There’s an interesting wrinkle that you see over and over in formal implementations of service management; they typically struggle with self-evaluation. It can actually lead to something of a credibility gap, because service management implementations might initially seem to be unsuccessful at the very thing they’ve been promoted to address. Here’s how that can happen. […]

Heuristics are the cognitive short-cuts we employ during decision making. Heuristic traps are when those heuristic short cuts lead to undesirable outcomes which in hindsight seem hard to explain… logically. Before continuing it is worth emphasizing that heuristics are useful in the right contexts. They allow us to not waste valuable thought processes over trivial […]

Service desks exist on a spectrum from call logging to expert, and the University has the full range of service desks currently. However, what are the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches?  Where is the best place to position your service desk? Let’s describe the two extremes ends of the spectrum initially. Call Logging This […]

Did you know that if you report a problem with your email account there’s the potential that up to 7 teams could end up working on your problem to ensure its resolved? You probably didn’t and, if we’re delivering quality services nor should you. Did you know that there are 8 directorates made up of […]

Sometimes even the best planned work can go wrong. Often you can identify the best planned work not by its resistance to failure, but by its resilience or recovery in the face of it. Reducing the likelihood of things going wrong is one part of planning for a change. Reducing the consequence if the worst […]

Which is more important? The User? Or the Queue? A fallout from doing service management reporting is a greater appreciation of the perspectives of good service. However what good service looks like is subjective. Recently the team had a discussion about that classic service desk tension situation – the queue. The discussion was animated… and […]

A few weeks’ ago, I asked the question, “Is our knowledge management best practice?“, although I left the answer as an exercise for the reader… If you thought that our current practice could do with improving, but didn’t know where to start, I’m going to propose an alternative operational approach, drawn from Knowledge-Centered Service, some […]

The more you work across different ITIL disciplines, the more you realise how much they can feed value into each other and become more than the sum of their parts. One aspect of this is how you fit your processes together. Most organisations, when they first formalise their service management practices, start with incident management. […]

Two weeks ago Robert asked us to consider if our Knowledge Management practice is best practice and to consider how we can  move our current Knowledge Management practice closer to best practice. As a reminder, in ITIL4 Knowledge management aims to ensure that stakeholders get the right information, in the proper format, at the right level, and […]

Every organisation will have something that appears to be straightforward but somehow they make a mess of it! And what is more frustrating is that it is easy to articulate the problem yet the solution is far more complex. Often these seemingly straightforward issues have the characteristic of being an event that may be anticipated […]