Search

Have you noticed how the world of IT is changing in recent years? Have you also noticed how your role, responsibilities and current work practices might be coming under increased pressure to change and work differently? Organizations used to buy and build IT infrastructure a...

Cloud-based IT services have created a massive change in the traditional IT model, the way IT is delivered and the agility enabled as a result. With cloud, organizations are getting access to technology services in days and weeks rather than months and delivering products ...

What does migrating IT services to the cloud mean for ITIL ® ? I’ve heard various comments along the lines of “it’s no longer our infrastructure , it’s the responsibility of the cloud provider so why are we bothering with ITIL?” I find this really surprising as cloud integ...

In the first post in this series, Service Monitoring as a Strategic Opportunity , one of the topics that we discussed was the need for a "Service Monitoring Service " that would act as the monitoring platform for all of the various application and service teams within the s...

The first aspect of Service Design is to define the functional requirements, capabilities, and so on. No matter what we are doing and no matter the industry, we should always start with the customer in mind. In the case of our Service Monitoring Service, our customers are th...

I recently read a blog post titled something like "the death of ITIL ® ". The essence of the post was the suggestion that DevOps would essentially supplant the role of ITIL in high-functioning organizations. Reading the blog post made me realize that the state of confusi...

We spoke with Kevin Moye, who is retiring from the US Air Force and has recently passed his ITIL ® Foundation exam. Here is his experience with ITIL so far. Can you tell me about your professional history? I’ve been in the US Air Force for the past 21 years, working in H...

ITIL ® Intermediate’s Planning, Protection and Optimization (PPO) module compels practitioners to think about the practical details of providing an IT service. In other words, once you have crafted the right service design what are the practicalities and implications of ...

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...

Service Management must not shy away from application development Most Service Management organizations are full of process people. And then, there are tools teams that are full of tools people. What I mean is that the tools teams are made up of individuals who are experts...

One of the most important aspects of delivering a world-class service, regardless of whether the word "cloud" is associated with the service or not, is Service Monitoring. Monitoring should not be considered a commodity, but rather a strategic opportunity for Service Deliver...

While working for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with responsibility for global service level agreements, certifying in ITIL ® ’s Intermediate Service Offerings and Agreements (SOA) module was essential. I really recognized the power of ITIL and service mana...

How well prepared are organizations for information security and risk management in an increasingly cloud computing-based world that is also volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) ? The rush to use cloud services sometimes means organizations are not thinking fu...

In my previous post in this series, I posed a question: “Can perfect monitoring still end in failure?” I hope that you have come to the same two conclusions that I’ve come to: nothing made by humans is perfect, and even if monitoring were perfect, we can most certainly fail...

Simplifying things for our application team consumers: Inputs Application teams know their applications. We know our Service Monitoring Service. We need to quantify very simple inputs that will enable our application/service teams to easily consume our service. The great new...

Earlier in the series, we discussed the importance of enabling features in our Service Monitoring Service that make the application teams want to use the service rather than building their own “page myself” scripts.There are many features that we may add, but there are thre...

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...

Service continuity management, along with IT security, is top of the critical list for IT today – not least in the current global situation caused by Covid-19 . If you don’t have service continuity management and something major happens, it could ruin your business and – cl...

We recently published our 2019 ITSM Benchmarking report where 1,600 respondents worldwide had their say on the state of the ITSM industry and the challenges ITSM is facing. The key findings from our report include: Digital transformation Digital transformation has become ...

For service managers the concept of service is changing. In crisis situations such as now, it’s not about service level agreements but managing the customer experience and anticipating things they didn’t know they needed. It’s about helping businesses prepare for and respond...

Since Google first began sharing details of its approach to massive-scale web operations - Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE - many organizations have adopted aspects of the SRE approach to help deal with the emerging complexity of modern software systems. However, there...

Throughout the "Building Service Monitoring as a Service with an Eye on the Cloud" blog series, we have focused on the need for a Service Monitoring Service - a “monitoring hub” of sorts. This approach is different from the legacy centralized monitoring approach whereby t...

30 years ago, researchers and companies used to ask: how do we harmonize IT and the business? Today, we’re no longer talking about harmonizing, aligning and integrating IT and the business : the business is technology! Organizations that understand this are already at ...

Marcel Foederer is part of the AXELOS Lead Architect Team (LAT), responsible for guiding this year’s ITIL update. In this blog post he looks both backwards and forwards, considering where ITIL has come from and where it’s going: How has ITIL ® changed in the past 20 ye...

In today's connected world, service providers and clients share a common accountability to make business successful. The way that some might have shrugged off accountability previously just doesn’t work now and, if this continues, the outcomes won’t be favourable. Because ...

Traditionally, ITSM has not been agile. People have tended to focus more on having robust processes and rather than considering “what do we need?”, they have asked “what more can we put in to processes ?”. This level of “over-control” has happened because of over-enginee...

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 ...

Throughout the 25 years of its existence, ITIL has supported IT organizations in providing business value for their customers in the form of well-designed and supported services. ITIL has become the most widely used and most successful ITSM (IT Service Management) framework i...

The world of work is moving towards enterprise-wide, planned adaptability . Running the business and changing the business are becoming one and the same. As the organizations we’re working with are fundamentally aiming to improve their capability, it is interesting to note ...

There is now a huge demand for digital IT products and the services they support. This is no surprise, as cloud-based software as a service is easier to maintain, make changes to, upgrade or swap things in and out. Servers can be rolled up and rolled down, adding or reduci...

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...

With tech-centric changes driving disruption all around us, AgileSHIFT has a simple indicator to help you assess the impact on your organization. The Delta is the difference between the 'target state' and the current performance level. The larger the delta, the more exposed...

Technology has helped companies make the transition to remote working that was necessary over the past months. Organizations have had to react fast to come up with temporary solutions. Many employees are now able to work from home , services have been moved to the digital s...

Julie L. Mohr, renowned author and international keynote speaker, shares with AXELOS her thoughts on why consumers are embracing companies such as Uber, Amazon and Netflix and why IT organizations can either learn lessons from the disruption economy, or risk extinction: ...

What did I notice most when certifying in the ITIL 4 ® Managing Professional Transition Module ? Above all, the agile and digital perspectives in the guidance are moving service management away from a process-only driven world. For example, breaking down change into quick...

Another day, another IT framework – or that’s how it could seem to IT Service Management (ITSM) practitioners in 2017. DevOps, digital transformation, BRM, SIAM and so on; all of them have relevance and good ideas; but we have to stop thinking that any one framework i...

Despite studying software engineering and computer security to Masters’ level at university, my career took me into technical support rather than development. Working on a service desk – at the front end of IT, dealing with customers – worked for me: being customer focused...

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...

Following the release of ISO/IEC TR 20000-11:2015: Part 11 - Guidance on the relationship between ISO/IEC 20000-1:2011 and service management frameworks: ITIL® at the end of 2015 , we spoke to Shirley Lacy, managing director of ConnectSphere, who was involved in i...

Services are about people and processes and how technology enables the service delivery. These services need service management and, as a product manager, it has been useful to recognize that designing services is different to designing products. In order to deliver a cons...

Services are about people and processes and how technology enables the service delivery. These services need service management and, as a product manager, it has been useful to recognize that designing services is different to designing products. In order to deliver a cons...

It’s a pivotal and exciting moment for the service desk. For those still struggling with their traditional IT service desks that might sound like an odd statement, but significant change is coming. Historically, the service desk’s primary role has been a help desk for when ...

The pace of change in digital and the challenge of being a sustainable business are more profound than ever. With companies likely to have an average lifespan today of 20 years compared to 50 years in the 1950s, gone is the idea of being sustainable through sheer size, like ...

This is part 2 of a 2-part article, read Part 1 . Theory to ACTION! At the end of the short simulation exercise (1 ½ hours) we asked delegates, ‘ What did you experience from applying ITIL ® 4 theory that you will now take away and try to apply in YOUR organization ? ...

I was recently in Tokyo to meet with CIOs of Japanese businesses prior to the annual itSMF Japan conference. I was interested in asking these CIOs about their business and IT challenges, the skills they believed would be important, and their thoughts about ITIL ® and th...

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...

Agile ITSM is on the rise, now becoming more and more a reality and even making it into ITIL 4 ® . So, what are the next steps in the Agile ITSM evolution? I think the most critical one is defining an Agile ITSM Manifesto that works holistically across IT. The Agile Manife...

How to develop and grow control processes that work for your teams How do teams deliver better quality software or an IT solution at a pace that matches the needs of a business? This question is especially pertinent in the context of the solution development lifecycle an...

What is the impact of mobility for the enterprise and the IT people tasked with supporting it? Like it or not, mobility is a hard trend – one that is not going away anytime soon – and its impact is significant. There is a projected exponential increase in mobile usage and c...

The onus on the service desk has changed: today, it’s more customer focused and demands a new combination of skills for successful service desk agents. Previously, the idea was to spend as little time on the phone as possible, with service level agreements measuring speed ...

We are going through a light-speed technology revolution: from IT modernization to digital transformations, the internet of things (IoT) , cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI), not to mention “quantum computing”. My advice? Hold on tight, continue to learn and g...

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...

Janek Rozov, Head of the Information Society Services Development Department at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications in Estonia, explains how it has introduced a multiple-view service catalogue to improve understanding of services amongst its citizens and allo...

The DevOps and Agile movements are putting increasing pressure on traditional approaches to IT Service Management (ITSM) as many organizations embrace new technology and become more and more cloud native . These concepts related to the movements are all about evaluating ...

Good information security and cyber resilience begins with creating a solid security strategy. So, how do organizations and their CISOs or Heads of IT and security create such a strategy? There are a number of critical questions, driving factors and strategic considerations ...

How does High-velocity IT (HVIT) in ITIL ® 4 help organizations develop the capability to integrate new technology and reduce their services' speed to market? The challenge in a product/service environment is developing the product, harnessing the technology, involving st...

1. In your service management experience, how much of a foundation does ITIL provide? ITIL ® provides a deep foundation when it comes to IT Service Management. One of the reasons is because ITIL is a framework. It is a set of best practices that focuses on aligning IT s...

Is your organization ready for the biggest shake-up of data protection laws in 20 years? The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation will take effect from this year with the aim of giving EU citizens greater control of what happens to their data and containing t...

Daniel Breston shares his thoughts on why it’s a misconception that ITIL is incompatible with other practices: Practices such as lean, agile and DevOps can’t be successful without ITIL . Each of them needs to go from idea to realization, be supported in operations a...

There are a lot of misconceptions around ITIL as a tool within IT Service Management (ITSM). Some people believe that if they implement a ‘tool’ or an aspect of the guidance, they’re implementing the whole thing. Others think that if they implement a tool it will fix every...

My first three days in a new job with a training company just before the Millennium comprised the I TIL ® Foundation course. Those three days changed my career. After the course I realized ITIL was what I’d been seeking during my 15 years working in IT. The course made s...

Some projects are better managed under a Waterfall approach while others are better managed using an Agile approach. However, The PRINCE2 Agile ® course and certification allowed me to understand the needs of project stakeholders and apply the best combination of the two me...

It is very easy to look at best practice and/or a number of existing Project Management Offices (PMOs) in your industry sector and decide on what functions and services are ‘best’ for your organization. However, a best practice PMO has a problem-focused purpose, with its fun...

People wanting to progress their careers and make a difference in IT and IT service management (ITSM) roles need to concentrate on three major issues: their customer, the services they need, and the value they should be providing. Avoiding the sport of “framework hunting” i...

How can companies – and particularly IT organizations – take something positive from the current worldwide situation with Covid-19? Just like I had the chance to end my own procrastination in completing the ITIL ® 4 Managing Professional Transition Module , organizations h...

Every product or service has a carbon footprint. How a project is managed, how a product is built and used, and how it is disposed of will define the harm it does to our planet. Sustainability must be judged across the entire product lifecycle. So many of the decisions tha...

Since finishing education, my entire professional life has been in project management. What struck me from the beginning was the organizational element of project management, the ability to make real change without prior knowledge of the work area and even how it can apply t...

The ongoing uncertainty in our working lives makes long term planning difficult. And though people and organizations are not assuming that their current approach will be the long-term way of working, it will likely last longer than first expected. This means friction between...

The banking and personal savings sector is a prime target for hackers, which is no surprise when that's where the money is! Hackers use social engineering and phishing techniques to target both staff and customers to gain access to an organization's information, data and mo...

Delivering value to a customer doesn’t begin and end with a product and its features – it also requires service . In the IT development world, recognizing the need for service means cultivating skills in service management. This is where turning to ITIL ® is important...

In the world before ITIL v3 and Continual Service Improvement (CSI) it was part of a service level manager’s job to identify areas for improvement. However, this was ad hoc and happened mostly if a customer was complaining. We used what were called service improvement pl...

“It won’t work if organizations expect IT people to pick up an ITIL ® book or go on a training course and then implement successful service management solutions. “Organizations and people need to ‘adopt and adapt’ ITIL to the specific and unique requirements of their b...

Business service management (BSM) is about bringing value to a business through matching overall business objectives with IT. Arguably, the concept has been with us for some time; but like the latest version of ITIL ® addresses the issue of business and services, it ha...

Today’s organizations need greater flexibility to create new products and services, which requires agility to build, test and deploy much faster. This need has led to movements such as DevOps and – in fact – ITIL ® 4 , the latest evolution of the ITIL best practice framewo...

Business value from IT goods and services in a digital world I think it’s fair to say that organizations’ understanding of “digital” is currently ‘all over the place’, leading to much confusion. In technology terms, when you’re using IT strategically to drive a business...

Why is co-creating value within service management such an important concept in ITIL ® 4? While some customers might expect providers to “deliver value” independently, value requires open dialogue and active collaboration between providers and consumers. Everyone needs to a...

How can communication within IT service management (ITSM) – and ultimately with the business it supports – be improved? The silos that can develop among different parts of organizations need something that bridges the gap between the professionals that create and build t...

The success of cyber security awareness learning in organizations today is, typically judged by the ‘ticking of a box’ to say it’s been done. But have organizations – and their managers responsible for information security awareness learning – really stopped to ask whether t...

The ITIL ® update in a world of digital and service transformation Today, what are the main challenges facing organizations around IT generally and ITSM in particular? This is very dependent on the individual organization: on one hand, many are passing through digiti...

With so much hype today about artificial intelligence, IT service providers need to weed out the facts from the fiction to develop as successful strategy . The most promising area of study and research in artificial intelligence for ITSM is in machine learning or teaching co...

Delivering services that equally meet consumer demand while remaining stable and reliable has become even more critical with the speed of IT change today . Every service organization needs to create, deliver and support services and understand the skills and competencies th...

The IT industry is undergoing a tremendous amount of change and at a rapid rate. It’s becoming no longer affordable for an organization’s in-house IT department to manage every single IT service that’s required for the business to grow. Outsourcing IT or at the very least so...

Mike Babb, who is responsible for recruitment into Capita’s 4,500-strong professional services division, gives his verdict on the PRINCE2 ® 2017 Update: Since qualifying in PRINCE2 six years ago I’ve witnessed at first hand the importance of tailoring the project mana...

Products, Services, and Service Relationships Over the next few weeks we will publish a blog series to give you the big picture of ITIL ® 4. A bit of context before I start: When I was in India last November, I was challenged by a group of trainers to create a single dia...

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 ...

For any operational department it’s obligatory to have processes and an approach to things – otherwise it would all be chaos! In my view, if you don’t adopt and adapt knowledge from one of the IT operational approaches such as the ITIL® Intermediate module, Operational Supp...

It might sound strange to say that there’s no need to be afraid of failure. And that goes for IT Service Management (ITSM) as much as anything else in life and business. Using ITIL ®  to learn how not to fail in ITSM In fact, one of ITIL ® Practitioner’s co-authors, Kev...

I n recent years Romania and, more broadly, South East Europe have become a hotbed for international IT services. Due to the region’s Internet of Everything approach, the IT market is booming and facilities like Security Operations Centres (SOCs) and Network Operation Centres...

An interview with Mark Smalley, author of ITIL ® 4 Managing Professional High-velocity IT. Q: Why should ITIL practitioners see value in the High-velocity IT module within ITIL 4’s Managing Professional certification? A: The module is aimed at practitioners who are n...

IT professionals do not typically focus on delivering value to customers and that’s because service providers in general don’t understand what value is – it’s not quantifiable, it’s not tangible, it’s not definable, it’s not measureable and so it can frighten them. Manageme...

IT organizations don’t tend to recognize when they have an image problem or why they should care. Though some would argue they’re getting better at dealing with it, it’s still not nearly enough. The traditional problem is based on IT organizations believing the world revolv...

Why is the question “who really is your customer” important to ask in IT and IT services? It’s extremely important because it shapes what IT/ ITSM people do and why. It helps us define and focus on the right things, which includes going beyond the superficial view of who a ...

"How do I hold on to my current ITSM budget or even grow it? I know I need to show value to the business, but my concern is that the 'powers that be' see only cost. What's my best approach to this?" As technology continues to advance and develop, IT is becoming even more i...

We are creators, innovators and explorers of new, shiny things. It is part of our role and we love it. Listening to the hype, the latest trends - what ones are worth our time and investment, which ones will stick around (Apple iPhone, Amazon Echo) and which ones will not make...

Five years ago, after more than 21 years with Ashland in multiple business roles, I was appointed director of IT customer support and service delivery. Unfortunately, I had zero traditional IT knowledge. I literally Googled “IT education” and found the word ITIL ® . Fast for...

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 more than a decade, where the Fourth...

When I first learnt about ITIL Practitioner , I was somewhat sceptical about its value and, in particular, how it would work for candidates with a wide range of ITIL backgrounds, knowledge and job roles. Thinking about training someone at ITIL Foundation stage in the...

I n a recent webinar hosted by New Horizons, AXELOS’ ITSM Product Ambassador, Akshay Anand, shared his thoughts about one buzzword of the moment, digital transformation: What is digital transformation , how are companies going about accomplishing it and what does th...

Back in the industrial society, goods were a dominant factor in our lives. But in the “service era” we prefer to replace ownership of goods with access to services and resources without necessarily owning them. This is happening with and without digital transformation , alt...

What is the imperative for organizations moving to a high-velocity IT environment? Scarce resources, growing demands, continually shifting goals, the need for speed and end-to-end, sustainable behaviours that deliver agreed business value in times of agile transformation. Is...

When a traditional IT organization evolves to achieve a higher velocity – delivering work more quickly and meeting the business demand for agility – it adopts new ways of working, such as DevOps. This usually triggers organizational changes which might lead to multiple produ...

Process implementation in IT Service Management (ITSM) comprises the steps we take to deliver services and the changes necessary to support the business moving forward.The purpose of IT is to be a business partner, ensuring anything that falls within the remit of delivering ...

It all started with a tweet and now I find myself debating Customer Experience (CX) on the AXELOS blog. My tweet posed something of a challenge to AXELOS: “Right AXELOS, I’ve decided here starts the campaign to replace ITIL® Business Relationship Management (BRM) and Servic...

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...

How do IT teams keep up with the increasing speed of business change and demand for services that provide customer value consistently? Optimizing work methods in service management helps to improve efficiency, effectiveness and minimize waste while ensuring that IT’s goals...

Initial lockdowns this year meant that organizations had no choice but to send staff to work from home. However, how they handle the return to an office – or continue to operate remotely – is less simple. Among employees working from home for the first time, some will thrive...

Focus on value is one of the nine guiding principles described in the ITIL ® Practitioner Guidance and is the subject of the animated video below. Of course it’s so obvious that we should focus on value that you might wonder whether it needs saying at all. The t...

2017 was the year of the “lean IT” revolution, trying to bring frameworks together and figuring out how they can all play in the same sandpit. That means understanding how to get cohesion between the likes of ITIL ® , Agile, Six Sigma and COBIT in a way that adds value ...

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...

The Service Value Chain, and Service Value Streams Welcome back! This post is the fourth (and last) in a series in which I connect the key concepts of ITIL 4 . In the last blog we briefly covered the service value system (SVS) and its five components. One of those compon...

Companies need to seriously re-think how they change direction to ride out crises. And not just to survive, but to thrive. In uncertain times like now, high-velocity IT is something organizations need regardless of industry. And that’s not only about speed but the ability ...

Why is mapping the customer journey with a service mindset important for organizations in the digital era? Until recently, customers have mostly engaged with organizations via person-to-person engagement, such as paying in a cheque at the bank. Now, there is an increasing d...

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 ...

Following the publication of AXELOS' The Future ITSM Professional report, AXELOS associate Toby Moore joined Dr Tuuli Bell, partner manager at Tasktop Technologies, to discuss the evolution of ITSM businesses and the shift to a more service-based culture. Ever...

Royce Dsouza began his ITIL ® journey in 2011, becoming an ITIL Expert in 2015. His ITSM career has included setting up a service management office at two Fortune 500 companies and helping to align IT with end-to-end service delivery. He has replicated this success ...

The reality of working in increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environments is going to drive organizations to adapt and thrive. This lack of certainty has made people very nervous about making long-term plans and is, essentially, almost an ideal sc...

For organizations, the COVID-19 pandemic has been challenging on an unprecedented scale. Business leaders have suddenly had to focus on keeping their companies above water, as well as sustaining future growth potential. Given this unpredictable environment many organizations ...

Today, in big tech companies, we increasingly hear about people having a “growth mindset”. That means continually pushing yourself to learn and explore different professional certifications. In essence, employers view people like this as going the extra mile, wanting to unde...

Why is IT and - consequently ITSM - under pressures that can pull it in two different directions? Leading research company, Gartner, calls it "bimodal IT" and depicts it as “rocks in a river”: solid IT operational excellence standing against the fast-moving flow of digital. ...

The initiative to establish a service request catalogue to automate fulfilment of the most commonly requested services and allow customers to log their support requests is a commendable one. It would meet the objective of reducing the calls to the service desk and therefore...

In IT service management (ITSM) education is critical: it helps organizations get a shared understanding of terms and concepts and a proven body of knowledge such as ITIL ® . The IT industry is rife with buzzwords carrying varied interpretations, so education helps ...

Every organization, at some point, will make some sort of IT transition. The concepts in ITIL ® v3 Intermediate’s Service Transition (ST) module help that challenge in specific ways: The ultimate idea is to make transitions smooth enough to avoid disrupting current IT ser...

The ITIL ® 4 Managing Professional Transition module provides the foundation to deliver effective service management through new ways of working within digital organizations. This builds on concepts from ITIL 4 Foundation and the four Managing Professional modules, such a...

Every day, CIOs face the same daunting question; how can they effectively communicate the value of IT to the business? For any IT initiative, the confusion lies in identifying and quantifying its outcomes for the business. They need to challenge the business’ perception of ...

Roman Zhuravlev talks service management and why ITIL ® is not the work of a “crazy professor”! Service management is everywhere – and that means the economy becoming more customer-focused, intelligent and alive. With the exciting concept of digital transformation, o...

How can DevOps bring service improvements to IT service management (ITSM) in organizations and avoid throwing operations the “hot potato” of badly planned change projects? And what is the role for ITIL ® Practitioner’s 9 Guiding Principles – in particular start where y...

Many individuals, and even organizations, are convinced that there is real value in the guidance documented in ITIL® , but they struggle to know how to use that guidance to best advantage. ITIL describes a lot of best practices that could be followed, but as the saying go...

The ITIL ® Practitioner guiding principles are not independent of each other. You don’t start with focus on value then, once you’ve finished that, start thinking about a different principle. All nine guiding principles work together to help ensure you do the right things...

‘Digital’ is about customer experience and value For better and for worse, the societal, political and economic impact of information technology is unprecedented. As citizens and consumers, technology has made our life so much easier that it’s giving organizations a hard t...

AI is not the future: in fact, we’re seeing very much in the present. So the message to organizations (corporate and IT) is, simply, “get on board and start learning about it ”! If you don’t believe me, take the example of IBM Watson in healthcare . While no human can dig...

What is the future for automating IT services in an ITIL ® 4 world ? The latest evolution of ITIL has opened the conversation up, addressing the practices from a technological perspective as well as a business management one. But where are organizations on that journey ri...

Certifying in ITIL Practitioner has been an opportunity for growth and understanding of how IT service management (ITSM) delivers value in the government organization I work for. In fact, its 9 Guiding Principles have become part of my vision statement because I feel they...

Why is focusing on value – according to the ITIL ® 4 Guiding Principles – so valuable when providing services? We used to tell people: “Don’t focus on the technology you are managing; focus on services you enable or support with the technology.” Now, we must take the nex...

Over the past five years, I believe that – for some IT organizations – the ITIL ® concept of Service Strategy (SS) got left behind. Why is this? IT organizations have been buried in the “trenches” of an endless loop which includes immediate uptake of design, transition an...

The customer interface is the place where an organization meets its customers but in ITSM it’s something no one talks about enough, even though it adds so much value. In today’s economy, businesses revolve around the service experience: take the upmarket coffee house concept...

When I analyze the tangible results my organization has achieved as a result of employees being ITIL ® competent, the return is undeniable. The benefits of ITIL training are threefold: differentiation, service improvement and cost saving. Differentiation In 2012, lev...

Many people associate ITIL’s core books with managing incidents and problems. This focus on break/fix scenarios is probably historical, but the misconception is still very much alive. Having been an ITIL trainer for more than 15 years and practising even longer, the o...

Why is IT Service Management (ITSM) important to organizations? Executives, of course, want to measure systems, data and people and how the IT infrastructure and the provided services are helping end-users to accomplish their business goal more efficiently. In the past, onl...

My AXELOS is the new, online content subscription service to help you take control of your skills development and career in project, programme and IT service management. In a recent webinar AXELOS’ head of Professional Development, Amrit Saroya, and Global Marketing...

The Service Value System Welcome back! This post is the third in a series in which I connect the key concepts of ITIL 4 . In the last article , we briefly covered concepts such as multiple stakeholders, PESTLE, and the Four Dimensions of Service Management. In this articl...

ITIL Intermediate’s Service Design (SD) module provides one of the most important approaches to deliver a service that works and enables value creation. Without employing SD and, for example, moving to transition without much design and attention to processes there is a ...

Why should organizations think about creating a customer-focused approach to delivering services? And where do they begin? The experience of providing services during the current pandemic drives home a number of service management lessons, most prominently that the only path...

Programme Managers or directors play a critical role in an organization, often acting as the conduit between strategy and execution. Speaking in a blog post for AXELOS, The risks of promoting Project Managers to Programme Managers , Lindsay Scott, Director at Arras People, d...

A lot of organizations, experience frustration with their service desk. While that’s not a criticism – the majority get things done quickly – end users get annoyed by the speed of service desk support. Interestingly, what’s usually at fault is effectiveness rather than effic...

I have found the structuring principles of ITIL ® Practitioner extremely valuable for my latest project with a social services cooperative in Italy which, although relatively small in size, has ambitious plans for continued expansion. Having achieved double-digit growth ...

What is IT4IT and who is it relevant for? AXELOS’ ITSM Portfolio Development Manager, Roman Zhuravlev and Anton Lykov, Solution Architect for Micro Focus, discussed the IT4IT architecture model in a recent AXELOS webinar and this blog post offers a brief summary of their dis...

Organizations and professionals are facing an ever-changing world in which consumers are forcing faster responses to their demands. At the same time, there are internal tensions between the delivery team seeking to fulfil this demand versus the corporate teams they interact w...

Emma Arnaz-Pemberton, director of consulting services at Wellingtone Project Management put herself and her team through the new PRINCE2 Agile ® Foundation course with the support of Logical Model. What’s your principal role? I run a team of consultants and focus...

What is a programme? And how does the Managing Successful Programmes (MSP ® ) guidance and certification make programmes more manageable? A programme is a flexible structure in an organization used to coordinate, direct and oversee implementation of a set of projects to de...

What does it mean when we talk about a goals cascade in ITIL ® 4 Direct, Plan and Improve – and how can this enhance the work of service managers? In fact, there are different ways to look at a cascade: 1. Purpose Here, the goals cascade comes from purpose (for exampl...

Companies worldwide are now realizing that cyber resilience is not just a “good to have”, but a necessity. It’s no longer a question of if but when risks will emerge and when vulnerabilities are exploited with threats relating to information assets such as data, syst...

How is ITIL ® best practice important to people in IT operations teams getting “dirty” in the day to day tasks of managing changes, transition and delivering flexible and stable service? Well, I think that ITIL 4 Specialist: Create, Deliver and Support (CDS) gives them a ...

What should service management practitioners do after certifying in ITIL ® 4 Foundation? This is one of the questions I hear most often, especially from people starting on their ITIL journey. And it’s important today for people who have previously certified in ITIL v3 Foun...

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...

The PMO has evolved from a mainly admin/support function into an exciting career space – so how can today’s practitioners successfully navigate the different opportunities on offer? PMO is becoming increasingly popular as an organizational entity around project management...

Organizational transformation is built on ITIL ® best practices. And, from what I’ve seen from the frontline, the need for this still exists. In fact, there is so much work still to be accomplished among organizations that I could be busy for years and years! As a consul...

While my first exposure to ITIL ® came almost 30 years ago – working in tech support for the American part of Glaxo – helping organizations adopt and adapt ITIL has been a cornerstone of my consultancy practice for 15 years. In that time, I’ve seen ITIL help organizati...

As part of our Built on ITIL ® blog post series, one of our most prolific guest bloggers, Adam McCullough, shares his ITIL journey: was it coincidental for someone who was working at NASA to find ITIL helped his career “sky rocket”? Working in ITSM supporting NASA’s Kenn...

AgileSHIFT , one of the latest best practice solutions from AXELOS introduces a new concept, the delta. But what is it, and how do we use it? The purpose of the delta is to illustrate how organizations need to think in order to be more resilient to disruption . If we loo...

How should an organization undertake the transition from ITIL ® v3 to ITIL 4 ? But before the “how?”, maybe we should talk about the “why?”. ITIL 4 is the latest evolution in the best practice framework that has supported IT service management professionals and their org...

Value streams are without doubt my favourite topic in ITIL ® 4, because the concept makes clear how the overall value that a service delivers is a complex combination of sub-components. Now, to explain how value streams work I’d like to invite you for coffee: Going to ...

Digital transformation worldwide will pick up the pace in 2020. This is despite  the thorough planning required to move from legacy IT to digital transformation , which will entail analysing current practices and determining future outcomes. But organizations around the world...

How can organizations become more proactive about defining and making timely, significant changes to compete in a digital world? Most define their digital strategies to compete more effectively but, rather than starting with a clear vision, companies look to industry leade...

To my mind, one of the most useful additions to ITIL ® Practitioner is the Guiding Principles (GP). The Guiding Principles help focus on the essential aspects for a successful ITIL adoption. They provide a powerful checklist to those responsible for ensuring an ITIL deploy...

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...

Before we begin, let's define what culture is. Culture is a pattern of responses discovered, developed or invented during a group's history of handling problems which arise from interactions among its members, and between them and their environment. These responses are consid...

Combining different IT and ITSM frameworks for business benefit How do organizations that begin with basic IT service management (ITSM) processes progress their approach to become more service-centric? I often observe companies – in spite of today’s focus on digital tr...

Ten years ago, Bitcoin was launched, and James Cameron released his innovative film Avatar. And now think of all the changes we have lived through since then. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has created such a fast-paced and complex environment that organizations and individ...

When embarking on any project, the hardest part is knowing where to begin. But as the Guiding Principles of ITIL Practitioner recommend, my view is that you should start where you are. I recently put these principles into practice when completing a strategic review of our I...

In recent days, there’s been a lot of comment (in news stories , by pundit s , on social media, and in online forums) about how appalling it is that MPs are sharing passwords with their staff. Amid all that chatter, on a forum that I follow, John Custy ( @ITSMNinja ) mad...

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...

Like most people who have either project managed or worked within a project and have started their formal training typically starting with Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2 ® , I was no different. Working on my first ever business change project, the guidance was ...

The content of best practice methods and frameworks such as ITIL ® , PRINCE2 ® and MSP ® enables people to speak a common language of IT service management, projects and programmes. However, the terminology needs to be chosen carefully to account for tone and...

Understanding the needs of others is fundamentally at the core of good service. A working definition of a good service is the ability to address the needs and wants of an individual in the fastest and most effective way possible – whether it’s in a restaurant, at a hotel, ...

Change, release and deployment in ITIL ® help to ensure that what a requester – such as a service owner – wants can be delivered from a technical and feasibility perspective. I’ve seen this work effectively in the French national railway company, SNCF; but before we get...

When is a “dirty, mucky field” like your IT estate? Having mature existing practices, processes and controls that can’t be jettisoned; legacy technology sitting alongside new and a combination of waterfall and Agile/DevOps approaches – that’s your proverbial “mucky field”....

Managing IT assets has been a natural part of business for decades: where is the asset? What are you paying for it and from whose budget? From the service management perspective of “ providing value through technology services ” we rely on the assets to deliver the technolog...

The focus on customer experience has really taken off in recent years. However, customer experience won’t happen without employee engagement; having engaged staff means the company performs more effectively. Therefore, creating more engaged employees is what companies should...

The current pandemic has probably accelerated organizations’ plans for working from home by five years and digital transformation is now taking months rather than years. So, the world that IT organizations have been moving steadily towards – supported by the digitally-enable...

Lockdown has, I believe, ultimately changed all products to services and means that service managers will be needed more and more. Thinking about ITIL 4 ® , the co-creation of value is going to be increasingly important to service management if you want to understand busin...

If ITIL 4’s Digital & IT Strategy (DITS) module offers strategic guidance for leading digital transformation in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, it was made for 2020. In fact, we were still writing the DITS book when Covid-19 hit, forcing us...

Every service management implementation is a cultural transformation. And culture change is an even bigger issue for senior management than it is for IT and ITSM, as they need to recognize that for such a transformation to be successful, they need to lead and be role mode...

Being able to break through jargon is vital for effective communication, particularly when dealing with people who have little or no technical background. This is particularly true in change management where a breakdown in communication can potentially lead to failure in any ...

Yale University’s IT Service Management (ITSM) journey began in 2011, just before my arrival in 2012. At the time, the University had about 450 central IT staff and a newly appointed CIO who had arrived with a mission to create a world-class ITSM organization. ITIL ® ...

Just because you can connect a device to the internet doesn't mean you should. While connected devices (commonly called the “Internet of Things”) can deliver new services, there needs to be security, privacy and clear ownership of data. The endgame for the Internet of ...

In the past 30 years the Northern Ireland Civil Service has seen an increased focus on delivering change and less on “business as usual” activity. This demand for improved public services has changed the way these services are delivered and that requires a much more robust a...

Having spent an early part of his career in a business relationship management role as a Government IT Service Management (ITSM) contractor supporting NASA, Adam McCullough understands the purpose and value of Business Relationship Managers (BRMs) within organizations. In th...

ITIL ® can help companies improve effectiveness, efficiency and cost effectiveness by developing reliable data and consistent delivery, processes and tools. But when it comes to demonstrating the difference ITIL is making, and especially when the interpretation of valu...

Ten years ago, IT in India was a very different world to now: the country was the “back office” of the world, providing outsourced services in the form of Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) and Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO). During this period ITIL ® was the...

If you want to successfully deliver new products and services to keep your organization competitive in today’s changing world, effective project management is critical. The project management method, PRINCE2 ® , has been taken up by more than 150 countries and, by its prov...

Value for Stakeholders, PESTLE and the Four Dimensions Welcome back! This post is the second in a series in which I connect key concepts of ITIL 4. In the last article, we briefly discussed the concept of value co-creation, and I’d like to expand on that here. While value ...

The major reason I think ITIL ® practitioners should be looking at the Intermediate module – Release, Control and Validation – is summarized in one word: DevOps. DevOps has become the latest way to describe collaboration, agile, and leaner enterprise working but ITIL’s R...

As technology becomes more and more embedded in company processes, businesses need to look beyond the traditional ways of securing their organizations’ most valuable assets. This involves approaches that engage with people and understand their needs and perspectives on secu...

The global pandemic has accelerated the pace of digital transformation; this, in turn has put a new spotlight on the discipline of digital strategy. And the ITIL ® 4 Leader: Digital and IT Strategy (DITS) module is a timely guide to help organizations’ leaders understand ho...

The ITIL 4 practices are described as "sets of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective". Every practice includes familiar, service management processes while encapsulating more than previous versions of ITIL. Each begins with a c...

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...

Phishing , Trojan Horses, Malware, Whaling , Denial of Service – these are all terms that have become common currency in the world of cyber security. With increasing public exposure of global organizations’ cyber security vulnerabilities , the language of cyber threats a...

1. In your service management experience, how much of a foundation does ITIL ® provide? ITIL is “documented common sense”, useful when undergoing any transformation as an organization. Having that ITIL tried-and-tested structure in place helps to lighten the load and mi...

1.  In your service management experience, how much of a foundation does ITIL ® provide? ITIL is “documented common sense”, useful when undergoing any transformation as an organization . Having that ITIL tried-and-tested structure in place helps to lighten the load and m...

You may have heard about our latest guidance AgileSHIFT and wondered, what makes it different from other Agile products. After all, there are a lot of methods, methodologies and approaches that carry the name ‘Agile’, so why do we need another one? Well, the thing is, Agile...

The service level agreement (SLA) model has always existed in the world of IT in some form, as a promise to guarantee a level of service. For a long time, SLAs have offered very traditional approaches to measure what is perceived as quality of service by IT organizations. ...

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...

Susie Farquhar discusses why ITIL is “not only for big organizations” and can be used by organizations of any size. Is ITIL only for large organizations? Over the years in my consulting role I’ve encountered a number of people who believe ITIL isn’t for their organ...

How do you recognize and tackle the problem of silo working in IT? Picture the scenario: you’re in a meeting, discussing why something isn’t working; scratching your head and wondering how it can be improved. Most of the time the elephant in the room and the reason it’s not...

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 ...

AXELOS associate Toby Moore and Dr Tuuli Bell, partner manager at Tasktop Technologies explore the outlook for IT following the release of the AXELOS The Future ITSM Professional report . IT has evolved beyond recognition in recent years to become an integrated part of ...

All PRINCE2 ® project, MSP ® programme and MoP ® portfolio governance bodies want updates on how well initiatives are progressing. To do this, management dashboards are a useful tool. MSP programmes aim to realize benefits resulting from changes in organizati...

Organizations going through digital transformation can’t afford to use a tick-box exercise when it comes to using best practices like ITIL ® . Too many organizations find themselves going through the motions of adopting best practice when they need to. They might have good...

In the first part of this two-part blog post series on ITSM anti-practices, ITIL Expert Pavel Demin described the problems of being too focused on implementation, increasing process maturity, "join-the-dots" ITSM and the risks of fast-tracking change requests. This time, P...

What is human-centred service design (HCSD) and how does it add value to an organization? It begins when you start to ask the right people the right questions about how IT is performing. The right people are those using the IT! The principles of understanding customer...

It’s almost 30 years since the book, The Machine that Changed the World , described how the Lean approach transformed Toyota’s approach to manufacturing. Today, Lean approaches to IT and IT service management have become extremely influential. In the past couple of years...

ITIL ® 4 brought many modern concepts and approaches to Service Management. Many of those were previously thought to be exclusive to other areas like marketing and customer service. In this blog post, Airan Romero Savinon, Chief Operating Officer at Openser will cover the...

The blueprint is one of the core elements of programme management and the Managing Successful Programmes (MSP ® ) best practice guidance. In essence, it captures the capability an organization wants to have by the end of a programme, with all its features and characteristi...

The ITIL 4: Create, Deliver and Support (CDS) module is focused on the central engine of ITIL’s service value chain. Summarising a recent panel webinar involving Akshay Anand (AXELOS ITIL Ambassador), Barclay Rae (ITIL 4 CDS lead editor and consultant), Jon Stevens-...

Industrialization in any sector is initially driven by people with specialist, technical skills and knowledge in that area. With maturity, the sector becomes more mainstream, with the need for other generic business skills. IT is a perfect example of this – as our industry d...

How has the impact of the pandemic forced organizations to think differently – and how should they adapt project management and leadership to help them in 2021? Using what we call the “PMO triangle” helps us drill down into three key areas: People: The human element h...

This is the first in a series of conversations with Nick Wilding and leading cyber resilience commentators and practitioners from around the world. Who should countries and companies learn from when thinking about cyber resilience? Estonia has been described in tech pub...

With the new version ITIL ® 4, the discipline of Service Management has been catapulted back from the supposedly old, past world to the centre of current reality. No, not bureaucratic processes should manage services or products anymore. Rather, holistic practices are to be d...

QUESTION: I’ve gained the initial ITIL® qualification but I don’t understand what further training and development can do for me. Isn’t the ITIL foundation enough? Individual practitioners often see the ITIL foundation qualification as a way onto the ladder because busin...

Although an integral part of the ITIL ® Service Lifecycle, Service Strategy is probably the element most IT Service Management (ITSM) professionals are least comfortable using. In fact, even the word ‘strategy’ can strike fear into some IT professionals as, quite sim...

If you had to choose between following an agreed IT Service Management (ITSM) process, or focusing on value, what would you do? When assessing the Major Incident Management process for one of my customers, I recognized that while the process was well established and defined ...

Cyber security, today, is often very technology-based with a focus on technical issues such as firewalls and virus scanning software. While technology is an important part of the cyber defence, it is important not to neglect strategy in identifying what controls an organi...

Developing new applications with a combination of ITIL ® , DevOps and agile methods is transforming results for customers. While DevOps and agile are enabling better communication, improved analysis of customer needs and delivering a quality solution, ITIL adds incide...

What happens when you introduce the new PRINCE2 ® 2017 update to experts responsible for training and developing PRINCE2-certified project managers? It’s never easy to predict how people will respond when best practice guidance undergoes a change. So, we were keen to hear...

ITIL Practitioner is best practice guidance I use both in implementation as a consultant and in training people working in IT service management. Before the arrival of ITIL ® Practitioner there was, in my opinion, a large gap between ITIL Foundation and ITIL Expert ....

Working as the service lead for an outsourced IT company, my challenge is understanding what our customers’ businesses are trying to achieve. Customers expect new ideas and innovation based on what we see other companies doing across a host of industries. But, above all, th...

Today’s increase in cyber-attacks – and the resulting loss of valuable data and denial of services they cause – means organizations and individuals need to be better prepared to tackle this threat. What we all need is greater cyber resilience. AXELOS is partnering with Di...

We should “stop talking nonsense” about people being the weakest link in our cyber security, according to the head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre . Ciaran Martin, the organization’s CEO – speaking at the CBI’s Cyber Security Conference 2017 in London on 13 Sep...

When I first ‘discovered’ ITIL ® in the 1990s, it was both a revelation and like discovering a “family” I never knew I had. At that time, I loved that “family” because of how it took us where we needed to be. And it was needed because IT was largely run by people with ...

How can the higher education sector protect itself from and respond to a cyber-attack in the era of increased digital connectivity? AXELOS’ latest RESILIA ® discussion paper, Protecting the reputation of UK Higher Education with your most valuable defence: your peop...

Originally developed by Toyota in Japan, Kanban is a system for scheduling production using a physical board to show work in progress; essentially, it’s a process improvement method. Within IT departments it’s used to visualize workload by having notes on a board showing...

Why should organizations become agile organizations? Recent research outlined in The Evolution of the Agile Organization report from PA Consulting among 500 business leaders suggests the “top 10% of businesses by financial performance” are “almost 30% more likely to dis...

Providing ITIL ® 4 training has introduced me to a whole new range of people beyond the pure IT professionals previously attending ITIL courses . Now, I’m involved with people from sales, user experience and others from organizations with an interest in how IT supports the...

Organizations are now reacting to the need for high-velocity IT (HVIT) by exploring customer experience and methods like DevOps and Agile. In some of the more mature enterprises, they’re looking at ITIL 4 and recognizing elements of modern service management, but without f...

How can ITIL ® methods help transform the performance of a service desk supporting a multi-national business? Car dealerships in the Renault/Nissan Group – based in Switzerland and Austria – were generating 1,000 IT tickets per month, of which 75% were service requests an...

The current coronavirus crisis has pushed ‘home and mobile working’ onto the front pages. Self-isolation is critically important as we work towards preventing the rapid spread of the virus. But how can we isolate ourselves from a different threat whilst working remotely or a...

How does it work certifying in best practices such as PRINCE2 ® and PRINCE2 Agile ® via virtual classrooms and distance learning? Right now, when most people are working and studying in a context of social distancing , it’s the only viable option. I’ve been delivering co...

Amey Manjrekar was, until recently, in information technology at India’s Great Eastern Shipping Company – which provides tanker vessels for the energy industry. When writing this blog post, he had recently certified in PRINCE2 Agile® and described how the changing demands f...

Dmitriy Kolesnikov recently certified in the ITIL ® 4 Strategist Direct, Plan and Improve (DPI) module after attending an online training course. He’s a long-time advocate of virtual training and believes more practitioners and their employers could benefit from it. Tak...

Whatever people might think now about working life in the future, I think it’s safe to predict we’ll be operating in a new normal. The statement “I have to go to the office” will become a foreign concept, though a home working /office mix will probably remain. And the sh...

Most IT teams – from front line up to leadership level – are focused on technology and functionality. They focus less on how to drive forward the vision and strategy of the organization. What is interesting (and maybe unexpected) today is seeing IT teams trying to move the...

Using Kanban in projects is a simple and direct way to help teams increase their work efficiency by visualizing the workload. As part of the guidance available in PRINCE2 Agile ® , it’s a tool that should be in every project manager’s toolkit, especially in less complex en...

Everybody has to take care of projects in their professional or private lives. So, in a way we are all project managers. And if you think about it, you can apply PRINCE2 ® to a lot of these projects. In my spare time I work as a qualified London tour guide. So, the other da...

How has the pandemic lockdown affected the way project managers need to think about their work? On a practical level, we are so used to being in front of our boards and PMOs to get approval and support that many have found it difficult to re-structure and adapt. Admittedly...

Happy, safe employees generally stay longer at their organizations, are more productive, and cause fewer incidents. Successful leaders know this and actively develop safety cultures— climates in which people are comfortable being (and expressing) themselves—to make sure that ...

An international brewery company I work with is, in fact, two companies: a producer and a distributor of products to the hospitality sector. The company’s operations were forced to close from mid-March and relocate staff to work from home. So how did it respond to the lockdo...

The service desk practice is a huge part of ITIL ® and any organization as it highlights the importance of value in customer service. It sets the precedent for the customer/user experience and reflects heavily on the organization. The practice involves establishing effective...

How has lockdown affected the way project managers need to think about their work? The challenge has been primarily two-fold: first, technical and, second, how to do project management when the workforce is distributed. The technical challenge is about whether the tools ava...

In the pre-Covid world, what were the most important elements of customer service interaction and what’s changed? Taking the example of a restaurant, service was about managing the demands of customers such as their waiting time for a table, how long it took to get a menu an...

Best practice in IT, ITSM and the ITIL ® update: solving business problems and delivering value IT organizations operating anywhere in the world still remain too internally-focused. That isn’t me saying this. This is what we are discovering using our ABC cards (Attitu...

For many years, I’ve felt that I’ve been the official ITIL ® apologist in the DevOps community, because I’ve always believed that DevOps and ITIL should be able to peacefully coexist. But these days, I feel that a more activist role in the DevOps community is necessary -...

I started in IT back in the pre-Internet ‘dark ages’, over 35 years ago. In those days we were literally in the basement and nobody really knew what we did, we were the geeks of ‘IT Crowd’ cliché. When there was a major system outage it could take us down for hours, but the ...

As part of the CBI Cyber Security Conference 2018 , experts hosted a future looking session to “examine the latest threat intelligence and emerging risks for businesses in the cyber security landscape”. The panel considered what threat and risk issues boards need to be addr...

P3M3® v3.0 is – in the world of best practice guidance – the “big one”. This latest version, the newest since 2008, will provide PPM consultants and organizations they work with the evidence for whether projects, programmes and portfolios are working or not and their return ...

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 knowled...

The new ITIL ® Practitioner qualification is about giving IT Service Management (ITSM) professionals practical guidance that allows them to truly adapt and adopt ITIL® in their organization. Practitioner is very much going to be about continual improvement as much as...

Does it matter whether companies can predict their future and the potential impact of cyber risk? According to the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), it does. For companies reporting year ends from 30 September 2015 onwards, and driven by the need for greater transparency in...

This blog (abridged from my original 3000-word version) isn’t meant to be a review of the new ITIL Practitioner Guidance publication, although you might feel it sails close, and instead talks to the content that stands out for me, i.e. the stuff that will really help the read...

There are a number of challenges faced by IT Service Management (ITSM) professionals in the operational space but, broadly speaking, the ITIL Practitioner can be used to address three key areas: measurement; communication; and education. Measurement Metrics are often a...

Project management and IT Service Management (ITSM) are evolving and, as a result, are becoming more interlinked. The reason for their entwinement is simple: it’s part of a move from ‘traditional’ project management approaches that focus on producing a deliverable to a more...

Using AXELOS’ best practice for programme management - MSP (Managing Successful Programmes) - can come in useful in the most unexpected situations - even beyond the workplace. Several years ago, I became involved in a local parents’ campaign about the lack of secondary ...

Many IT departments struggle when trying to adopt Kanban, especially at first. Whether they are moving from an established but ad hoc work management structure, or from a more standardized traditional IT Service Management (ITSM) work management model, they often find it hard...

One of the reasons why businesses overcomplicate processes in transition projects is because they are trying to develop an approach that meets all the principles of best practice. Quite often, the people in charge or accountable for transition projects want to achieve perfec...

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...

There are a couple of ITIL ® processes that you really can’t avoid. Continual service improvement (CSI) is one. If you’re not improving, you’re stagnating. And though you might not yet have a strongly-developed CSI concept or framework, you must assume that most peop...

Recently, I have been lucky enough to attend some excellent events in the IT service management (ITSM) space. I have noticed some reoccurring themes running through the presentations and networking discussions, which was affirmed by the talks I attended at Pink17 . There a...

Obtaining an IT Service Management (ITSM) certification such as ITIL ® Foundation always requires an investment of time and money and begs the question: is it worth it? ITIL Foundation gives you the opportunity to put theory into practice immediately. This is important a...

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...

In today’s world, you would be hard pressed to find a business that doesn’t use IT. And where there’s IT, there’s IT Service Management (ITSM). When taking my ITIL ® classes, I met people from all walks of life who wanted to learn about ITIL: people from government cont...

In the world of best practice frameworks there is a risk that people jump on the latest thing, believing a particular framework is the answer to all their problems. As a species it seems we chase the one, universal quick-fix that doesn’t exist! As an expert who’s been worki...

1. In your service management experience, how much of a foundation does ITIL ® provide? One of the benefits of ITIL as a foundation is that it has created a common language across organizations, by establishing both basic terminology and the processes they define. It also...

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...

The discipline of project management is evolving rapidly, but what does this mean for the project manager? Lisa Hodges, principal consultant at Cornerstone Service Management, explains why the future belongs to project manager 2.0. At a recent conference one of my fello...

Organizations are going through a period of constant change in how they do things and having to leave behind the mindset of “that’s the way we’ve always done it”. As ITIL ® says, it’s a matter of focusing on customers and what they want. From an IT service management (IT...

With the digital disruption of markets, regulation and a need to maintain competitive edge creating a vision of a future organization, along with having an effective vehicle to deliver that, is absolutely crucial today. Organizations may achieve good project management pr...

After 14 years’ working in project management-related roles in complex environments, Andrea Vecchi – now Head of PMO at solar power company, Sonnedix – was introduced to programme management. Here he recounts his learning and certification journey, including 12 months of st...

AXELOS guest blogger, Charlotte Morison, has been providing training and consultancy to companies for more than 15 years, helping them satisfy customers and achieve strategic objectives through improving business processes including IT services and functions. How effecti...

There is a pressing need to start graduating US college students with basic practical knowledge of how to operate in IT organizations and other change environments. Students with a recognized project management certification such as PRINCE2 ® are more likely to become eff...

There is often rigorous debate about whether an initiative should be categorized as a portfolio, a programme or a project. However, adopting any methodology needs to be appropriate for the level of change required as each portfolio, programme and project methodology or produc...

When I got my start in IT, I found myself in a service operation role without even knowing what it was! I was part of an initiative in which Service Operation (SO) and ITIL ® were at the heart: consolidating IT operations management and incident ticketing for a radiology ...

To be successful in the current environment of rapid, concurrent and never-ending change, organizations must grow their agility not just to thrive, but to survive. Agility is the ability across an organization to move and adapt quickly. A high degree of organizational agility...

Over the past few weeks most classroom training courses around the world have been cancelled, causing a major impact to the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of trainers and training vendors everywhere. Not only are these people worried about the wellbeing of their family d...

How can you easily enhance your continuing professional development (CPD)? The My AXELOS online subscription service, providing career development tools and resources aligned with ITIL ® , PRINCE2 ® and MSP ® best practice, has listed its top CPD content accessed b...

Remote working for many companies during this lockdown has proven the proverb: “necessity is the mother of invention”. In other words, if you’re forced to do it, you make it happen. US companies have often struggled with remote working ; it’s too early to tell which organiz...

Why is a service management office (SMO) an important function today – and how should it interact with a project/programme management office (PMO)? To operate successfully in a high-velocity IT world, organizations need to progress iteratively, collaborate and automate. Ther...

In an era of adaptation and better ways of working in the context of continuous performance improvements, people have inevitably expanded their skill set and capabilities. Much of this change has stemmed from the shifting of roles and organizational structures in response to ...

In this blog post, Alexei Kuvshinnikov , an accredited PRINCE2 ® 6th edition trainer with 20+ years of international project management experience, explains how to include intangible benefits in the Benefits Management Approach.  Project benefits can be tangible or in...

Culture is one of the most important elements in service management but has rarely received more than lip service about “soft skills”. Successful change projects are affected very much by culture so it’s necessary to call out aspects of it that matter and therefore need mana...

Organizations planning service management for 2021 have a raft of unknowns to contend with. At the macro level we are currently presented with the biggest set of variables we’ve known in a generation. Of course, Covid-19 is the stand-out – it means a 2021 business operating ...

Okay, I don’t usually quote Shakespeare, but there’s one line that I’ve remembered since I was at school in England. It comes from Othello : “Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself.” All the publicity aro...

I was working with a client recently, helping them plan ways to improve the management of IT user support. When I came to review the advice I offered them, I realized that other organizations might find the same advice useful, so I have created three blog posts highlighting ...

At AXELOS, we like to explore new ways of working, as well as new ways of learning. One such way is experiential learning (or ‘learning by doing’ as it’s more colloquially known). Earlier this year, Paul Wilkinson from GamingWorks proposed running the Grab@Pizza simulation...

The IT Infrastructure Library – the original name for ITIL ® – is, officially, not in use! In fact, we haven’t actively used the name since the formation of AXELOS five years ago. However, as recently as last month there was debate on Twitter about what happened to the I...

What are the ITIL training questions that a tutor hears from trainees time and again? As a useful resource for all practitioners, I felt it was worth bringing the “usual suspects” of topics together in one place: What is an accreditor, an ATO and EI? AXELOS is the accredi...

Programme managers juggle a wide range of challenges and many will get a buzz from bringing order to chaos and under-performance. All will want to avoid the pitfalls of change. Here are five change mistakes that a good programme manager will avoid in situations the really e...

What are the different approaches and benefits of programmes and projects in organizations? Rajiv Khanna assesses the differences and how the Managing Successful Programmes (MSP ® ) and PRINCE2 ® project management best practice principles and certifications can help. ...

Taking the MSP ® (Managing Successful Programmes) Practitioner exam puts you on a pathway to a proven best practice method for managing transformational change in organizations. Programmes are the delivery mechanism for this level of change, defining an organization’s f...

People and organizations seek out the reassurance in structured recommendations from sources like ITIL ® . These sources essentially articulate in a cogent and accessible way the learning from others who have been in the same place before them, facing the same challenges...

Project management and transformation practitioners Stephen Dowling and Stephen Callaghan have been sharing their 'Adapt or Die!' ideas with organizational change practitioners in Australia. AXELOS caught up with them to find out what this means for projects and project man...

Recruitment in the project management market in mid-2018 finds itself in between times: the recessionary economy of post-2008 and an emerging state of recovery. The relatively high availability of people during recessionary periods means employers don’t have to try too har...

Digital transformation offers organizations the potential to compete, stay relevant and reduce the cost of delivering services to customers and running business processes. IT service management (ITSM) provides a structured process, approach and common language along wit...

Cyber security has been thrown into the limelight this week with allegations that the North Korean government is responsible for hacking into Sony Pictures’ systems and leaking four films at a cost to the studio production company of tens of millions of pounds. This follows ...

The IT architect title is used to describe a range of jobs varying in scope and responsibility but, in summary, the architect team is responsible for developing, maintaining and governing the ICT solutions across an organization. They are also tasked with making sure technol...

Working on projects to develop new software with developers in a different country - in other words, remotely - poses certain problems that cry out for the practical approaches enshrined in ITIL ® Practitioner’s guiding principles. The scenario I describe, unfortunately...

Why is working in silos a problem in technology and how can the ITIL Practitioner guiding principle of “working iteratively” help? In one service provider company, there were four silos operating very different service delivery models and different ITIL processes, therefore...

I started life in IT as a technical support assistant about eight years ago and I have worked in a number of different organizations. In that time, I’ve often been the only woman in the IT department. There are few IT women in Kenya due to a mix of cultural and practical rea...

Configuration Management requires a disciplined approach to be functional. It’s about having a record of your systems, what’s happened to those items and the details of the relationships between the items on your list. It’s commonly used in IT, military or commercial aviatio...

In response to the AXELOS The Future ITSM Professional report, AXELOS associate Toby Moore and Dr Tuuli Bell, partner manager at Tasktop Technologies, explore emerging issues in a key function of IT: The Service Desk An effective Service Desk is key to a successful IT...

How do people working in IT Service Management (ITSM) measure success and – more importantly – what should they measure? What tends to happen in ITSM is people measuring against internally-focused metrics: the number of incidents, service level agreements on incidents, the ...

From medical, banking and automotive, to retail and hospitality, ITIL ® best practice is being used in more and more industry sectors to improve business performance. Why is this happening? Because ITIL is a proven industry best practice that takes a holistic view of p...

CEO Javier López Casarín’s group of companies in Mexico is adopting ITIL ® best practice principles – including ITIL ® Practitioner – as part of programme to raise service quality standards and increase professionalism. Here, he describes why the group has emba...

The much feared GDPR compliance date has come and gone. You have located the personal data your organization processes and ensured you have a lawful basis for processing it. You have published your privacy notices etc. Hopefully, as part of your readiness projects and progr...

IT service management – at the turn of the century and before ITIL® v2 – was as difficult to manage as landing on the moon and finding a state of anarchy. But – in my career post-ITIL v2 – I discovered a common language, a glossary, definitions of service level agreements ...

Executive Summary We all are aware of the three fundamental principles of People, Process and Technology. Every organization focuses on these three elements. The people factor in all the above has been limited to reskilling in new technologies and training on methodologies a...

Organizations that previously set up IT processes that lasted for years are now preparing themselves for new ways of working – and a “machine” of constant change. Running in parallel to this has been the introduction of alternative ways of working – such as Agile methods a...

As Christmas looms, families everywhere are trying to decide how to celebrate. It’s been one crazy year, and that craziness has infected (no pun intended) all our assumptions and expectations about typical festive holidays. You may be wondering if there’s any point to celebr...

The coronavirus pandemic has led to major changes in the way that business is conducted in terms of interfacing and interacting with customers and organizations’ internal processes. This may well result in the commissioning of multiple projects to formalize and de-risk the n...

IT as unsung heroes? Really? Who are your heroes? Growing up, maybe your heroes wore capes and fought crime . Maybe they were the characters you found in books and on TV. Right now, in the middle of an unprecedented challenge to our health and wellbeing, you'd probably sa...

As many US service managers will know already, ITIL ® 4’s biggest strength is its holistic and comprehensive nature, without being overly prescriptive. Practitioners will also recognize its affinity with other methods and frameworks such as Agile, DevOps, Lean and COBIT. Bu...

Before any discussion about ITIL's "adopt and adapt" approach, it's important that we dispel some ITIL myths. The principal myths state that ITIL is: Useful for large organizations only Bureaucratic Time consuming Non-Agile Prescriptive. Traditionally, ITIL's commun...

Improving IT Service Management in 2015 For me the main issue with improving ITSM is that we often spend too much time contemplating our own navel instead of making things happen! As an industry we are very good at theorizing and discussing ideas both old and new, but makin...

Eddie Vidal hosted the recent session at USA service management conference, FUSION14, where AXELOS Product Development Director, Frances Scarff presented her thoughts on project/programme management and ITSM. Here, he reflects on conference learnings and the state of ITSM in...

Though a performance analytics and testing company, SOASTA use ITIL ® best practice to consider key processes for any application lifecycles and have applied them to their development methodology. In this blog, Dan discusses a little of what they have learned so far. ...

As part of our Professional Development Programme , AXELOS has outlined the skills and competencies needed in a wide range of roles across IT service management and project and programme management. In this blog post, Pauline Brown – Service Operations Manager at the Un...

Gary Warzala is the former SVP CISO at Visa and has also held senior roles in information security and IT risk management at Aon and GE (General Electric). In 2014, he was a trusted CISO adviser for a major retailer following a serious information security breach. In this...

The effect of IT service management (ITSM) transformation or improvement initiatives is not only about the business; the mental and emotional impact on the way people work and behave is a major factor – not everyone likes change. That’s why collaboration – one of the ...

I read an interesting comment by AXELOS Head of ITSM Kaimar Karu that “…the ITIL of the future is from practitioners, for practitioners.” As a result, I keenly awaited the release of the ITIL ® Practitioner Guidance so that I could use it to assess and improve my ITIL prac...

CIOs have overall responsibility for IT strategy within a business and are accountable for the governance and management of IT resources. In most organizations, the CIO is someone with a broad knowledge of IT and is able to provide vision and leadership in all aspects of IT...

The issue with Delta Air Lines’ computer system on 8 August 2016 created chaos for travellers around the world. The official reason for the systems crash was a power outage, initially described as something outside of Delta’s control, a claim that has  not been backed up by t...

As consumers we expect a high standard of service. Either with your cell phone provider, mechanic or energy company, we’ve got used to certain standards and being treated by businesses in a certain way. Yet in a business-to-business context – including IT service management...

Good P3O governance is about ensuring that all key stakeholders have a clear understanding of the portfolio, programme and project boards that are focused on 'changing the business' and how it aligns to the corporate governance structure that is focused on 'running the busine...

When is an incident a major incident? An incident becomes major when the potential impact or urgency is considered significant. This means different things to different organizations, but ultimately it depends on business goals and objectives and is defined by each organiza...

If ever there was a time to deliver efficient and consistent business change in an organization it is now, particularly with ever-increasing budgetary pressures to do more with less. What the Portfolio, Programme and Project Office (P3O ® ) guidance provides is a decision e...

Organizations today are struggling to stay responsive and effective in the face of constant change. Most are struggling just to catch up with, let alone get in front of, the accelerating turbulence that seems to infect every industry being impacted by ‘macro disruption’: A te...

The idea that there should be a disconnect between IT and the organization it operates within is, clearly, an insane proposition. Over the past 40 years we’ve recognized that there should be alignment, indeed convergence, between business and IT – and yet we’re still ...

Among many things, ITIL ® teaches us about accountability, boundaries and consistency. Therefore, it’s important to know who is accountable when a service goes down or there’s a change to a process . Having it documented means that anyone can see who’s accountable. That’...

My AXELOS, the new content subscription service from AXELOS, includes access to digital badges for ITIL ® , PRINCE2 ® and MSP ® certifications plus CPD in each area of knowledge. But why is investing in digital badges an important part of demonstrating your credibili...

There is a famous saying, that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but I’m going to break the code here and share my views and feedback from Pink19 .   Although this was my first experience of Vegas, I knew what to expect having enjoyed several movies based in ‘Sin City...

As an experienced ITSM professional I am fortunate to have a wide network of colleagues and friends within the sector and from the many conversations I have had, I came to the realization that most of us are unhappy with our IT service management tools . This got me thinking...

What are ITSM anti-practices? They are the bad practices that have become prevalent as organizations try to tackle service management challenges. Akshay Anand, AXELOS’ Product Ambassador for ITIL ® , has referred to “Watermelon SLAs” , check-box ITIL implementation and en...

What does ITIL ® 4 have to do with the eternal, human practice of storytelling? Though you might already believe it instinctively, there is substantial research into the importance of narrative and storytelling to human beings. For example, a study that exposed people...

The ‘age of the customer’ describes how modern organizations need to meet rapidly changing customer expectations and also anticipate their future needs. With technological advancement occurring at an unprecedented rate, increasingly, what distinguishes one organization from...

How is the ITIL 4 guiding principle “collaborate and promote visibility” important to organizations today? Many organizations remain siloed, whether by function, process, product, territory or other types. And within the silos, people tend to focus on their tasks and objec...

Management of Portfolios (MoP ® ) introduced the concept of ‘ clear line of sight’ , a technique that seeks to ensure a transparent chain is continually demonstrated from strategic intent through to benefits realization. That is, a clear understanding of the positive cont...

Happy International Women’s Day ! This year, we are celebrating some of the exceptional women we work with at AXELOS. These women are experts in their fields and respected leaders in their thought-communities.  We ask a lot, but they always come out on top and deliver amazi...

John Edmonds – who joined AXELOS in 2018 – was the classic, "accidental project manager" in an era before best practice and when project management was done through trial and error. Here, he charts his journey to training countless professionals in PRINCE2 ® while a...

The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted the virtual training market and in many companies, training has taken a back seat. For some people, virtual training has never been a realistic option. They either don’t have a computer at home, only absorb information if presen...

When quantifying the scale of corporate cyber threat, the figures alone tell a sobering story. As reported in The Economist's recent special report on cyber security, 800m data records were lost last year as a result of cyber-attack, despite estimated worldwide spending of £...

There are, as you may know, a few key differences between agile and traditional waterfall projects, when managed using PRINCE2® . Traditional waterfall projects are delivered sequentially, whereas agile projects tend to be iterative and incremental. Traditional project p...

I was working with a client recently, helping them plan ways to improve the management of IT user support. When I came to review the advice I offered them, I realized that other organizations might find the same advice useful, so I have created three blog posts highlighting ...

With continuing digital disruption, customer-focused organizations today more than ever need a portfolio-centred approach to both strategic planning and product delivery. An effective P3O model for any organization therefore seeks to build on, and better coordinate, the cont...

Update January 2020 Hi everyone, I thought it worth providing a quick update. Most of the changes mentioned below have been made. However, there were 3 changes or clarifications that I wanted to share now: The new definition of Problem appears in the glossary only. The ma...

I was working with a client recently, helping them plan ways to improve the management of IT user support. When I came to review the advice I offered them, I realized that other organizations might find the same advice useful, so I have created three blog posts highlighting ...

Let’s begin by defining the senior responsible owner`(SRO) role. The publication Managing Successful Programmes ® (2011 edition) describes the SRO as the individual responsible for ensuring that a project or programme of change meets its objectives and delivers the projec...