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 […]

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 […]

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 – […]

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 […]

In keeping with Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer is of course, “no”.  However that’s only down to the inclusion of “just”! Processes indeed offer comfort, security and (re)assurance to organisations.  Going back to ITIL v2, the IT Service Continuity process had the “cushion of assurance” within operational management. Embedding operational processes (and similar organisational […]

With Christmas rapidly approaching, I’m sure many of you will be looking forward to enjoying a whodunit, whether in print, film or game. I’d already referenced Holmes when introducing Kepner-Tregoe problem analysis and by popular demand have been asked to tell a story. So settle down and grab a mug – are you’re sitting comfortably?  […]

The majority of people don’t want to plan. They want to be free of the responsibility of planning. B. F. Skinner (Walden Two) I once heard a senior manager declare that they didn’t consider disaster planning useful as their staff did their best work under pressure… So, why should we plan?  I think we may […]

For the final Kepner-Tregoe thinking process we return to risk analysis – despite Matt having covered this recently from a change management perspective, I make no apology for the repetition! Many service management disciplines encounter risk as, in the real world, perfect knowledge is not possible – much of what we do will involve a degree of […]

  Decision Analysis is our next Kepner-Tregoe thinking process.  The steps provided will be very familiar to anyone who has undertaken a procurement, theft or recruitment exercise, yet they can be scaled down to decision making at an operational level.  A key aim of this process is to balance benefits and risks. 1. State Decision […]

Problem Analysis is probably the most well known of the Kepner-Tregoe thinking processes, and the one referenced in the ITIL textbooks.  Almost certainly your current job description includes a “problem solving” section, yet I suspect that problem solving rarely proceeds via a systematic process and instead is often intuitive and sporadic.  How many times has […]