Don’t wait until you have your Service Catalogue “closed”: that’s not happening (if you do things the right way…)

Moses introducing Service Catalogue v1.0

While reviewing a few requests for change to be submitted to the weekly CAB meeting, I told my manager about 2 of them in which there was no affected service recorded; well, in fact there was something written in the field “Affected Service”, but it was not present in the Service Catalogue.

My boss didn’t want to change it for one of the services that actually exist in our Service Catalogue as he says “the Service Catalogue is not closed yet”. I thought he meant our current Service Catalogue was only a draft pending of validation or whatever, but he didn’t: what he meant is that our Service Catalogue has not been carved in stone yet, if you let me put it that way. That’s what he means with “closed”. Well I’m afraid I have to tell him that’s never happening, if we do things the way God dictates…

Read the rest of this entry »

APMG announces ITIL V3 Master certificacion

At last, the APMG has announced the ITIL V3 Master Certification.

Now, let’s wait and see who’s first achieving it…

ITIL wants YOU!

When launching ITIL V3 back in June 2007, the OGC announced the establishment of a cyclical program to update its core guidance books, to take into account the latest developments in Service Management best practices.

Now, the OGC and the Stationery Office are recruiting participants to update the five core publications (the Service Lifecycle books) and the “Introduction to the ITIL Service Lifecycle” book. The participants will be two kinds: authors and reviewers.

Check out for the official announcement. It’s not quite clear what you get in return, aside from prestige of being credited in the books. Hey, it would be OK and more than enough for me. Maybe they could even handle out an all-inclusive invitation to the next ITSMF congress… it would be worth the effort (they could think of an exotic destination next time, Barcelona is not really appealing to me…).

What about you? Would you like to participate? Do you think a public announce is a good step on broadening ITIL scope and incorporating new trends (and, more important, new realities) to its core books? Please share your thoughts on the comments.

ITILize your iPhone: ITIL Acronyms app now free for your iPhone or iPod Touch

From June 28th, ITIL Acronyms, an app for iPhone and iPod Touch is given away free at AppStore (it was 0′79€ before); it’s a list of all common acronyms widespreaded along ITIL publications, ITIL & IT related blogs and articles and frequently blurbed by anyone more or less involved in that IT Service Management thing.

Basically, it displays on a list all the acronyms and what they stand for, and clicking on one of them triggers a Google search of those words; this may be not the most useful feature of the app, but easily get access to the meaning of some of those acronyms is worth buying this app. Well, buying… I mean, it’s free, so as long as there’s a gap on your iphone for one more app, just download it and avoid looking dumb when you hear about SIP or BIA or BCP.

The Spanish Jury has a plea: ITIL V3 is not good enough for us

The Spanish Jury after their unanimous decision: ITIL V3 is worse (sic)

A few minutes ago, a mail landed in my mailbox from an IT training center offering ITIL V2 Practitioner courses partially subsidized by Catalan Government. I’m talking about “Service support” and “Service delivery” courses, you know, all that ITIL V2 stuff. I hope I made it clear: it’s V2 we are talking about; no V3 signs anywhere in that mail.

I insist about it displaying ITIL V2 courses because in Spain is settled the general opinion that V2 is better than V3, although anyone can tell for sure why.

After the jump, the most common bullshit arguments supporting such a daring quote…

Read the rest of this entry »

Incident management: train users as much as you train your help-desk crew

Give one of those to everyone at your company before letting them contact your Service Desk

Setting incident management, at a higher or lower maturity level, in an organization, is the only way to try to keep the sanity of the IT crew. Besides the effort needed to get Service Desk (SD) personnel committed to do a perfect by-the-book management of their incidents and requests, efforts must also focus on training users on how to contact the SD and place their requests; the way I see it, it’s needed not just to make the management of their requests faster, more efficient, eliminating the need of being constantly contacted by technicians asking questions relative to the incident because of poor information supplied to the SD; it’s also needed because they must be responsible on their relationship with technology they work with and with the SD and, in the end, the way they use and take profit of the means the company puts at their disposal to reach the business goals (a goal shared with IT, of course).

A practical case, after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

The fear of the blank problem record

Root cause analysis (RCA) is an intuitive activity, we are naturally inclined to do it in our daily life; we know the techniques and methods to make deep and sharp analyses of our daily events, from enumerating causal factors to the generation of recommendations and the implementation of changes to eliminate the underlying cause.

Why, then, it’s so hard to take that ability to a work environment?

Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter + ITIL = a win-win combination

Tweet tweeet

Lately, it’s exhausting reading on a nearly daily basis on any blog a success case of using Twitter at work; some of them, obvious, on IT support teams, though none of them about using it as an ITIL process management support tool. Does Twitter fit among ITIL support tools?

After the jump, I’ll try to make my try explaining how…

Read the rest of this entry »

RCA: misunderstood or even a complete stranger

I’ve been working on IT for about 8 years now, always as a member of support teams (except for a couple of years, when I, just me, was the “support team”). Through the last 2 years, beyond the mega-hype of ITIL as a magic recipe to turn IT shops into perfect machines (as if that was enough) one of the most used expressions for selling and buying IT services has been “continual improvement”.

On January 2008 I joined a support team of 5 people, where I played the systems administrator role; the customer was a private holding who bought to my company a managed service pack, including the adoption of a few ITIL v2 processes: incident, problem and change management.

I had never known, through my years of experience in the IT field,  nothing like problem management, whose goal is finding the  underlying root cause of major or recurring incidents and then raise a request for a change (of the infrastructure, the operations procedures or documentation or whatever) to permanently eliminate that cause and so prevent the recurrence of such incidents.

Read the rest of this entry »