a new one. Many corporate organisations have had a team of this sort for over a decade and several UK Universities have been working for a number of years with guidance from their Service Management team. Here […]

When I first took on the Change Manager role it was a new position, and so a lot of my initial work concentrated on developing Change and Release Management in Information Services. In the first few weeks, I arranged a number of visits and video conferences with colleagues in other UK Universities, to get a […]

Aye Aye, Captain Have you ever thought, “I can’t speak up, I’m only a new member of staff”?  Or perhaps, “I think this is a mistake, but I’m the least senior person here”?  Maybe just “I’m not certain about this, so why does everyone else seem happy?” If so, you’ve encountered an authority gradient – […]