ITIL4, The new old kid in the block/blog

One great presentation by Daniel Castle (www.castlequality.com) at PMI was about the Project Manager being a Change Agent (and a BlackBelt :-)). Dan's idea is to emphasize on Customer needs rather than wants. Evidently, as most of us (implementers) know, that the customer rarely knows his IT needs, but has great understanding of the business he runs. This is exactly what PMBOK, ITIL, CoBit and other frameworks make abundantly clear. In fact the ITSM and ITIL are about efficiently and effectively leveraging IT to achieve desired business outcomes, even at the definition level. They were never about the IT capabilities or the technologies used. Somehow lost in translation, is that the constraints in the Project Management (scope, schedule and cost), which are too focused on delivery and completion rather than fulfilling the desired "Business Outcome". The question Dan wants to ask, while defining things, is the simple "What are you trying to accomplish?" Specific...

One interesting concept came out of a conference was: There should to be a problem Ticket associated for every Incident Ticket! A really out-of-the-box thinking. But this looks like a very good opportunity to account for (and work-out solution to) every weakness in the IT Infrastructure. As the incident tickets are associated with an existing solution or a potential solution, we are sure that we are "doing" something about all the current and potential issues. This would also include capacity bottle necks and individual issues (such as training on a software module). Not to mention the ability of Service Desks to refer the "solution" from the problem analysis and increase the "FTR" ratio. The only issue here will be the practicality of the association plan and the ability of the Problem management Teams to handle the volume. However, Management willing, these issues can be systematically tacked and then, the long term benefits will be immense. Like all gre...