RMS Titanic departing Southampton on 10 April 1912 The sinking of the Titanic has become synonymous with epic failure, brought on by ego and arrogance. But if you look at the immediate actions of the crew, you’ll find a fairly rapid and well orchestrated response to a (Emergency) Request for Change. The Titanic Story (in short) The lookouts were perched high in the crow’s nest scanning... 

In my last article on service improvement, I laid out four premises that underlie how I think we should approach CSI: Process improvements evolve with time on railroads Everything we change is service improvement. Improvement planning comes first. We don’t have enough resource to execute all desired improvements. We choose the wrong unit of work for improvements. What are the desired business outcomes? We... 

While they might appear much the same at first glance, these roles are actually very different Many times people who are just getting started with ITIL (or broader speaking ITSM) stumble over what the differences are between a Process Owner and Process Manager and, to a lesser extent, a Process Engineer. These are different roles, with different skill sets and expectations but there are some overlaps.... 

This article has been contributed by Yemsrach Hailemariam, ITSM Consultant at Macro 4. Implementing IT service management (ITSM) according to ITIL best practice is often seen as a large, complex undertaking which those outside of IT may sometimes struggle to see the true value of.  This can mean the IT department feels some pressure to demonstrate early evidence of practical progress to help win the... 

Simon Higginson This article has been contributed by Simon Higginson. Problem Management is the intriguing discipline of the Service Management suite.  The IT Department is continually being asked to be proactive not reactive. Often in IT we presuppose what our customers in the business require, then give them a solution to issues that they didn’t know that they had.  But what happens when that... 

Traditionally Continual Service Improvement (CSI) is too often thought of as the last bit we put in place when formalising ITSM.  In fact, we need to start with CSI, and we need to plan a whole portfolio of improvements encompassing formal projects, planned changes, and improvements done as part of business-as-usual (BAU) operations.  And the ITIL ‘process’ is the wrong unit of work for... 

Problem, risk, change , CSI, service portfolio, projects: they all make changes to services.  How they inter-relate is not well defined or understood.  We will try to make the model clearer and simpler. Problem and Risk and Improvement The crew was not warned of the severe weather ahead In this series of articles, we have been talking about an ethanol train derailment in the USA as a case study for... 

Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said ‘If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution’. Since Mr. Einstein was, undoubtedly, a clever man, I’d like to believe that those are his words. Understand the problem first Where I work no one seems to care about problems. All I ever hear about are solutions... 

My recent blog Is it time for a two-speed ITIL? seems to have generated a lot of interest. As well as a large number of replies on The ITSM Review site, there were many tweets and Facebook posts where a wide range of people offered their thoughts and opinions. A variety of approaches The overall consensus seems to be that we need a fast-moving online repository of up-to-date IT service management... 

Most readers have got the story now from my recent articles: Cherry Valley, Illinois, 2009, rain bucketing down, huge train-load of ethanol derails, fire, death, destruction. Eventually the Canadian National’s crews and the state’s emergency services cleaned up the mess, and CN rebuilt the track-bed and the track, and trains rolled regularly through Cherry Valley again. Then the authorities moved...