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In this ITIL ® 4 Q&A, Dinara Adyrbai explains the development of the 34 management practices and how they relate to ITIL processes: Q: Processes in ITSM are about structure, defined inputs/outputs and objectives – with ITIL 4, do we need processes anymore? A: Yes, we...

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 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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

“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 do IT professionals certify in ITIL ® and PRINCE2 ® ? In the space of eight months, Service Process Controller (within Change Management tower) at Fujitsu, Balaji, achieved three certifications: PRINCE2, ITIL 4 Foundation and PRINCE2 Agile ® . We asked him why: While ...

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

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 ...

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...

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

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

No matter how sophisticated an organization’s technical controls, there is always a risk of attack. In this day and age, with the great speed at which technology is advancing, the constant evolution of threats makes it impossible for any business to be 100% protected; what th...

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”....

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...

You only have to be a casual follower of the news to see that cyber attacks and the resulting damaging data breaches are happening with greater frequency. TalkTalk and JP Morgan are just two of the latest high profile companies to show their vulnerability to cyber crime....

Automation today, and certainly in the future, can do many things equally if not better than humans, providing efficiency and cost savings. Ideally this also allows people to do more interesting work. The opportunity is clear that – as artificial intelligence becomes yet m...

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...

AXELOS' "Cyber Stories from the Frontline" brings to life the reality of cybercrime for organizations today and from the perspective of those who have first-hand experience How often do we hear stories of how multi-national corporations have been hacked via third-party s...

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

Scott Harberd shares his experience of implementing PPM software during a period of transformation and change for one of the UK’s largest airlines. Following a period of rapid growth and promotion to the FTSE 100, the organization was outwardly successful but highly i...

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...

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 ...

PRINCE2 is one of the world’s most popular project management methodologies, so congratulations if you’re studying to take the Foundation exam; having the PRINCE2 certification will prepare you well for job roles both within and outside the world of project management. But b...

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

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

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

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

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. ...

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...

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 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...

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...

How can you use ITIL ® to address real business problems and add value while bringing along people who might be resistant to change? Progressing iteratively means that changes (in effect, smaller changes) are easier for people to stomach and you’ll get a better level o...

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...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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

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...

What’s the point of training people in project management best practices and then not using their new-found skills? Clearly, there is no point; however, this seems to be an issue among organizations according to the latest AXELOS PPM Benchmark Study 2017 – The Value of Pro...

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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...

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

Configuration management is an area often underestimated by businesses. Creating a configuration management database (CMDB) isn’t necessarily that difficult but actually using it correctly within an organization is. This is because configuration management also involves orga...

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

What can ITSM practitioners learn from getting involved in problem-solving simulation activities? For example, the Apollo 13 simulation – something offered by accredited trainers – replicates the NASA event made famous by the phrase “Houston, we’ve got a problem”. And i...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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 ® ...

As part of our ITIL Practitioner Global Summit Michael presented a session on Small scale ITSM implementation and ITIL Practitioner . Watch the video and read his new blog post also discussing this topic. How do you apply a large, comprehensive framework like ITIL ®...

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: ...

The 2017 update to PRINCE2 ® has brought the best practice guidance up-to-date with new ways of working and thinking. Remaining current is, I believe, critical for something that has grown and become the industry standard through its flexibility and suitability to any pr...

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

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

According to the Project Management Institute , ineffective communication leads to project failure one third of the time and compromises the project’s budget half the time. I always go by this mantra: people deliver projects not processes and tools . In order to emphasize...

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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 ...

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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 ...

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

Are you a person who wants to get things done and be successful but lacks the time to make big changes or to start anything complex and new? Based on PRINCE2 ® processes, though taking a more lightweight approach, we have created a brief, practical guidance paper using...

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

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

Continuing our series of blog posts on PRINCE2 Agile ® Foundation certification, Allen Philip Abraham – IT project consultant – who took the course through Logical Model – explains what he learned from the experience. With an IT functional background and solid opera...

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

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...

Emma-Ruth Arnaz Pemberton looks back at her career in project management and the role that best practice professional certification has played. Like a lot of people, I “fell” into project management without any formal qualifications. I was working abroad at the time an...

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

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

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

Ever had the nightmare of your company being hacked and it making national news? Have you ever stood in front of your board and felt like saying ‘I told you so’? This is exactly what happened to one CSO (Chief Security Officer) in our real-life C yber Stories from the Frontl...

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...

If your organization doesn’t change it will probably do one thing: atrophy. It’s not sustainable to remain the same - do that, and you’re writing your own obituary. Like it or not, change happens. The world, people and technology change and organizations need to maintain th...

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 ...

More and more organizations are finding a need for their employees to have project management knowledge because the work people do is increasingly project-based. Not only that, but as the world becomes more complex and advances in technology are made every day, project acti...

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 ...

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...

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...

While security threats are constantly evolving and becoming more sophisticated our industry’s approach to cyber safety has - in the main - not developed at the same rate. Frequently, businesses have a ‘set it and forget it’ approach, tackling cyber security when an employee...

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

ITIL ® 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...

PRINCE2 ® can, and should, be “tailored”. That means being flexible in your use of PRINCE2 when delivering projects rather than applying the method rigidly. Unfortunately, this is something many people have struggled to grasp about PRINCE2 and, as a result, shy away from us...

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...

Why is it becoming so vital to equip your staff with the training and knowledge to be more cyber aware and ultimately cyber-resilient? At the end of 2017, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) , an offshoot of GCHQ, revealed that the ‘WannaCry’ hack – which knocked out...

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 ...

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

It’s a challenging time to be a programme or project manager: expected to deliver more with less, responsible for multiple change initiatives simultaneously, facing a range of internal and external pressures and embracing agile methods . This is the world according to prof...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

I received the Project Mandate in October 2016.  It was clear and concise. “Run the Bournemouth Half Marathon on 8 October 2017 and raise awareness and funds for Target Ovarian Cancer ” . Starting Up A Project process was triggered and I created the Project Brief. Th...

In this, the first of a series of blogs on the use of PRINCE2 outside of traditional project management roles, we speak to Dan Verghese, Head of Digital at AXELOS, on how the guidance helps in the management of digital projects. How have you used PRINCE2 during your caree...

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...

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

The focus on tailoring in the PRINCE2 ® 2017 Update is about taking only what you and your project need to ensure the right approaches are in place for success. This idea of cutting the best practice guidance down to the size you require is a crucial and useful change to...

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...

PRINCE2 Agile ® arguably offers the best of both worlds, so why aren’t more Agile practitioners embracing this collaborative approach?  In the past five years or so, I’ve seen a growing recognition within the Agile community that controls, governance and oversight are...

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, ...

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

Despite being an experienced project manager, I keep the PRINCE2 ® Practitioner book on my desk and refer to it often, especially when starting a project. I think that’s the important point: If you want to be a project management professional you need the PRINCE2 Practit...

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...

Does your organization have a problem with delivering projects and are you wrestling with the question: “how do we start to improve our projects?” It might seem like a simple question but the answer is more complex. This is because there is no universal right answer, as dif...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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

Taking an ITIL v3 Foundation course and sitting the  Foundation Exam  is a great way to start your ITIL journey. Following on from our blogs on how to prepare and what to do during the examination , here are our Top Tips to help you once the exam is over. Relax. ...

If you’re intending to take the Practitioner qualification, a little groundwork while studying for the Foundation exam will pay dividends later on. The Manual The Practitioner exam is open book, meaning you can consult the manual during the exam. The only book you can take ...

How can change management – across portfolios, programmes and projects – really be embedded in organizations? There is – today – a major shift in how organizations view the proposals they receive for achieving effective change. Now, they are turning their attention more to...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

In the UK, the two popular project management methods, APMP and PRINCE2 ® , have divided opinions in the project management arena for years. Some project management practitioners will view one as being superior to the other and some employers similarly will have a prefere...

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

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...

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

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

If you think of process improvement in IT Service Management (ITSM) as having a clear linear structure, you’re probably thinking about it the wrong way. With process improvement, you’re never really done. Typically, process improvement activity happens reactively rather tha...

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...

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

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

Many people can change roles in an organization and – suddenly – from being a specialist, operational person they’re thrown into managing a project . The “accidental project manager” might have leadership and management skills for business as usual (BAU) activity plus cre...

“A vision is a picture of a better future. In MSP ® it is the basis for the outcomes and delivered benefits of the programme. As such it is a vital focus and enabler for the buy-in, motivation and activity alignment of the large community of stakeholders involved in any prog...

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 ...

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

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

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

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...

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

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 ? ...

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

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

Within my own organization, we’ve used the principles of ITIL ® Practitioner to ensure we’re working more effectively. And that has involved taking a “helicopter ride”. The release and deployment team’s objective is to release about 20 new and quality courseware titles to...

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

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...

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

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

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...

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

Many organizations go into Agile assuming it to be a “silver bullet” for numerous business management issues. Managers may have attended conferences or read articles where forward thinking companies, such as Amazon, Netflix or Toyota, are held up as positive case studies. ...

It may seem at odds with purist Agile thinking, but project managers are increasingly finding themselves allocated Agile projects. This trend is partly because Agile projects have become the norm rather than the exception in a number of disciplines, such as IT, where digit...

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...

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...

When I was a junior consultant, I viewed project assurance with more than some trepidation. The scrutiny poured on my work by the manager felt like a school examination (which I was not passing). I had been cramming the previous night, checking project descriptions, ensuring ...

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 a beautiful city Riga is! Described as the ‘Paris of the North’, it struck me as quiet, incredibly clean and with the widest pavements (boulevards?) I’ve ever seen. Everyone also seemed to be tall, but it wasn’t my imagination – a factsheet in the hotel informed me that ...

I firmly believe that emotional intelligence (EI) and communication are integral to the development of project management and key to shaping its future. So, it doesn’t surprise me that they are recognized in this year’s AXELOS PPM benchmark report 2019  as “specific skills ...

I first discovered PRINCE2 ® when I moved to the UK from the United States and, I can honestly say, it was an eye-opener. It both reinforced the project management theories explored in my early training years and provided guidance on how to use them. Instead of guessing ...

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

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...

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

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

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

In this two-part blog series, ITSM and organizational change expert, Karen Ferris explains the importance of organizational change management and reviews the knowledge and tools available in ITIL Practitioner to support change professionals with OCM. Organizational cha...

When summing up project management in 2017, one word dominates: convergence. Convergence has been happening for a while and is founded on having a common understanding of project management and its underlying concepts. For example, if everyone involved in the project shar...

It is October 2019. We are in the middle of the ITIL 4 refresh programme, having launched ITIL 4 Foundation in February and ITIL 4 Managing Professional Transition module at the beginning of this month. We are also about to launch two more Managing Professional books and ...

Politics often throws up examples of highly memorable, and equally emotive, language designed to make voters think a certain way about a particular party. The UK’s current election fever is no different, with politicians coining the rather loaded phrase, “Weaponizing the NHS...

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...

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 ...

PRINCE2 Practitioner training and how it has evolved It’s been a while since I first discovered PRINCE2 Agile™ I was part of a delivery team that I had just joined in a technical/development role and we were implementing a new DBMS (database management system) and data ware...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

When thinking about cyber resilience, just how important do you believe the people in your organization are? All your people, from top to bottom? You have heard the expression, ‘ People, Process, and Technology’ a thousand times. But which is the most critical of the three...

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 ...

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...

Project teams are increasingly becoming virtual in one form or another. This can include working across different geographies, time zones, firm-wide boundaries and with third parties. Projects can cover a number of different countries with virtual teams and as Project Manag...

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...

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...

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 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...

Should IT organizations worry about culture when adopting the ITIL ® framework? It is a misconception to think that they shouldn’t . Although cultural change - both behavioural and procedural - should begin long before a significant change, such as adopting ITIL, ...

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

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 ...

What is the difference between leadership, management, and governance? Peter Drucker said that “leadership does the right thing while management does things right”. But why is it important to distinguish between them? Issues arise when people confuse the roles, and while...

Periodically we can all start to feel under-valued for what we do. Whether it be getting the credit and recognition we want for our work or just a few more pounds and pennies a month in our pay packages, it is a perfectly normal and reasonable thing to want. That said, aski...

Is there room in today’s organizations for both AXELOS’ PRINCE2 ® method and PMI’s IPECC (Initiating, Planning, Executing, [Monitoring and] Controlling, Closing)* framework described in the PMBOK ® Guide ? While PMI* provides an excellent framework for the management ...

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...

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...

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

Hannah Mason, project manager at Octopus Group, recently studied and certified in the latest versions of PRINCE2 ® Foundation and Practitioner. Here, she talks about the newly-updated certifications and how PRINCE2 helps her day-to-day work. Certifying in PRINCE2 has...

What is effective project and programme governance and why is it important to define and establish governance arrangements for success and the realization of benefits? T he focus of many organizations , particularly in the public sector, is how to reduce the cost of opera...

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...

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 ®...

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 ...

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 ...

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

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...

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...

Agile  is fast becoming the ‘must-have’ methodology requested by many operations directors… something that may be more the result of an impulse purchase in an airport waiting lounge bookshop than coming from a deep understanding of the topic. That said, I must admit that le...

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

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...

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

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 has been an element of every job I’ve had. As an events manager and global assignment consultant, planning and organization were key. But it was only when I took the leap to concentrate on project management as a career that I found out just how diverse,...

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

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...

Organizations are going through rapid change, often driven by digital technology and changes in local and national priorities. Therefore, it’s important to have a central repository – the PMO – where organizations have an oversight of all change initiatives and are able to...

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...

Why is now the time for organizations and their teams to move to Agile approaches in project management? At this moment, as the world is experiencing so much uncertainty, complexity and way more unknowns than knowns, the best way to deal with it is through an agile mind-s...

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...

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...

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...

A recurring challenge in large organizations is the lack of trust among practitioners, teams and people that are using different methodologies. Many “agilists” use language that non-agile trained people don’t understand which can lead to distrust within a business and in te...

What is a PRINCE2 ® Champion and what does that person bring to an organization? The PRINCE2 Champion is capable of supporting an entire enterprise – from frontline delivery level to the boardroom – by demonstrating how using the PRINCE2 principles effectively will delive...

My good friend, Hannah Simmons, used to be CFO at a large multinational food company. If you’ve read Whaling for Beginners , you’ll know how my simple (careless) mistake sparked a chain of events that led to her getting pushed out of the company. I downloaded an innocent ...

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

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

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...

Project managers - by their very nature - generally don't start a new project without an underlying belief that their project will be a success. However, what should sit alongside this optimism at the outset of a project is an equal dose of realism and a willingness to ask c...

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...

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 ® ...

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 ...

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...

What is the importance of Continual Service Improvement among ITIL Intermediate ’s lifecycle modules? Adam McCullough explains how the module empowered him in his role as an ITSM professional. Continual service improvement (CSI) is something every business has t...

Passing the ITIL ® Practitioner certification is a significant achievement. It shows you can take the ITIL framework and adapt it to real-life situations. The following tips will improve your chance of passing your exam. Studying for the ITIL Practitioner exam and getting...

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...

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...

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

Working in ITIL ® adoption has given me a steady stream of employment in broader, more engaging roles and a significant increase in salary. The demand for ITIL skills are continuing to grow worldwide and – I believe – will increase significantly over the next five to 10...

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...

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. ...

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

I 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...

After joining AXELOS as Social Media Lead, I got the opportunity to attend a PRINCE2 ® Foundation and Practitioner training course. There were 18 of us, almost all from a project management background. I wasn’t too sure what to expect at first, I was worried that my l...

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. ...

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...

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...

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...

Managing projects and programmes differs based on the objectives each tends to have. Where project management focuses on one specific element to address a particular business process, programme management not only has a greater monetary value but also a wider range of people...

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...

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 ...

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

In this guest blog post Rear Admiral Malcolm Cree, recently retired from the Royal Navy, describes how he led a major change programme to implement the new delegated defence operating model following Lord Levene’s Defence Reform report. This was about bringing programme...

Louise John shares her thoughts on why ITIL doesn’t require lots of people and how businesses of all shapes and sizes can use the framework effectively. Does ITIL require a lot of people to work effectively and do you need to have one individual for every role, process ...

PRINCE2 gives you a structured approach to delivering something , regardless of what that something is. And it’s effective not only for professionals with “Project Manager” in their job title: according to AXELOS’ PPM Survey 2016 , 88% of IT professionals, 82% of senio...

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...

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

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

The quick-to-market digital environment of today means organizations have to find a way to incorporate agile working in what they do. Take-up of agile remains a mixed bag and we should acknowledge that agile isn’t for everyone or everything. However, where the feeling t...

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

My 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...

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...

If you want your projects and programmes to be successful, it is crucial that proper Stakeholder Engagement and its associated activities take place. Stakeholder Engagement is one of the practices in the new AXELOS AgileSHIFT ® product. But it is more than just a pro...

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

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...

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

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...

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...

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 ...

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

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...

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. ...