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 […]

Long time no see ITIL Tattlers! The medical theme in Robert’s post last week has encouraged me to resume blogging duties. His post cleverly applies First Aid principles to ITIL and I’ve had cause over the last few months to have a lot of interaction with our amazing NHS, so I’d come to the same […]

Contrary to the stereotype that Change Managers typically want paperwork in triplicate, this particular Change Manager has always been dead set against duplication of effort, and so triplication will be right out. Today I want to write a little about duplication, value, and how to keep the right balance. When I think about duplication, I’m […]

To an outside observer, the Change Manger appears to undergo a shocking change during the start of semester period, like something out of gothic fiction. We go from a normal, everyday perspective on making changes, to locking down the work that we do in order to reduce the immediate risk to the services we run, […]

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 […]

Both Robert and I have recently talked about Risk, which is one of the key factors we use to categorise Changes into Minor, Significant or Major types. The other factor that plays into this categorisation is Impact. How we categorise Changes is important, because it affects how they can be authorised for Release, as well […]

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 […]

Change Management is an interesting proposition, when it comes to risk. At first pass Change Management sounds like the kind of discipline where it would be important to minimise risk. In practice, Change Management is better described as balancing risk. Changes are inherently risky. Any time we upset a known quantity, we’re introducing risk. It’s […]

Hi folks, Matt here again! One of the first big changes that I was responsible for after coming into post as Change Manager, was to implement a regular, weekly CAB. You can thank James Jarvis for the name: Go CAB. If you didn’t already know that James came up with that name, you might have […]