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As a PRINCE2 ® consultant, trainer and practitioner, what do I think of the PRINCE2 2017 Update ? Not wishing to be contrary but it’s great that PRINCE2 has a changed a lot, while remaining the same. What I mean is that the good things about PRINCE2 are still there wh...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

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

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

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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

Do you all have 15 July 2018 marked in your diary? If not then it’s high time because that is the day of the football final. We now know that France will play Croatia in Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium  on Sunday and Adam our #PRINCE2PUNDIT  is already planning his big football p...

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

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

What is the current state of project management and Project Managers? At the turn of 2016, PM Perspectives Blog - in its top 10 project management trends post - said: “Project management is no longer boxed away in a corner of the room. It stands front and centre and is b...

How can organizations and their programme managers ensure agile approaches and programme management work well together in 2017? This is a hot topic right now, with a rapidly-evolving technology landscape which lends itself to agile techniques and the pressure on organizatio...

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...

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...

PRINCE2 terminology can be a real bugbear for agile practitioners; they see it as being too prescriptive and inflexible. However, there are many PRINCE2 terms that reflect agile approaches. Here, we provide one example from each of the five PRINCE2 elements: 1.  Initiation:...

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...

A perfect storm of circumstances in UK public sector project management is helping open the door to agile methods. First, some projects have not been as successful as expected - either not delivering a product or not meeting stakeholder expectations. Combining those issues w...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Ongoing measurement of project progress is vital. In the simplest terms, it tells you how much work has been done and what is left to do. However, in certain instances it tends only to be treated as vital when something on the project goes wrong; and only then will you hear ...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

When PRINCE2 Agile ® first arrived on the market in 2015, it explicitly addressed a deep-rooted misunderstanding . It challenged the assumption that PRINCE2 ® should be used to facilitate project delivery solely through a Waterfall process. But this focus on the Waterfall ...

The space in between people managing and operating IT services and those that build and deliver IT products could be called the great divide. Among developers, the thinking can - sometimes - be based on the principles of "build it and hand it over". The big issue is that the...

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...

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...

Ed Lively is a senior consultant and senior trainer at the International Institute for Learning, an AXELOS Accredited Training Organization (ATO) headquartered in New York. Ed attended a free AXELOS PRINCE2 'Train the Trainer' session in January 2015 in Chicago where he unde...

There are two areas of culture we need to look at. The first is an understanding of the role of ITSM and the need to challenge the business perception that looks upon the Information Technology department or division in an organization as a separate entity rather than an inte...

The justification for service governance is summed up neatly in the words of a CEO I know, when asked how things in the company were going: he said “Everything’s going OK, except operations.” While he and the company’s board were happy that the finances were in order, things...

Configuration management systems (CMS) are the bedrock of IT service management (ITSM); they provide the tools and databases to hold and manage all the necessary information about the assets used to deliver IT services – hardware, software, network equipment, processes, servi...

It is only a month since the launch of PRINCE2 Agile and all of the hard work put in over the last year has turned to relief and excitement. A bit like cyclist Chris Froome going up Alpe d’Huez the other day in the Tour de France – it may be hard work during the ascent, ...

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...

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

Using and Developing IT Skills within the Organization Many organizations today are faced with the challenge of adopting cloud-based IT services, a move which may involve a significant transformation of IT infrastructure. One option is to adopt a private cloud model to lea...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. (Warren Buffett) Board meetings will never be the same again! Following a number of high profile cyber-attacks and embarrassing boardroom apologies in the UK over the last six months, business leaders ...

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...

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...

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...

A career in project management is more popular than ever before, but what does it take to get your foot in the door?  Lindsay Scott, director at Arras People, provides some direction. There has been a dramatic shift in the way people enter project management over the ...

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...

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 ...

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

Lessons learned is part of the PRINCE2 ® method and is there to save time, energy, effort and the cost of making the same mistakes on another project. For example, if you’ve been in a situation before with managing stakeholders and you know how to work with them it’s ...

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

IT Service Management (ITSM) is often portrayed as being founded on a process-driven approach, and while processes are useful to organize activities the core of ITSM lies elsewhere. Soft skills are and will always remain relevant regardless of how many processes are defined. ...

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...

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

Agile delivery principles are increasingly attracting the attention of organizations looking for the most appropriate approach to help meet their project objectives. But, buyer beware! Agile methods alone may not supply sufficient control within projects to ensure they are ...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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

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...

Can you be both agile and strategic in project management? Based on our recent research, The Future Project Manager , AXELOS invited consultant trainers Duncan Wade and David Hinde to explore the debate in this first part of a two-part blog post series: Project managers...

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...

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...

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. ...

In today’s world of technology, businesses need to understand customers and their role in delivering service and value to them. Tech start-ups get this, with delivery teams focused on giving customers what they need and faster than ever before. But how well are organizations...

Delivering the right thing, in the right way and at the right time to ensure maximum return on investment isn’t easy. However, by ‘adjusting the controls’ within the principles and themes of PRINCE2® we have found a more responsive, agile, way of working that’s delivering si...

The worlds of IT and ITSM have been suffering something of a Mark Twain syndrome lately: reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated. Even worse than that, they’ve been subject to unnecessary hype along the lines of “the IT Department is dead, ITIL is dead, DevOps i...

Why should IT Service Management (ITSM) professionals care about agile delivery of technology services? With the business world changing rapidly under our feet, being agile allows rapid response to those changes in a timely manner and shifts your organization in the right d...

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...

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...

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 ®...

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...

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 ...

In this second of a two-part blog post series based on AXELOS’ recent research, The Future Project Manager , consultant trainers Duncan Wade and David Hinde explore agile in project management and how it aligns with a strategic approach: While the term “agile” is becom...

Having had the opportunity to review the new PRINCE2 ® 2017 (draft) manual, and as someone who sat the first PRINCE2 2017 (trainer only) examinations – what are my impressions? Firstly, it’s still the PRINCE2 we know and love... but better! Let’s start with a little bit...

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...

How do you start a project using the PRINCE2 ® project management method? Mark Sutton, change manager and trainer, considers the steps: Starting up a project – according to PRINCE2 – is triggered by a mandate : a reason to do something or, in other words, a busin...

According to the recent AXELOS PPM Benchmark study , nearly half of project managers who rarely or never conduct project reviews have experienced project failure in the past 12 months – this compares to only 34% of those who review either always or most of the time. Thes...

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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...

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...

How can a system like ITIL® - forged in a year of seismic historical change 25 years ago - still be relevant to the world of ITSM today? Leaving aside the shift in information technology since 1989, the global changes in that year alone tell us how different the world was ba...

Project management in North America has a long way to go to fulfil its potential. This is partly because there are many notions about what project management is and partly because a proportion of people involved in project management are giving their abilities more credit th...

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...

Many organizations experiencing chaos in their operational teams have a potential solution staring them in the face. That solution is service management. IT Service Management (ITSM) works well in managing IT, and its principles can also be extremely valuable when used acro...

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. ...

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 ...

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...

This year AXELOS launched the AXELOS Consulting Partner Programme . The programme allows consulting organizations to enter into an official partnership with AXELOS for the first time. The programme is part of our continuing commitment to ensure all organizations that use our...

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 ...