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!”. […]

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 […]

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 – […]

Over the last  few weeks the ITIL Team have been talking a lot more about Second Line Support, we’ve been blogging about it, talking about it and James has even created a video about

It is July 2020. Everyone is trying to make do amidst loss and anxiety; or frustration and impatience. The economic reality is kicking in and budget holders are being told to tighten their purse strings. If you were short staffed, or if staff have left, recruiting to replace is unlikely to be an option. And […]

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. […]