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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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

When it comes to ITSM programme management, Continual Service Improvement (CSI) through ITIL ® is an opportunity to add value that exceeds customers expectations. Get to know the customer The first step in a contract should be a kick-off meeting and, where possible, d...

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...

Reality TV show Shark Tank panellist and entrepreneur Kevin O'Leary always asks: “How do I make money” when presented with any product. The value to him is simple – getting the biggest return on investment with the least amount of risk. Focusing on value is extremely i...

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...

Understanding the power of frequent product releases – typical in agile projects – needs some prior reflection on the more traditional approach to product release, i.e. waiting until a product is built and then releasing it into the system. With that comes a certain feelin...

How agile are we in IT service management (ITSM)? I’ve seen numerous different companies claiming to be agile while – in reality – they’re not. If we refer for a moment to the ITIL Continual Service Improvement (CSI) model, the first step is to define the vision and prop...

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...

Why are C-suite level managers wary of allowing Agile product delivery methods in their organizations? More and more businesses have adopted Agile approaches in the 20 years since the launch of the Agile Manifesto. However, some leaders remain nervous about investing million...

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 ...

How does the legalistic, adversarial and prescriptive nature of the business contract stand a chance of working in the “change-friendly” world of agile projects? While typical contracts specify a solution or output, plus a deadline and price, agile methods work on the prem...

IT transformation alone – as a functional concept – might deliver a good process outcome. However, the difference between that and digital transformation is like standing on the face of earth and then travelling to stand on the moon. Having just certified via the ITIL ® 4 ...

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...

One element of PRINCE2 ® that I use on every project I’m involved with is product-based planning. This PRINCE2 technique is especially useful for putting a plan together which comprises the “shopping list” of the things that my project team needs to create to deliver...

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 ...

I ’m often asked how to apply agile principles in project management to ensure customers get the end product they need. Knowing what a final product will do – and how it will do it – is essential; defining that clearly is the purpose of a requirement in the PRINCE2 Agile...

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...

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...

“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...

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...

Hitesh Patel demystifies the role and qualities of the Service Delivery Manager and where ITIL® Practitioner’s best practice guidance can support their work: Service Delivery Manager (SDM) is a role many people struggle with within IT Service Management (ITSM) and, for...

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...

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, ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Rarely does an organization design its project management method from scratch. Instead it needs to be aware of the standards, best practice methods and bodies of knowledge related to project management (e.g. BS 6079 , PRINCE2 ® , PMI’s PMBOK ® and APM’s Body of Knowle...

The IT Service Management (ITSM) mindset in 2017 needs to shift, both culturally and in ways of working that are about breaking down barriers and silos. This means embracing agile service management and moving away from long-term projects of process and improvement. Yes, th...

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...

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...

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...

Cultural transformation should have been on top of the agenda for organizations years ago. The fact that it wasn’t will now be very apparent to some, as they try to navigate the new business challenges presented by the Coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic. This includes the compl...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Projects fail for a number of reasons: while it’s dependent on the industries you are working in, there are some reasons that are more prolific than others. For example: Unclear scope and success criteria Lack of buy-in and engagement Lack of change management skills U...

‘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...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

Organizations can use the introduction of GDPR in May 2018 to learn more about their customers while building customer loyalty and increasing efficiency. According to John McDermott, EMEA Portfolio Manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the new regulations are a busine...

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 ...

It’s fashionable to convey confidence in a standpoint or outcome by incorporating the phrase “100 percent”. If I gave such an absolute level of assurance when managing a project, I suspect my customers would soon become disillusioned with me as I have never delivered 100% o...

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 ...

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...

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...

Continuing her series on the Most Common Questions from PRINCE2 2009 Foundation Training , Lead Trainer Michelle Rowland addresses some of the most frequently asked questions from Chapters 7 through to 10 of the PRINCE2 2009 textbook . Chapter 7 Why do we have t...

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 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 ...

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...

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...

Any discussion of project management in the USA demands the question: “how well are we doing?” I’d like to say that Project Managers are doing a good job in delivering projects on time and within budget along with all the scope and quality the customer expects. However, th...

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. ...

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...

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...

Steven Deneir – a project, programme and portfolio management trainer and coach with 20+ years’ experience – highlights his top four tips to agile project management success and reiterates the importance of ongoing learning and certification in approaches such as PRINCE2 ®...

As the world has kept moving, we’ve been exploring more about managing customer journeys, value streams and leveraging cultural models to improve the velocity of IT . So, as things have evolved ITIL ® needed to change to reflect that; consequently, ITIL 4 is very much a tr...

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...

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 ...

According to the recently published AXELOS PPM Benchmarking Report 2019 , project managers are facing multiple challenges in their day-to-day roles. PRINCE2 ® is becoming more important than ever when we examine some of these key challenges and how PRINCE2 can help. ...

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: ...

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...

In the second of a two-part blog series, ITSM and organizational change expert, Karen Ferris continues her exploration of organizational change management  (OCM) by looking at managing and reinforcing change. She also considers the knowledge and tools available in ITIL ® ...

Why, in project management, are small projects treated as the “poor relation”? Many Project Managers aspire to manage large projects and programmes – large, transformation activities with high visibility, significant resources and a lot of kudos! As such, an aspirational Pr...

Like their traditional counterparts, organizations that are struggling with Agile face the lack of executive involvement . Despite Agile’s success in addressing software development issues, it hasn’t addressed strategic leadership. This is where I believe the real issue i...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

What does de-centralized IT look like today and how is high-velocity IT (HVIT), as addressed in ITIL 4 , enabling it? Digital organizations need to provide rapid and immediate responses to customer needs because they demand quick action, whether they are internal or externa...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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 ...

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...

As an organization are you interested in attracting top talent? In growing your business? Providing your employees, the tools they need to be successful? If you are than you need to create a learning-centred work culture. Our re cent ITSM and PPM benchmarking surveys sho...

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...

And just like that, we’re done with Day 3 of Agile 2018 ! I’m hoping that by now any readers are aware of the previous two posts about days 1 and 2, but if not...here they are: Day 1 Day 2 The last hurrah - final thoughts from Agile 2018 The focus of the po...

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 ...

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...

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...

Siloed working has always been one of the most common issues in IT and IT service management (ITSM). The lack of contact across operations teams, lack of knowledge about what design and development is happening and low collaboration is very painful for IT support, leading ...

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...

What do project managers need to have “top of mind” when working on projects involving agile delivery methods? A handy checklist within the PRINCE2 Agile ® best practice guidance outlines the salient points to be aware of – and these are captured under four headings: 1 C...

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-...

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. ...

What has 2017 meant for project managers and what is coming around the corner in 2018? Karen Ferris of Macanta Consulting looks ahead to the challenges facing project managers and their organizations next year. The need to be both waterfall and agile in projects ha...

There are several reasons why you might need to tell the story of ITIL . Maybe you’re trying to get your current employer to adopt a process, pitching to get some additional training budget or explaining how your organization uses ITIL as part of a new business bid or te...

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 ...

Information and communications technology (ICT) – whether in-house or outsourced – is fundamental to 99% of businesses today. As Chief Financial Officer and part of AXELOS’ executive leadership team, having a close relationship with our ICT team is crucial, as is understand...

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...

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 ...

In recent years there has been a profound shift in the pace and extent of change. The need to develop an appropriate response to that is the reason behind the development of AgileSHIFT ® – a guide to help prepare individuals and organizations for transformational shift by ...

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...

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 ....

The way big businesses are applying Agile methodology has seen a distinct shift. Where once Scrum was limited to team frameworks, it’s now being used at a much broader programme and portfolio level by the likes of Google, Apple and Spotify. Why? Because these large organi...

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...

How do you know whether ITSM is delivering what a business and its customers need? Some organizations decide to answer that question by measuring their IT Service Management (ITSM) maturity. This might be prompted because of a need to improve, or they’re investing in transf...

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...

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...

How does an organization instil the required discipline to align portfolios and hold itself to account? Step 1: Business forecast New market opportunities drive strategic change . This means the first step should be to look at what kind of an organization you need to b...

What qualities define the practitioner who has studied and certified in ITIL ® 4 ? This person is what we call “T-shaped”: a specialist-generalist with great depth of expertise in one area but also a breadth of knowledge across other disciplines. Why is this important in ...

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...

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...

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 ...

What do individual people know about using agile delivery methods for projects that organizations don’t? According to AXELOS’ 2016 PRINCE2 ® Report , individuals are embracing agile methods more than organizations: 81% in a sample of 2,400 see the value of working in an ag...

Studying the risk management dimension of the RESILIA Foundation course will enable people to better understand what is a threat, a vulnerability and an asset in the context of cyber resilience and how they combine to create a risk to the business. One way to understand the...

What is digital strategy and how can ITIL ® 4’s strategy management, workforce and talent management and Organizational Change Management practices support organizations on that journey? This and more were the focus of a recent webinar featuring ITIL 4 authors Davi...

Herding Cats with PRINCE2 ® Let me introduce myself - I’m Tom, a Project Manager. I recently started in my new role and my team are… well, they are a little hairier than I first expected. And when the job description said strong stakeholder management, I didn’t realize this...

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...

In the early days if ITIL ® , many IT Service Management (ITSM) practitioners saw the various job roles in play as pretty understandable - the overarching role of the Service Manager and the individual Process Manager roles. But with the evolution of ITIL in 2007 it appear...

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...

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...

With the current global situation, many organizations are – for the first time – facing the challenge of managing a global team working from home. Under normal circumstances, and with the right infrastructure, the concept of virtual working is already part of many peoples’ d...

What should we call organizational initiatives that are focused on the long-term as well as short-term and recognize their wider impact on society? I’d call that responsible project management . The new generation of people growing up today are more switched on to the be...

One of the most dangerous things for people in organizations to say is: “We’ve always done it this way.” While employees often don’t question or challenge the status quo , enterprises today are having to transition from the way they might have been doing things for decades....

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...

As more and more people turn to Agile frameworks over traditional project management methodologies to help enhance project capabilities and deliver outputs, it’s important to highlight that Agile is not a panacea for poor project management. At this point, let's distinguish b...

Continual Service Improvement (CSI) is a key lifecycle of ITIL ® : but why should business focus on CSI and what benefits does it actually bring? To explain why businesses should focus on CSI it’s probably easier – and more powerful – to explore the organizations th...

I spent the first fifteen years of my career in engineering project management , so moving into digital development has opened up a completely different working environment for me. But although the two industries are worlds apart in many ways, I have found that PRINCE2 ® a...

Why should companies be exploring full agility at product level instead of at project level – and what does this mean for project managers? Markets and competition are evolving so fast while digital resources are enabling organizations to respond very quickly to changing de...

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...

In the final post in her series on the Most Common Questions from PRINCE2 2009 Foundation Training , Lead Trainer Michelle Rowland addresses some of the most frequently asked questions from Chapters 11 through to 18 of the PRINCE2 2009 textbook . Chapters 11 and 12 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Understanding the difference When looking at outputs and outcomes it is important that IT service management (ITSM) professionals understand the difference; all too often we focus only on our outputs and the processes rather than thinking about the outcome and what we are ac...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

There is an important question for project and programme professionals in 2018: now that you’ve passed your test, how are you learning to drive? By this I mean that, presently, colleagues who have passed their best practice foundation and practitioner examinations are not ...

Since good governance is about the processes for making and implementing decisions, then effective governance and accountability structures are vital particularly if organizations are to successfully use an agile approach to deliver business change through the investment of p...

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

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

Digital transformation – as imperative and unavoidable as it is – offers a double-edged sword for organizations. The latest Digital Transformation Study from Constellation Research, a Silicon Valley-based research and advisory firm, looks at the state of digital transforma...

According to the AXELOS 2019 PPM Benchmark Report poor communication is the primary cause of project failure. An advantage of adopting a method such as PRINCE2 ® is that it provides a common language that makes it easier to communicate with critical stakeholders. This al...

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...

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...

For many project managers, their role in Benefits Realization is viewed as 'not my job' or out of scope for their role. This attitude will be the death of the 'old school' project manager in a world that is much more socially conscious and holds people accountable for the...

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...

PRINCE2 ® 2017 Update co-author, Robert Buttrick, looks at how the latest update of PRINCE2 helps organizations to design their own corporate project management and change approaches. While PRINCE2 can be used to run a single project, it can also be tailored by or...

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...

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...

As some of you may know, this week I’m attending the Agile Alliance conference, Agile 2018 in San Diego. The event run by the Scrum Alliance brings together many of the leading thinkers on everything agile for a whole week of talks, discussions and much more. For my part, I...

What do project sponsors need to understand before starting the agile journey and how can they ensure a successful project outcome? Increasing globalization, advances in technology, volatile markets and rising customer expectations are just some of the factors driving tod...

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...

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...

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...

Since my introduction to ITIL ® best practice guidance at the beginning of the Millennium, an important lesson I've learned is that ITIL is guidance not gospel. Fast forward to 2016 and the launch of ITIL Practitioner brought even more clarity to the guidance and...

Organizations are dealing with change at a massively accelerated pace. Few can escape this disruptive influence but many need to re-think how to operate in this new dynamic – something Agile leaders are ideally equipped to manage. Traditionally, change has been initiated fro...

The lack of “strategic mindset” capability is – I believe – a clear and present problem in industry. Where, previously, there were generalists with broader skills, today we have more specialists – or subject matter experts. This is not inherently bad, but it has forced some ...

When organizations are not managing projects effectively, it means the value that should be delivered by projects suffers. I believe this happens in a multitude of industries, and it is impacting businesses’ bottom lines. The solution is for organizations to recognize the b...

We’re living in an environment where most organizations will need agile practices – methods, projects and DevOps – in order to respond to the market. Equally, most organizations still have to run some projects with a more traditional and methodical approach; that means oper...

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

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...

One hundred percent of US Fortune 100 companies use the ITIL framework to manage, govern and keep their IT environment safe, so why isn’t ITIL training a priority at all of these organizations? In the past, product lifecycles were longer. You would develop a product, pu...

When considering your ability to deliver projects, programmes and manage portfolios, you should always consider things from an organizational perspective first. Sounds obvious, right? Though this thinking is not new, it has been gaining a lot more traction in recent yea...

Stakeholder engagement is absolutely vital whether you are operating in a portfolio, programme or project activity. It is the means by which you gain support for your change initiatives allowing them to progress through the organization. Stakeholders generally do not appre...

Strategy is more relevant than ever as a competence in service management. It’s a leadership skill and everyone working in operations, project management or in senior management needs to have some level of leadership skill; leading ourselves, leading teams and working cros...

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...

Within every organization processes change, new technology is brought in, new policies are implemented and organizational structure can change too. IT Service Management (ITSM) initiatives often involve changing how people carry out their jobs and if you’re changing the way...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

In this first blog post of a series, Julia Gosse, trainer at SPOCE Project Management , considers organizations and their staff that have already adopted PRINCE2 ® : What challenges do PRINCE2 practitioners and their employers face with the concept of agile project deliv...

What are the factors that make a strategic programme work? a question that might have helped the set rebuild project of the BBC’s flagship soap opera in the UK, “EastEnders”. The UK Government’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) recently published a report into the transform...

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 ...

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...

We are often using terminology and words that we haven’t agreed the definition on. Oh, but there is a definition you might say! Yes, but using a definition of terminology that is defined in a global, universal context is only a starting point, we need to make the definition ...

What leadership techniques and understanding of behaviour should project boards and project managers use for organizational transformation? Set the strategic vision Taking the example of AXELOS’ work on updating PRINCE2 ® in 2017 , our vision was focused on the se...

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 ...

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...

ITIL is being challenged by ‘shiny new’ philosophies, methodologies and frameworks that have recently laid claim to the work practices of service management professionals. But how valid and viable are these new approaches and how do they relate to the ITIL ® framework ...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

The principal objective for a project – delivering a specific output – can often be relegated to a focus on standardization. And very often this standardization of the project management processes boils down to completing a set of project templates. I’ve seen this happen very...

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...

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...

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...

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...

A recent poll of City of London bosses by the Financial Times called on companies to hire a “younger generation of boardroom directors to head off the systemic threat that cyber risk poses to the financial system”.¹ I welcome business leaders openly discussing the signi...

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...

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...

To take Bill Clinton strategist James Carville’s famous quotation and apply it to the world of project management: “It’s the benefits and value, stupid!” But as Dr. Harold Kerzner of IIL revealed in a recent AXELOS webinar , 70% of companies fail to achieve the bene...

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’...

What drives employee engagement today and how can organizations and their people remain passionate about customer experience?   A recent AXELOS panel webcast explored how having motivated staff is good for business, customers and employee retention. These insights were sh...

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...

In the international bestseller The 7 habits of highly effective people (Free Press, 1988), Steven R. Covey describes an approach to being effective in attaining goals by aligning oneself to what he calls the ‘true north’ principles of a character ethic that are universal...

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...

A new year often brings transition and new beginnings. And, in that spirit, we are bringing you a new PRINCE2 ® . Though the existing PRINCE2 is fundamentally sound – and has become the world’s most practised project management method – we have reached a tipping point a...

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...

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...

It was the marriage they said could never happen but AXELOS has managed it. What were thought to be two polar opposites, PRINCE2 - symbolizing control, accountability, order – and agile – symbolizing self-organization and equality, have been reconciled in the new PRINCE2 Ag...

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 ...

If your key stakeholders and end users aren’t happy, nobody’s happy. Key stakeholders can make or break the success of a project, even if all the deliverables are met and the objectives are satisfied . I was thinking recently about what added value I bring to the success ...

It’s a natural response for many IT organizations to think about how implementing tools can be the solution to IT problems. But it’s a big problem, as there’s no magic pixie dust sprinkled over a tool and it can affect people negatively as much as positively. This issue ...

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...

Today’s organizations are subject to continual change and the rate of change is increasing . There are many dynamic and contradictory factors for this; including innovations in technology, changes in the economic, social and political landscape, and more demands from regulat...

We have recently published the third instalment of our Global PPM Benchmarking series and it makes for compelling reading. The report has been designed to offer market insight into the status of project and programme management highlighting the growing trends and key issues...

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...

Projects in business are about change: introducing new products and capabilities and making improvements. Digital transformation – something we hear frequently these days in the USA and elsewhere – is very much about applying digital IT solutions to change the way organizati...

What does the future hold for IT service management (ITSM) and project management professionals? Since we launched AXELOS Membership it’s something that we’ve been wanting to explore, especially from a skills perspective, which is why we embarked on this project. The r...

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”....

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...

Setting the scene: ‘…The rolling green hills of England, the buttercups painted a golden yellow by the early morning sun, cows lying in glistening dew cloaked fields, the gentle buzz of a bee in the scent filled breeze... a stark contrast to the high-tech hum of the sterile ...

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...

We have often discussed how technology and new frameworks have changed our service management practices and how we need to adopt and adapt them. Still as we know there is another key pillar: People. People are often the last step in any improvement plan. Trainings are the f...

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...

As organizations and their leaders start to prepare for what the “new normal” will be, they would benefit from a structured, best practice approach to this journey. Using a tried and tested method, such as PRINCE2 ® , helps address a number of critical challenges of change. ...

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...

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...

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

Over the years there have been many studies and white papers that look at the difference in the performance and attitude of motivated and non-motivated staff. Happy people give great service and therefore it makes sense to take time and effort to invest in the people that are...

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...

LocWorld is a localization conference that I’d wanted to attend for several years. Localization, for those of you who might not have come across the term, is the process of amending a product so it works in a local context. Traditionally, this was primarily about translatio...

This will be the final post from my time here at Agile 2018 . It’s been a packed week yet in the same breath I only feel like I have scratched the surface of the content on offer. I want to end this little series by sharing a couple of thoughts from the last day, but also de...

While Scrum has become the standard for agile software product development, many Scrum users are demanding a kind of umbrella for managing more complex projects where more than one team is involved. Similarly, many “well-established” Project Managers would like to know the ...

If you think companies are out of the “cyber woods” in terms of risk, then you should think again. The latest research from insurance organization, Aon Risk Solutions , finds 90% of senior executives saying cyber risk is “not fully understood”, while 80% say companies are ...

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. ...

Nicola Reeves, Service Management Consultant at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, describes the value ITIL ® Practitioner brings to organizations, especially when it comes to change management. Having completed my ITIL training to the highest level, I was keen to understand...

The risk of being held to ransom is no longer just a phenomenon of the physical world - the digital world is subject to the menace of Ransomware . Ransomware is where an attacker renders your computer system and your data unavailable to you through encrypting your data and ...

Robert Burton explains why he feels that ITIL shouldn’t be viewed as a prescriptive regime. There is a common misconception that ITIL is a rigid set of tools, procedures, and processes and if you don't follow what’s in the books, it’s not ITIL. With this approach,...

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...

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...

In Agile, Minimum Viable Bureaucracy (MVB) refers to a way of having just enough process to make things work, but not so much as to make it cumbersome particularly when applied to portfolio, programme and project direction, management and delivery practices. It’s about findin...

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...

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...

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...

How true to life are the so-called projects being managed by the so-called Project Manager on The Apprentice? What problems do they encounter and how do they deal with them? How should they be dealt with and how would the PRINCE2 Agile ® guidance handle things? The seri...

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. ...

Project Office Managers, or P3Os and PMOs for short, are the crux of a project, programme or portfolio support office. Giving strategic guidance, support and coaching, PMOs lead the team to deliver best practice and standardize their approaches to project execution. In this...

While organizations might choose to flatten the hierarchy and decentralize decision making, everyone in the organization needs to step up and lead – especially in organizational change management (OCM) . Think for a moment about the Total Football concept pioneered by the ...

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 ...

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 ? ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

While setting up a book club, I decided to adopt some PRINCE2 principles , themes and processes to help structure the running of the book club. As a result, my research on book clubs was more thorough and my plans better detailed, making starting and running the book club mu...

Agile – it’s such a simple word but one that can cause so much misunderstanding. More and more of us are being asked to ‘be more agile’ in the way we work. We’re being called to be more adaptable, show greater agility, and to be more responsive . And it’s easy to see why, a...

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...

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 ...

The world is changing faster than ever and so organizations are experiencing more changes more often, with every change having an impact on something. To effectively implement all but the simplest of changes, managers need to be able to understand and manage projects, no mat...

How do you decide when to continue with a project – even when it’s horribly late and over budget – or when to stop it altogether? The new Berlin airport , for example, is scheduled to finally open this year, after its original opening date in 2007 was repeatedly delayed, co...

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...

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...

Is Agile IT Service Management (ITSM) an official term and is there a body of knowledge behind it? The simplest answer is not really. I have seen this term several times over the past few years, but never dug into it until I realized that we need more agility in the current...

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...

Those familiar with Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2® will know that the value of the universal, process-based project management method is that it can be applied to any project regardless of  type, organization, geography or culture. It can be used for any project...

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...

Enterprise agility is almost mandatory today. Digital disruption and the rate of change is stimulating product development, raising customer service expectations and altering the technology landscape forever. Any organization unable to read, respond and adapt to these cond...

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...

Q: When is an iceberg not just a large block of ice that can sink ships? A: When it’s the hidden iceberg of attitude, behaviour and culture that stops an organization getting the full benefit from implementing ITIL ® . For example, a large European bank had adopted ...

The use of agile delivery to deliver large scale digital programmes is now is at previously unknown levels of maturity. In fact, it has got to the point where I can’t think of a serious web development team not using some kind of agile method. Equally, it’s difficult to imag...

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...

How to be successful at dating using the seven principles We are approaching the – at least officially – most romantic day of the year, Valentine’s Day. A day perfect for dating. But what has this to do with project management ? Well, PRINCE2 ® is designed to suit any proj...

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...

"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...

Those of us at TSO who work as close partners to AXELOS are extremely committed to understanding how the content and products we publish are used by our customers. One of the ways we do this is to take training courses and exams using the same materials they have access to...

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 do you prepare your organization for an agile project? Naturally, this depends on the project; but if it’s a major technology project with a digital outcome , then using agile methods will probably be a significant shift for your organization.  Where your organizationa...

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 ...

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

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...

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...

Why is the ITIL Practitioner Guiding Principle, Be Transparent, so important to get right? A lack of updates about incident resolution can create complaints and an image of a service desk “black hole” in an organization. How does this happen? At times, incident resolu...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

The discrepancy between reports and reality is something that I see frequently within organizations because, as the animation below explores, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are often developed without proper consideration and understanding of the reasons behind the measure...

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...

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 "S" factor - sponsors and stakeholders - are critical to the success of any project or programme. And ensuring these vital people are actively supporting you and your team depends on how successful you are at "managing upwards". People tend to "buy into" programmes as t...

Are you getting the very best from your PRINCE2 ® best practice knowledge? Sometimes, it’s useful to have a handy reminder of the key points you need to think about at any stage in a PRINCE2 project. My AXELOS has created a series of templates covering the bre...

If you believe Darwin was right when he said that survival is about being adaptable to change, it is fair to say that the decisions you are making today about the change projects being delivered in your organization are crucial to ongoing survival of your organization. Over...

Agile is such a hot topic at the moment with clear recognition that agile approaches are increasingly important to fast-paced, organizational change. It’s definitely up there as important to the future of the project management profession and the people in it. Project...

Projects and project management are about delivering change that your organization values. Doing that needs task orientation: you focus on what needs to be done, by when and to what quality – the founding pillars of project management . That same task orientation can le...

Having spent most of my career in delivery, I wanted to share my views on what makes a good  programme management office (PMO) . It's no secret that, at times, the programme manager and the PMO don't always see eye to eye, so I wanted to explain some of the system dynamics...

A project doesn’t end with delivery but with the realization of its benefits to the business. So why is corporate strategy still not being fully communicated to the project team and what steps need to be taken to ensure that it is? Without a clear understanding of corpora...

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...

Projects and programmes can be highly emotional environments, where everyone is under pressure to deliver . Some team members may not even have experience of working in this way, which means they need extra care, understanding and guidance. For the project manager, having t...

When first trained in project management, the skills I learned complemented the technical knowledge I needed at that time to function as an engineer. However, I eventually realized that project management techniques are useful for people anywhere in a business: things like...

The Project Sponsor is accountable for the project; or, put another way, the Project Sponsor is the “owner” of the project and the business case that supports it. A sponsor needs to be actively involved and committed to the project in order for it to be successful and shoul...

Christian Tijsmans is founder of Connect the Dotz and Paul Wilkinson is the owner/director of GamingWorks How critical is cyber security training for organizations? Not-for-profit IT governance body, ISACA said in its State of Cybersecurity report that 82% of board dire...

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

In 2017, people working in IT service management (ITSM) have shown a real openness to change and new ideas. There has always been a discussion that “a change is needed” in the ITSM world. Still a lot of initiatives have started and died unnoticed, or after a ton of negative...

I’m a big believer that projects are a product of the people who are involved in them. Of course, an agile framework and clearly defined measures of control are essential but, based on my experience, people have to enjoy what they’re doing and want to work together to ac...

Which partnership has the most influence on a project’s success ? Though it may not be top of your list, the one between project manager and sponsor (SRO) is arguably the most critical. A positive working relationship between these two roles will help keep the project on tr...

One of the major challenges for IT is that it still operates in a silo . An organization might understand its strategy, but the IT goals are often not aligned with the strategy; equally, there may not be a holistic view across the business and IT. This needs a mindset s...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

Scene 1: The work area. Brent, the famous systems engineer from the Phoenix Project, is sitting behind his laptop – which is covered with DevOps enterprise summit stickers. On the wall behind him is a poster of the new corporate values ‘ We delight our customers ’ is one of ...

Recently I had a fascinating meeting with the chief executive of a start-up company who are about to disrupt an established market – this was always going to be an interesting discussion! They have established that there is a ‘Delta’ in the performance of existing companie...

Having a background in Agile-focused learning, certification and roles for more than 12 years, I previously had less interest in ITIL ® . So, you might wonder why I’m now certified in ITIL 4. I’d had some ITIL training and learning at university and there were elements I...

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...

What is a key difference between a traditional and an agile project manager ? You can recognize the latter today as someone more focused on facilitating and supporting a team. For example, a traditional project manager would expect to present an estimated project bu...

What does cyber resilience mean to company directors and why should they care? The recent, high-profile incident involving Sony Pictures’ IT systems being hacked provides a comprehensive answer in itself. A company the size and sophistication of Sony should be able to defe...

Rameez Chikhalia, Commercial Analyst at AXELOS describes how PRINCE2 can help finance teams improve communication and collaborative working. What’s your role within the Finance team? I work in the Finance team at AXELOS, providing support in two key areas. Initially, my...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

When asked what his songs were about, Bob Dylan once responded, “Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve”. When people ask me what I do, and what a project manager does , I’m often tempted to give a simil...

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...

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...

With Continual Service Improvement (CSI), the six step CSI model is my secret weapon to ensuring IT Service Management (ITSM) practitioners implement changes and service improvements efficiently, effectively and continually . So, what are the six steps and how do you follo...

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...

Project management is under pressure – and organizations aren’t doing enough to get the most value from it. According to AXELOS’s PPM Benchmark Study 2017 – The Value of Project Management Excellence, about three-quarters of project managers are facing the dual challe...

What is the importance of detailing the benefit profile of a change programme? At a time of significant change – such as now, when organizations’ entire business or operating models could be transformed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic – benefit is everything. It is ...

This is the second in a series of conversations between Nick Wilding and leading cyber resilience commentators and practitioners from around the world and also Nick's second discussion with Karoliina Ainge, head of Estonian cyber security policy. In 2015 AXELOS launched i...

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...

PRINCE2 training, as with any new learning experience, yields a lot of new information for Project Managers to learn, and breaking that information down into smaller chunks can make understanding it a lot easier. So, with the textbook in mind, here are some of the most co...

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 ® ...

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...

Having worked in IT service operations for nearly 30 years, I think the most important ITIL Intermediate certifications are Continual Service Improvement and Service Operation (SO). Training in SO has given me a better understanding of how things come together from beginni...

How well-prepared is the UK’s workforce for a cyber attack on the companies they work for? What generally dictates the capability and performance of anyone, working anywhere is the relevance and effectiveness of the training and learning they’re given and the behaviours they...

The PRINCE2 ® 2017 Update arrives as organizations around the world are on a maturity curve towards achieving consistency, greater efficiencies and cost savings. This has led to a growth in organizations developing their own approaches to delivering projects based on sta...

Why is it important to plan a project and why are project plans not taken seriously enough? Planning is an integral part of our everyday lives and is perceived as a natural process, such as deciding what to do at the weekend. So why do some people still see it as a tick box...

PRINCE2 ® is widely recognized for providing a method for successful project delivery. However, aspiring project managers need to consider their certification – any certification – as only part of the greater whole which provides an experienced and well-rounded pro...

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

Project management is all about risk management. Risk management is the key that helps you predict the future and have things ready in your “back pocket” to “fight fires”. However, you can extinguish only one “fire” at a time so risk management helps you spot the pos...

In the third instalment of our blog series looking at why PRINCE2 Agile ® offers a suitable best practice guidance and certification option for people working in project management, Julia Gosse, trainer at SPOCE Project Management , considers project managers who hold no ...

Many professionals are given the responsibility for running projects without even realizing it. Although this can happen for any number of reasons, in my experience, there are generally two routes into this “unofficial” project manager role . Does this sound familiar? The ...

Project management is like a board game and PRINCE2 ® is the playbook. If you follow it, the project is successfully delivered and you “win the game.” If not, things are much more likely to go wrong. Guidance is there for a reason I believe the reason projects fail is la...

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 ...

We spoke with Michelle Oluoch, who works at LVCT Health in Kenya . Her organization promotes HIV prevention, testing, care, and treatment and fights against sexual and gender-based violence. What is your professional background? I have undergraduate and postgraduate degre...

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...

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 ...

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...

The British Computer Society’s outline of essential business analysts (BAs) skills these days includes elements of project and programme management. Looking closely at advertised job roles’ listed requirements suggests that additional certifications such as PRINCE2 ® , PRINC...

Personal information is an asset that can create more value for customers, hence people want to share their data with organizations. However, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) says we have to manage their data properly. From 25 May 2018, this applies insi...

The transition from project to programme management means being able to adapt and to draw upon a set of different skills as programme management is more than just being able to manage multiple projects. Where a Project Manager can deliver against a set of pre-defined goals a...