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

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

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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 ...

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...

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

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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: ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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 ...

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...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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

While 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...

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...

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, ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

What’s the difference between being certified and not certified in IT service management (ITSM) best practice? At a base level in ITSM you might be someone providing “boots on the ground”, doing the actual troubleshooting on the service desk and implementing changes. Howev...

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

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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...

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

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

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

As usual, reading an article by Paul Wilkinson , is always a refreshing experience with food for thought. That wasn’t any different when I started reading his AXELOS blog on " the evolution in ITSM part 1 ". However, when reading the following paragraph, I experienced a ‘fu...

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 ...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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

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

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

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

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

Organizations are not generally well-prepared for IT service transition. Either they outsource it because they’re not good at it, or they muddle through it. Recently, I’ve witnessed some transitions which have inspired me to revisit this topic. Typically, service transi...

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...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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

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...

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 ...

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. ...

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...

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...

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’...

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...

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...

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...

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

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 ...

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

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

Today’s 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...

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...

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

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

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...

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...

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

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

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

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

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...

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 ...

My view is that companies in 2017 really started discovering that one IT service management (ITSM) solution doesn’t fit all and they need a broader perspective, with different tools for different challenges. This means not only getting more frameworks and models to sit tog...

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...

This week, AXELOS announced the launch of My AXELOS , an online content subscription aligned to some of the world’s most widely used project and service management frameworks, ITIL ® , PRINCE2 ® and MSP ® . Here, Emer O’Sullivan, Marketing Lead at AXELOS explains wh...

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

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...

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

The need for speed has reached boiling point in IT service management (ITSM). Organizations’ ability to react to this in 2018 – especially in ITSM – will be the difference between surviving and thriving or withering and being outsourced. Those that have already adopted b...

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

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

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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

How 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...

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 ...

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...

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

In my career I’ve been part of a variety of service transition projects and while every project is unique there are key aspects that should always be considered. Make a plan A robust transition plan should always be the first step in any project and every plan shoul...

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. ...

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

How 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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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

I 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 ...

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

Why is 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...

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

The itSMF.ee AXELOS podcast was recorded on 7 December 2016 in Tallinn with the speakers and guests of the 11th annual itSMF Estonia conference . AXELOS' Roman Jouravlev talked with Stuart Rance, Stephen Mann, Christian Tijsmans, Elina Pirjanti, Jacob Andersen, Paula Mää...

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

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 -...

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...

30 years ago in the manufacturing industry, if you brought out a new product you may have had between three and nine months before your main competitors would catch on and create something to challenge you. Now, in a digitally-led market, you can often count your time of exc...

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

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 ...

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...

The new ITIL ® 4 Direct, Plan and Improve (DPI) module , leading to the ITIL Strategist qualification, provides essential knowledge and capabilities that a service management professional should acquire beyond Foundation level. The module – which is applicable to both ITI...

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...

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 is ITIL Practitioner and how does it complement existing ITIL accreditations? ITIL ® Practitioner is an addition to the ITIL portfolio and, ultimately, it helps professionals who’ve completed any level of ITIL training from Foundation onwards to develop the ski...

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...

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...

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

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

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...

“Nobody wants to show you the hours and hours of becoming. They'd rather show the highlight of what they've become" – Angela Duckworth author of 'Grit: Passion, Perseverance, and the Science of Success'. In my career, I have been very blessed with opportunities, life less...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

Organizational Change Management (OCM) is an approach to managing the people side of change. Any IT Service Management (ITSM) initiative, small or large, individual, team or department driven will in some way affect people. The OCM approach is about identifying where any res...

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 ? ...

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

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 ....

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 ...

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...

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

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...

<BEEP>….The Mission control flight screen displayed another systems event… Inside the control room a concerned team of specialists is huddled round the Mission (Sales) Director, looking at the results of the flight plan so far. The first mission goal was not achieved, revenu...

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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...

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 ...

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

During December 2016, AXELOS Community asked you what best practice would look like in the year 2030, and you answered. We now proudly present the winners and highlights of the week. If your name is listed in the infographic below, we’ll be in touch shortly with information o...

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

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

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...

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”....

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 ...

As a consultant, ITIL ® gives me the framework to organize and help IT organizations deliver value to customers. In the 12 years I’ve been using ITIL , I’ve learned that success is based on being able to speak the language a business understands, to communicate clearly ...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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 ® ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

Tallinn was mild and drizzly when I arrived as a first-time visitor to the annual itSMF Estonia conference , which is now in its eleventh year. Estonia has a thriving IT Service Management (ITSM) community, and the weather didn't dampen the enthusiasm of the 150 attendees, w...

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

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...

With the launch of AXELOS’ Professional Development Programme , we have updated one of our previous blogs on our Career Paths tool, which we designed to help you identify the professional skills needed to progress in some of the main job areas in today’s marketplace. You ...

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

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

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

What should the future hold for IT Service Management (ITSM) professionals certified in ITIL ® Foundation ? If you’re anything like me, it holds ITIL Expert ® and ITIL ® Practitioner ! ITIL Foundation lives up to its name: it’s a foundational framework that is the ...

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...

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

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,...

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...

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

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...

Behaviour is a critical success factor in any organization and yet – traditionally – many frameworks such as ITIL ® , SCRUM or LEAN, fail to address behaviour change. The issue is that many senior leaders and managers use negative consequences to encourage the desired b...

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...

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...

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...

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 ®...

What is GDPR, why should you care and how can AXELOS’ RESILIA™ best practice help you manage it? ITSM consultant and trainer, Stuart Rance has addressed these critical questions in AXELOS’ “ GDPR: Beyond Compliance ” White Paper. Handing over personal data to an organiza...

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...

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...

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

Part of the new My AXELOS subscription service for best practice professionals is a focus on “community”. The AXELOS online community is a place where you can learn and interact with other people involved in IT service management, project management and cyber resilience. ...

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

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 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...

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 ...

How using MSP can help organize a successful music festival It’s the time of year when it seems everyone is getting excited about music festivals. But what is it like behind the scenes? Do organizers think of Woodstock in 1969? Love peace, and “everywhere was a song and a c...

When organizations send employees for additional training or qualifications they need to have confidence that their money and time have been well spent and that the employees’ new skills will make a difference to their business. If the learning experience was effective, and...

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

What makes some change initiatives bloom while others wither and die? A 2013 study of pilot programmes by the National Academy of Sciences found that few effective pilot programmes remain effective at larger scales. The reasons may lie in both our natural resistance to new...

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...

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...

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...

At the start of teaching ITIL ® Practitioner I tell candidates that the guidance will become the ‘most thumbed book’ in their arsenal. By the time they finish their training, they agree universally. The response to ITIL Practitioner has been resoundingly positive in ...

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 know...

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

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

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

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...

Last week London hosted the Modern Employment and Digital Credentials conference and I was delighted to be one of the speakers talking about the importance of digital badges. Amongst the speakers were IBM, EY, City and Guilds and the Open University. All of these respected...

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. ...

Hi everyone, thanks for listening to first audio interview brought to you by the ITIL ® team. We hope you enjoy it. Listen to the interview We’re getting off to a flying start with two stellar interviewees: Gene Kim (IT Revolution Press, co-author of The Phoenix Pr...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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

Many organizations either don’t understand or avoid organizational change management (OCM), choosing rather to focus on the technical elements of change. Of course, this ignores that the human factor could be integral to failure of a change programme. Today’s self-service t...

Take your own medicine. Practice what you preach. Walk the talk. These clichés were circling my mind as I stepped into the classroom recently to begin the new ITIL ® 4 Foundation training. Having worked in AXELOS as Project Manager for the Foundation product for over a ye...

Taking an ITIL ® 4 Foundation course and sitting the Foundation exam is a great way to start your ITIL journey. Here are AXELOS’ top tips to help you get the most from the course and pass your exam: Read around the topic before you start. It will help you hit the ground r...

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

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

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...

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. ...

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...

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 ...

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

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

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 knowle...

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...

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...

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

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

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

In case you were wondering if it still makes sense to invest in professional certifications , we can assure you that, this is definitely the case. How do we know this? We simply asked. Not so long ago, we conducted a survey among more than 1,800 individuals and decision-ma...

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 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...

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 ...

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

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...

Approximately 70% of all IT Service Management (ITSM) transformation projects fail according to researchers from Gartner to McKinsey. And among those projects that fail, the same researchers uncovered that about half were unsuccessful because of internal resistance. The firs...

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...

Before the exam Taking an ITIL v3 Foundation course and sitting the Foundation Exam is a great way to start your ITIL journey. Here are our Top Tips to help you get the most from the course and pass your exam: Read around the topic before you start. It will help you hi...

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...

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...

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...

Oh, it’s THAT time again! Perhaps the contract you’ve been working on is coming to an end or you’ve been stuck in a role for a few years now and it's definitely time to move on. But who would have thought that just ‘updating your CV’ could be so arduous? “Did I really fi...

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...

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 ...

It is very common for organizations to ask project managers to deliver a plan for approval at short notice and this increases the risks for its delivery. What is rarely recognized is that a hastily-produced plan risks being incomplete, leading to delays, quality compromise...

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...

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. ...

Gregor McPherson, who has worked with AXELOS and contributed to our new Professional Development Programme, is a consultant specialist in business solution design and architecture. He draws on 15 years of insight from senior roles in a wide a range of industries and discipli...

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

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

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...

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

Would you lie on your CV to secure your dream job? Well, you might not. But before you dismiss the idea that this practice goes on, the latest facts tell a different story about job applicants and, even more alarmingly, about employers: Data gathered by the UK’s Office f...

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

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

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....

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...

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

According to the 2017 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. These ...

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 ...

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

I was first introduced to ITIL ® in 2009 when we pitched the best practice for a government IT contract and as part of the proposal process, I completed ITIL ® Foundation certification. But my journey didn’t really start until 2012. Prior to this, I had the pleasu...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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 ITIL v3 Foundation qualification will help you progress your ITIL journey. When you are ready to take the examination, read our top tips to help you during the exam. Allow yourself enough time to prepare everything you need before the examination starts. Make sure you...

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

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

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...

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 ®...

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

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...

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

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 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...

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...

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

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

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...

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

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

What 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...

Following the launch of our updated ITIL Foundation app, we spoke to Sharon Taylor, chief examiner for ITIL and content advisor to find out about its new features and get her top tips on passing the exam. While the ITIL Foundation app has been available since 2013, ther...

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...

Dr Guy Brown is an academic in business, management and leadership with a background in designing and developing contemporary and vocational learning for companies and work-based learners. He leads Northumbria University London campus and works with organizations and profes...

How agile is project management in 2017? Our latest PPM Benchmark Study suggests a discrepancy between project managers and the organizations they work for in the way agile is perceived and adopted. The majority of project managers continue to be enthusiastic about agil...

Why should professionals who have any level of responsibility for projects in their organizations look to approaches like PRINCE2 ® and others for help? Paul Bradley, MD of SPOCE Project Management, shares his view: Many people are involved in project management wit...

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...

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

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...

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 £...

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

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...

How much do Small and Medium Sized Enterprises ( SMEs ) have to fear from cyber-attack? The high profile cyber attacks of the past year have involved much bigger commercial fish than companies in the SME market. But that doesn’t render them immune – far from it. 74% of s...

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

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

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...

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

The focus of the Project Manager today is more about delivering the right things: we’re now expected to be more involved with senior-level decisions and prove we’re delivering value. In 10 years’ blogging about the project management industry on GirlsGuideToPM.com I’ve ...

If you’re considering a career in project management , the first step is to think about whether your goals, skills and natural aptitude fully align with what is required. I started my project career when I was supporting a small project and realized I wanted to have a bigg...

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

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,...

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...

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...

I recently attended the national conference of the Australian Institute of Project Management (AIPM) in Melbourne. The two-day event featured talks from a wide range of industries and roles, all sharing their experiences on how to further project management. I’d like to sh...

What you should do to improve project success and achieve value has been high on the agenda this year. Equally, the increased uncertainty in the economy has raised awareness of the need for increased professionalism in project and programme management (PPM) . In short, we’v...

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...

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...

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 ...

Typically, the scope and duration of programmes is significantly greater than that of a single project. Consequently – and in contrast to projects – they demand greater leadership and stakeholder management skills from programme delivery professionals in order to achieve pr...

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

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...

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...

Many small companies and even departments in larger enterprises simply don’t have the need for a dedicated project manager and, more often than not, will appoint someone from within the business to run projects on a case-by-case basis. Selection is usually made on the gro...

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...

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

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...

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

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 ...

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 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...

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...

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

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...

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

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 ...

Organizational and project change is difficult because – primarily – it involves humans who are programmed to like the status quo. Businesses underestimate the impact of change management at their peril. However, the tendency is to focus on project management delivery, st...

I sometimes get asked, what keeps me interested in learning and certifying? And that’s a very good question as during my career in projects and programmes I’ve completed PRINCE2 ® Foundation and Practitioner, MSP ® and this year successfully achieved MoP ® – Mana...

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...

What if you were waking up every day to PRINCE2 ® training as if it were a morning workout, getting you into top project management shape? Well, that’s how some describe the experience of a PRINCE2 daily email course. It started almost two years ago when Management...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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

In 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...

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...

2017 was certainly an interesting year for project management and 2018 looks set to be equally eventful. In a positive move for the industry, the Association for Project Management (APM) received its Royal Charter . This is a major step forward for the profession and tak...

What I want to talk about is the value of humour in its broadest sense, how it moulds who you are and why bringing aspects of your personality into the workplace can be a positive for everyone. So, while “funny” works for some project managers, it isn’t necessarily the most ...

There’s a need for using a blend of best practice methodologies, but also a risk. The risk is that the elements of the final system might not be consistent with each other. It happens when people pick elements from multiple systems just because they seem interesting without p...

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

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

As a PRINCE2 ® -qualified project manager, I’ve tailored every project I’ve ever worked on. That’s why it’s great to see that the principle of tailoring runs explicitly throughout the updated PRINCE2 guidance and how it can be tailored for projects in any environment: smal...

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...

The financial sector, in the 10 years since the financial crisis, has seen an end to limitless expenditure. With the main constraint now being financial , projects have to be delivered very much on budget. When making investments, organizations are now very mindful of the ...

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 ...

How does an engineer transform into a project manager with an eye on what a business wants? Or drive a project to solve a major environmental issue? I wouldn’t be where I am today without my background in electrical engineering, but it was the business management side of my ...

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

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

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

A well-designed project and stage plan was once the pride of any successful project manager. In the post-waterfall era of agile everything, the humble project and stage plan has got itself a bit of a bad reputation for being excessive. However, effective project management st...

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

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...

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...

In the world of project management , what do we mean by complex? Managing the refurbishment of historic buildings and public institutions in a densely populated city is one such complex and challenging environment. These busy facilities often need to stay open while work ...

The latest AXELOS PPM benchmarking survey is now live and we are asking our PPM community to share their views and insights on project and programme management, looking at the market now and in the future. AXELOS PPM Ambassador, Allan Thomson, shares his thoughts...

The term “ hybrid project management ” is generally assumed to refer to Agile and more traditional approaches when managing projects. People need to have the capability to manage both Agile and non-Agile initiatives. Yet, although we know “hybrid” exists, how capable is t...

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

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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

You could say I’m an “accidental project manager.” I studied philosophy at university so when I first came into the workforce I used my critical thinking to see problems and find ways to fix them. It didn’t take long for the fix to require significant planning on top of th...

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

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...

Why do you want or need a project and programme management (PPM) qualification? Ultimately the reason should be to achieve successful management of projects, programmes and portfolios. However, people often get pushed into getting a qualification for the wrong reasons. If t...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

The importance of effective communication with a project’s stakeholders is something that shouldn’t be overlooked. PRINCE2 ® describes detailed techniques only when related to one of its recommended approaches or one that is unique to its method. As a result, it does no...

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 ...

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...

A key focus of the PRINCE2 ® 2017 Update is to make it easier for individuals and organizations to adopt and tailor the world’s most-practised project management method. I’ve been helping organizations adopt and tailor PRINCE2 for over fifteen years. In truth PRINCE2 ...

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...

Using Agile methods in project management is not about choosing either to go Agile or not; it’s more about how agile can we be on this project? It’s the project manager’s role to assess exactly “how agile” and recognize the associated risks and benefits. The PRINCE2 Agile...

Fifty per cent of people I see undertaking PRINCE2 ® training today are not working in a traditional project management role and the organizations they work for usually don’t have a Project Management Office (PMO) . There is a growing trend for smaller companies to send ...

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...

In the fourth instalment of our blog series looking at why PRINCE2 Agile ® offers a suitable best practice guidance and certification option for people working in project management Julia Gosse, trainer at SPOCE Project Management , considers those working in large projec...

The second instalment of our PRINCE2 Agile ® blog post series with Julia Gosse, trainer at SPOCE Project Management , considers existing agile users: how can they combine their agile approach with the control and governance offered by PRINCE2 ® ? Professionals using ...

Project management learning is influenced increasingly by the importance of engagement . Tenets of engagement such as trust, relationships, communication and collaboration are all part of the behavioural and contextual competencies emerging in project management. Vodafone...

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

There are many reasons why a programme fails. But there are some causes of failure that are common across the majority of troubled programmes. So, let me introduce the seven Cs of programme failure and how they can be addressed using best practice methods such as Managing Su...

“ Elas Projetam ” literally translates as “they (women) make projects” and perfectly encapsulates the focus of this recently-formed, voluntary organization in Brazil. Here, Vanessa Guimarães explains how the initiative aims to connect women working in project management and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In a business environment, the topic of risk isn’t sexy; unfortunately, firefighting issues is! There’s simply no glory in managing risk and the subject tends to be subconsciously further down the corporate priority list. At best, it can be a box ticking exercise, i.e., comp...

Ulf Livoff, project manager and PRINCE2 ® trainer, has always had an interest in simulations and mathematical modelling. Having founded Inference Labs to develop learning simulators, he is now applying this interest to creating online PRINCE2 project environments which hel...

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. ...

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...

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

Last year, AXELOS interviewed over 1,000 best practice professionals* to understand attitudes towards professional development. An impressive 74% of professionals we spoke to demonstrated an interest in their continual professional development (CPD). However, when asked what ...

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...

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 ...

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

Project managers don’t do enough to advance their careers, even in the current climate where change is constant. And in a year when almost a third of PPM practitioners predict * no increase in their salaries, improving job and earnings prospects needs to be high on the lis...

With over 30 years’ experience working in the field of project management training and consultancy, Julia Gosse reflects on the benefits of taking both PRINCE2 ® Foundation and PRINCE2 Practitioner. For anyone connected with projects, PRINCE2 Foundation has merits as a ...

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

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...

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...

As a Project Management professional, I am often asked what my greatest career achievement is. My answer is simple and unerring: inspiring, as club manager, the recent victory of AXELOS FC’s fabled 5-a-side football team in the League One Victoria Late championship near ou...

Have you just gained the PRINCE2 ® Foundation certification? Congratulations! But don’t get too comfortable, because it’s now time to think about your next steps – taking your PRINCE2 Practitioner. But why – you might ask – should I go through another certification The 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...

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. ...

Why should learning and training in portfolio, programme and project management (PPM) lead to certification? People take training courses, but if they are not tested and certified at the end they can’t demonstrate understanding of the finer detail that gives them a more ac...

What does the world want to know about agile delivery methods and their place in PRINCE2 Agile best practice? One of the easiest ways to find out is to ask the world using that most instant of communications tools, Twitter. And so AXELOS – including Allan Thomson, our...

When project management relationships break down, most of the time the underlying reason lies in misaligned organizational strategic priorities, which result in misaligned project objectives. This prevents the delivery of value to the organization, stakeholders and ultimately...

In our latest blog post looking at PRINCE2 ® best practice , Fiona Magee explains why the real value of the PID template is realized only if approached with the right mindset. The complete set of PRINCE2 templates covering all key business activities is available via...

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...

Following the launch of PRINCE2 Agile Foundation certification earlier this year, we caught up with members of the alumni for their feedback. Here, Shane Keown of Valtech UK – who took the course through Logical Model – explains what he learned from the experience. Wha...

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

As a long-standing project manager already qualified in PRINCE2 ® Foundation , I’ve found that taking PRINCE2 Practitioner has made a positive difference to the way I approach my role in a number of important ways. Release potential First of all, and perhaps most signif...

What is the role of the project board and how can members direct successful outcomes? In predicting that man would land on the moon by the end of the decade, US President John F Kennedy became the ultimate project sponsor . According to an often-quoted story, when JFK ...

Finishing a project on time can seem like something of a rarity in the world of project management so it seems fair to question if finishing on time is even important at all? But the thing is, finishing when we said we would is very important because the pace of change in in...

Stakeholders can make or break projects or programmes . If they feel overlooked, not listened to or ignored, then your project will be in trouble – no matter how well you deliver in terms of budget, time and quality. Just giving them what they want is not usually a viable ...

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...

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

Working on assignment five days a week means it’s not always easy for project managers to 'reach back' to their own organization – but it’s something you should always make time for if you don’t want to risk falling under the radar. As a consultant, I’ve found that it take...

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

Humans have been communicating with each other since the dawn of time. Communication has evolved over thousands of years to not only include speech but writing, still and moving images and much more. Today we have more channels available to us than ever before to instantly ...

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

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

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 ...

Like it or not, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already having an impact on our everyday lives, though most people don’t even recognize it. But whether you are interacting with a chatbot or asking Siri for the weather forecast, it is present in some form or other. Most imp...

Now that the dust has settled and the challenge is over, AXELOS Community is proud to announce the winners of The Great Agile Challenge. We’d like to thank everyone that participated in the challenge and we look forward to discussing all things best practice with you in futu...

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...

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

AXELOS' ‘Cyber Stories from the Frontline’ bring to life the reality of cyber crime for organizations today –  from the perspective of those who have had first-hand experience. What if you were responsible for your organization's IT security and your boss told you your s...

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...

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...

Project manager, Ana Bertacchini, examines the importance of emotional intelligence for project managers and how best practice methods such as PRINCE2 ® can help. Emotional intelligence is about managing and understanding emotions – both your own and others’. Unlike t...

It is hopefully not a shock to suggest that over the last couple of decades there has been a general trend across most industries for roles to move from the specialist to the more generalist. This is not to say that specialists in whatever field do not exist, they simply are ...

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...