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 […]

A Look Back This week the blog is a celebration of how far we have come on our ITIL® journey. Sometimes it has been a winding uphill road but perhaps blue sky is ahead… It might seem an odd time to reflect but as the University has just passed through arguably the busiest time of […]

For his last few blog posts (notably in last week’s blog), James has been teasing about the ITIL “Guiding Principles” highlighted in the current iteration (ITIL4). Whilst I feel like a drum roll might now be anticipated given the build-up, these principles are not new and indeed are common sense!  I’ve often felt that a […]

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 […]

The word “Incident” has been used for many years at The University of Edinburgh. We used it in our original Call Management tool Remedy, then in CMS and when UniDesk our current ITSM tool launched, our individual tickets were called “Incidents”. This never really sat well with the ITIL aware among us and so, in […]

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 […]

ucisa (That lower case U is not a typo!) is an organisation which the University of Edinburgh has been a member of for a number of years, but it’s one that you might not know much about. ucisa is the member-led professional body for digital practitioners within education and encourages FE and HE organisations to […]

  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 […]