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 […]

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 – […]

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 […]

Doing certain things now will give us breathing and thinking space to assess our next response. First aid training includes a pre-prioritised list of immediate actions. Battlefield medics use MARCH, which in priority order means: Massive hemorrhage – if this isn’t stopped rapidly, everything else is in vain Airway – ensure an airway, as without a […]

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 […]

A situation when in the opinion of the master, the vessel, vehicle, aircraft or person is in grave and imminent danger and requires immediate assistance. International conventions (SOLAS, COLREG) clearly establish when a distress signal (such as a “Mayday” call) may be made.  These same conventions bind those that receive a distress signal to respond in a particular way. Our […]