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. […]

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 […]

Service desks exist on a spectrum from call logging to expert, and the University has the full range of service desks currently. However, what are the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches?  Where is the best place to position your service desk? Let’s describe the two extremes ends of the spectrum initially. Call Logging This […]

Did you know that if you report a problem with your email account there’s the potential that up to 7 teams could end up working on your problem to ensure its resolved? You probably didn’t and, if we’re delivering quality services nor should you. Did you know that there are 8 directorates made up of […]

Sometimes even the best planned work can go wrong. Often you can identify the best planned work not by its resistance to failure, but by its resilience or recovery in the face of it. Reducing the likelihood of things going wrong is one part of planning for a change. Reducing the consequence if the worst […]

Which is more important? The User? Or the Queue? A fallout from doing service management reporting is a greater appreciation of the perspectives of good service. However what good service looks like is subjective. Recently the team had a discussion about that classic service desk tension situation – the queue. The discussion was animated… and […]

A few weeks’ ago, I asked the question, “Is our knowledge management best practice?“, although I left the answer as an exercise for the reader… If you thought that our current practice could do with improving, but didn’t know where to start, I’m going to propose an alternative operational approach, drawn from Knowledge-Centered Service, some […]

The more you work across different ITIL disciplines, the more you realise how much they can feed value into each other and become more than the sum of their parts. One aspect of this is how you fit your processes together. Most organisations, when they first formalise their service management practices, start with incident management. […]