culture

how much nice is too much?

How much nice is too much?

Climate change

Media are awash with hysterical (and not as in funny) misinterpretations of the recent IPCC report, all of them along the lines of "we have 12 years to save the world". I'm as concerned about climate change as anyone, but the apocalyptic bullshit over the latest IPCC report only discredits the real science. It's not saying anything like we have only 12 years to save the world.

Two questions to ask

Here are two questions you can ask yourself, or you can ask any person or team, to challenge them to change the way they work:

  • Can you show how your work will be better in a year?
    We want to know whether there is any improvement programme, or any bandwidth for improvements, or even any culture based on improvement.
  • Can you keep working in this way indefinitely?

The corporate yoke

The symbolism of a company-branded lanyard and ID card hung around my neck is too potent for me. I'll do all I can to avoid wearing it. When the only option proffered is a logo-covered lanyard - no belt clip option - it says it all to me.

Don't try to change culture

Should you try to change culture?

Fix change not ITIL

Fix the way we change ITSM behaviours, not the models of that behaviour. ITIL is near enough.

Runaway emotion

Business is not about emotion. That is not to say it has no place for it. Business is about humans interacting to a common and productive purpose, so clearly emotion has a place. But it shouldn't rule us. We make a space for intuition, instinct and passion, but we structure and guide business with rational thinking.

Thoughts on SMcongress and the future of ITSM

The Service Management Inaugural Congress (SMCongress) is the output of the "RevNet" event at the 2013 Fusion ITSM conference in the USA. As a few of you know, twenty-something ITSM thinkers got together in a room to see what would happen. This happened. It has been followed by some unlovely debate and a number of articles.

I had hoped SMcongress would pass me by, but it seems not. A number of you really want to know what I think about SMcongress, (especially those who would like me to say the things you can't), so here you go.

In summary, SMcongress is full of emotion and short on ideas, it lacks clarity or focus, it is addressing the wrong problem in the wrong way, and like all these collaborative "community" movements in business it is unlikely to come to anything. If it can be built upon to create focus, to get back to useful outcomes, and to address the real issues, then its passion, inclusiveness, and energy might be harnessed to some good. I offer here three concrete solutions to the issues of IT and ITSM that I think SMcongress should be focusing on.

People first in ITSM

People first, in priority and in order.

Getting IT development to support production - a people problem

A LinkedIn discussion which I have now lost (LinkedIn having one of the worst search capabilities on the planet) asked about how to get Development to provide Level 3 support to Production incidents. It's a people problem.

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