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The new ITIL® Practitioner qualification will be aimed at developing some new skills and capabilities for ITIL professionals. In this blog I’d like to focus on one specific skill that I think needs to be included: ‘How to create an outside-in view and an understanding of cu...

What can project managers do to improve their skills and capabilities and – in turn – the performance of project teams? Have a best practice mindset To be truly effective, you need to know your chosen project management method – such as PRINCE2 ® – in ...

AXELOS’ Future ITSM Professional report predicts a growing need for people working in ITSM to adopt a more strategic role as service management principles spread beyond IT and throughout organizations. Service management consultant, Lisa Hodges, reflects on the findings: ...

One of the vital components of a successful Project and Programme Manager is leadership . Leadership capabilities are a key element of the behavioural competence among such professionals and, indeed, a Project or Programme Manager is someone people should choose to follow....

The ITIL ® update recently announced by AXELOS will be guided by the Lead Architect Team, comprising highly-respected experts from around the world. In this first blog post from the team, Troy DuMoulin talks IT past and present along with what an updated ITIL will mean f...

How do you implement ITIL ® successfully? Hang on a minute – is that even the right question? My answer to the question is this: you can’t. That’s because ITIL is a framework of guidance it isn’t something to be implemented; everything you do with ITIL and ITSM is abou...

I remember the divide in the industry when we published Service Strategy in the summer of 2007. Whilst a minority said it was inspirational, the majority questioned what right IT had in trying to shape business strategy. Zoom forward almost a decade, where the Fourth In...

Marcel Foederer was among a number of trainers and consultants who undertook the recent ITIL ® Practitioner “Trainer Readiness Session” course. In this first blog post from those trainers, he considers the value of the new ITIL Practitioner certification: Among t...

ITIL ® and ISO/IEC 20000, the international standard for service management, have enjoyed a long and mutually supportive relationship. ISO/IEC 20000 is currently being revised for the third time, with an increased focus on Service Integration (SIAM), governance and manag...

Sue Taylor examines the importance of the blueprint in programmes and within AXELOS’ Managing Successful Programmes (MSP ® ) best practice guidance. By implementing change through a programme , an organization is trying to achieve a better future. That starts with a pr...

Incident Managers are crucial to IT service operations in any organization. When something goes wrong, they provide immediate support, commanding and controlling major incidents. A successful Incident Manager needs to be proactive and a real people person. But what other sk...

Hi everyone, thanks for listening to the second audio discussion we recorded at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2016 in San Francisco. Listen to the interview One of the topics that repeatedly popped up at the conference – whether it was within presentations, during inform...

IT Service Management (ITSM) is not about the tools or the technology, but about delivering value to your customer through the use of that technology. The rapid advancements in hardware and software may have shifted the conversation onto what technology makes possible, but th...

In this first blog post, Julia Gosse considers organizations and their staff that have already adopted PRINCE2 ® : What challenges do PRINCE2 practitioners and their employers face with the concept of agile project delivery ? The biggest challenge is that the term “agile...

I recently witnessed the CIO of a publicly traded company dismissing the results of a successful red team to the Board of Directors by stating that the “the test wasn’t realistic as the red team had insider access.” The “insider” access in this instance was a network connect...

What's the point of ongoing professional development? In "My CPD Life", a short series of blog posts to coincide with the launch of the AXELOS Professional Development Programme , experienced practitioners share their views on the value of keeping your professional sk...

Do you have what it takes to be a Business Relationship Manager (BRM) ? What does a BRM do? The role is responsible for building relationships between the IT organization and the business units to ensure IT services meet the needs of business customers. BRMs collaborate...

In the past year to 18 months, we’ve witnessed a real shift in IT Service Management (ITSM). For a long time, there’s been an emphasis on the importance of processes, technology and certifications but now, there’s a much greater awareness of the need to have new skills. S...

In IT and ITSM, we’re living in the age of change – and that change is accelerating. If the birth of the internet was the start of this new age, we’ve now entered the next evolutionary stage: that includes a combination of cloud computing, mobility, big data analytics, ro...

AXELOS’ research project – The Future Project Management Professional – found that project managers’ roles will evolve to become more strategic within their organizations. In fact, 90% recognized the need for a much stronger strategic vision that aligns with the overa...

IT Infrastructure management and support domain are experiencing a new makeover when it comes to tools, technologies, and methods that are being introduced on top of the service layer. Support and service are an integral part of every business. Every organization is an IT org...

Over the past 30 years numerous methods, practices, and certifications gained prominence across the global IT community. As the numbers grew, so too did the tendency to promote specific practices and methodologies at the expense of other legitimate and relevant ones as all of...

If you’ve recently completed your ITIL Foundation certification, first of all, congratulations! Anytime you achieve something it’s important to take a moment to reflect on your accomplishment. You’re now part of an elite group of ITIL certification holders so welcome to the...

Everyone’s favourite IT service management (ITSM) puppet blogger, Joe The IT Guy, published an article a couple of months ago on the alignment of ITIL ® and DevOps. It had some great insights, and Joe suggested that I pen a follow-up … so, here it is. Before I start, I’d...

According to AXELOS’ Future Project Management Professional research, the project managers of tomorrow will need to embrace a wider range of skills and become even more multi-faceted. Project manager, Ana Bertacchini considers the implications for the profession. How wil...

What are the myths and realities about digital disruption? AXELOS attended the recent British Quality Foundation event, Digital Disruption – is it business as usual , and this is a summary of London Business School professor, Julian Birkinshaw’s analysis of current digi...

Three trends in 2018 will combine to challenge the most expert and experienced of the UK’s transformational change leaders . 1. Being clinical about the core We have heard plenty about “doing more with the same” or “doing the same with less”. Given global economic uncertai...

IT Service Management (ITSM) practitioners often forget that service management was not something they invented but rather a concept taken and adapted to create their own view of the world. They borrowed the principles of good customer service used by businesses, put “IT” in...

Continual service improvement (CSI) is integral to the ITIL® framework and should be fundamental for any IT Service management (ITSM) strategy. After all many of us are constantly looking to innovate, improve our business model, reduce costs, risks and improve the overall v...

What's the point of ongoing professional development? In "My CPD Life", a short series of blog posts to coincide with the launch of the AXELOS Professional Development Programme , experienced practitioners share their views on the value of keeping your skills and kno...

Why is robust governance and deploying a best practice framework so important when organizations want to introduce change? If you want changes from a business transformation programme which stick - i.e. things delivered that are embraced and used by the business operationa...

What is currently a typical starting point when organizations are thinking about protection against cyber threat and how often is that the right place to start? Organizations can start from one of three places when thinking about protection against cyber threat: Strategic...

An organization working on a major programme often needs a programme office. Major programmes are concerned with implementing complex transformational change, and this can bring with it a range of challenges. The size and impact of the change, an organization’s experience in...

Technical competence is no longer enough to be a great project manager. In today’s new world of work, technical knowledge and ability need to be aligned with the right essential life skills and professional behaviours in order to be truly successful, according to Kara Flanag...

Just how cyber risk savvy are today’s young people, the so-called “Millennials”? You might expect the generation probably most accustomed to mobile and digital technologies would also have the nous to stay safe online. However, this wasn’t the finding of a recent survey ...

At an IT Service Management (ITSM) conference in 2016, the following equation caught my eye: “DevOps = Agile + Lean + ITSM”. In other words, DevOps is about good development practices continually delivering product features (Agile), effectively and with minimal wasted effort...

In early December 2016, Kaimar Karu and I found ourselves in Portland, Oregon running a workshop with Jon Terry, Shane Carlson, and Kevin Behr. Over dinner one night, we started talking about Enterprise Service Management (ESM). Differences in opinion started to surface, and ...

As we begin these next few blog posts on “Implementation”, it is important to look at the ground we have already covered. To begin this series, we discussed Service Monitoring as a Strategic Opportunity . We followed that discussion with four posts on Building Service Monit...

Recently, we investigated the misconceptions around ITIL in order to better understand and address the common challenges when adopting ITIL. We asked our community members to share their stories. To our delight, our members did not stop at listing the challenges, but f...

The value of programme and project assurance can be described as the process of checking that a programme or project makes the right commitments to the business and then delivers on those commitments. Assurance provides an  independent, confidential, objective view  of progra...

ITIL ® has always been dynamic. It has evolved over time to reflect changes to the way organizations work, different service management concepts and priorities and our understanding of the different capabilities required to deliver value. Now it’s time to update ITIL ...

Over the last year and a bit, our team has been lucky to have had the opportunity to meet with and speak to the wonderful ITSM community worldwide to understand how ITIL is being used to deliver value with IT Service Management (ITSM). A lot of this is captured in the AXELOS ...

Developing materials for PRINCE2 Agile is a true milestone in the evolution of PRINCE2®. It’s the first extension to the PRINCE2 core qualification and is based on end user feedback; we’ve listened to practitioners and organizations to understand what they need, which is ulti...

When Dido Harding, the CEO of TalkTalk, recently announced there was a chance that all their four million customers’ personal data might have been compromised, she could not have imagined the tsunami of press and media coverage that resulted. It all happened so quickly – 48 ...

Looking behind, the Building Service Monitoring as a Service with an Eye on the Cloud   series of blogs has covered a lot of ground - from why, to what, to how. Now it is time to look ahead to how we pump water through the pipes we have built. It is time to discuss how we be...

As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit Bjorn presented a session on ITIL Practitioner and Strategic Roles . Watch the video and read his new blog post also discussing how ITIL Practitioner can be applied to a number of key IT Service Management (ITSM) roles. ...

The use of managed service providers is relatively common across all sorts of organizations. Unfortunately, what’s also common is ineffective relationships and ways of working between businesses and their provider. Most organizations work with a managed service provider in ...

ITIL ® Practitioner was launched two years ago, expanding IT service management (ITSM) practitioners’ capability to deploy and derive value from the ITIL framework . Since then, how has the guidance helped people on the frontline of delivering IT services? AXELOS sp...

What does a good PMO (project/programme management office) look like? The standard response is often to describe a best practice model and list some core services, but I want to challenge this perspective. In my view, it doesn’t really matter what activities your PMO provid...

What is Service Health? Now that we understand the service, we must ask ourselves what service health really is. For each service capability we must ask 1) is the capability working? and 2) is the capability performing well? What types of monitoring might we consider? We ...