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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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. […]

One of my firmest beliefs is that when we try new things, particularly when introducing new procedures, we should keep things as simple as possible. The ITIL 4 guiding principles back me up on this; “Keep it simple and practical”. But why? To help answer that question, let’s contrast simplicity and complexity. In general, simplicity […]

What is a Forward Schedule of Change? In short, it’s a document that lists Changes and their planned implementation dates. Interestingly, the term “Forward Schedule of Change” hasn’t been used officially in ITIL since v2. For ITIL v3 it was updated (in name only) to “Change Schedule”, and that terminology has remained in ITIL 4. […]

There’s a key distinction that’s often missed, between a failed Change and a failed Release (hereafter, referred to as an Adverse Release). It’s the difference between making a mistake about whether a Change will deliver value, and making a mistake in the execution of that Change. Although the value proposition is important – fundamental, you […]

What is a Service? The ITIL definition, if you’re not familiar with it, is about co-creating value by “facilitating outcomes customers want to achieve, but without the ownership of specific costs and risks”. The first time I read this, it threw me a little. I thought to myself: “The way this is written, it makes […]