This is our first blog for a while. We’ve tried to put this one off for a long time now, but we have a big confession to make.
We’ve been trying to hide it for a long time and to be honest it’s a bit embarrassing, but its time you all knew what’s really going on behind the scenes at the ITSM People (the Boss might not be happy we’re putting this blog out!).
The reality is that we are completely stuck in the past.
Yes you read that correctly, we are completely antiquated in the work that 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, exciting, or even difficult. In fact, most of what we do is really quite boring and its generally things that we learned 20 years ago!
Yes, the team here have amassed a huge amount of experience and skills over the past 20 years or so, and of course they apply learnings from more recent updates to the all-important Service Management frameworks (such as the super important Guiding Principles in ITIL4!), but ultimately a lot of what we do is far from new or shiny, in many cases far from it.
As you’d probably expect we do help clients with some new shiny stuff, when it comes to integrating Product-centric teams with some of the really important ‘core’ ITSM practices where they need to work harmoniously, and where organisations are mature enough to be thinking about end-to-end value steams and so on, but that’s not where we spend most of our time.
In fact, most of our time is spent working on old, boring traditional ITIL Practices, or processes as we used to call them. Despite many of the enquiries that come in from clients asking us to help mature and optimise their Services and Operations to 'align with ITIL4', the stark reality is that many of our clients simply aren’t ready for that yet.
Nine times out of ten, the output of our initial assessments come down to a handful of practice areas that need some prioritised work, and in doing so we catapult them forward on on their optimisation journey. We see it time and time again and it really is amazing the impact we can have when we focus people’s efforts on the (often overlooked) stuff that really matters when it comes to stabilising services and helping create efficiencies to focus on the shiny stuff.
To expand on this further though, more often than not, a lot of the work that needs to be done isnt on those old traditional ‘processes’ themselves, but it's more about helping the people delivering them. Sometimes there’s tooling challenges of course, in fact tooling often plays a big part in hindering service excellence. But the people aspect is the part we spend a huge amount of time on (and to be honest we love this part!).
A lot of time we find that processes were written many years ago, and through staff changes, new tech, or the introduction of shiny things and ‘the need for speed’, we often find that people (at all levels!) forget the importance of some those more traditional practices like Incident, Problem, Service Catalogue, Knowledge Management and so on. However, this is where by re-educating and re-focusing the delivery teams (and sometimes users also), we can have an often-surprising impact on how services are delivered and on the downstream satisfaction levels of those users consuming the services.
The good news, despite it being deemed to be a bit boring (and often not what our clients think they need from us when they ask us for help), is that we’re pretty damn good at this stuff and can have a huge impact on ‘moving the dial’ of their maturity levels for them.
The reality is that whilst our clients think some of this old, antiquated stuff that came out in the 90s is a bit boring, we’re super nerdy and we love it. We know from many years of experience that if we can get the ‘boring old stuff’ right, then the rest really starts falling into place.
If you’d like to hear more about how we’ve helped many clients move the dial by simply focusing on the stuff we learned over 20 years ago, drop us a note and we can line up a chat with one of the team – hello@itsmpeople.co.uk
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