Our Confession

This is our first blog for a while. We have tried to put this one off for a long time now, but we have a big confession to make.

We have been trying to hide it for a long time and, to be honest, it is a bit embarrassing. But it is time you all knew what is really going on behind the scenes at The ITSM People. The boss might not be happy we are putting this blog out.

We Are Completely Stuck in the Past

Yes, you read that correctly. We are completely antiquated in the work we do for the vast majority of our clients.

Sure, we do some cutting edge stuff. But most of what we do is not new, not exciting, and not even difficult. In fact most of what we do is really quite boring, and it is generally things we learned twenty years ago.

The team here have amassed a huge amount of experience and skill over the past twenty years or so, and of course they apply learnings from more recent updates to the all important service management frameworks, including the Guiding Principles in ITIL 4. But ultimately a lot of what we do is far from new or shiny. In many cases, very far from it.

As you would expect, we do help clients with some of the new shiny things. Integrating product-centric teams with the core ITSM practices where they need to work harmoniously, and supporting organisations mature enough to be thinking about end-to-end value streams. But that is not where we spend most of our time.

Where the Time Actually Goes

Most of our time is spent working on old, boring, traditional ITIL practices. Or processes, as we used to call them.

Plenty of enquiries come in asking us to help mature and optimise services and operations to align with ITIL 4. The stark reality is that many of those clients simply are not ready for that yet.

Nine times out of ten, the output of our initial assessment comes down to a handful of practice areas that need some prioritised work. Doing that work catapults them forward on their optimisation journey. We see it time and time again, and it really is remarkable what impact you can have by focusing people's effort on the often overlooked things that genuinely matter when it comes to stabilising services and creating the headroom to go after the shiny stuff.

And It Is Usually About People

To expand on that further, more often than not the work that needs doing is not on the old traditional processes themselves. It is about helping the people delivering them.

There are tooling challenges too, of course. Tooling often plays a significant part in hindering service excellence. But the people aspect is where we spend a huge amount of our time, and honestly it is the part we love.

A lot of the time we find processes that were written many years ago. Then, through staff changes, new technology, or the introduction of shiny things and the need for speed, people at all levels forget the importance of the more traditional practices. Incident, problem, service catalogue, knowledge management, and so on.

By re-educating and re-focusing the delivery teams, and sometimes the users as well, we can have a surprising impact on how services are delivered and on the satisfaction of the people consuming them.

The Good News

The good news, despite all this being deemed a bit boring, and often not what clients think they need from us when they ask for help, is that we are pretty damn good at it. And we can have a real impact on moving the dial of their maturity.

We know from many years of experience that if you get the boring old stuff right, the rest starts falling into place.

If you would like to hear more about how we have helped clients move the dial by focusing on the things we learned over twenty years ago, drop us a note and we will line up a chat with one of the team.