Gamification - What is in for you as an ITSM expert by playing Apollo13?

This blog stems from my experience participating at the Apollo 13 Business simulation played in Delhi recently.   We had around 8 delegates who were specialized in delivering ITSM engagements internally or externally to their clients.

One of the key differences of the workshop was that we had 8 people from 6 different companies who got a chance to meet and interact with their fellow industry colleagues first time through the game.

From a background and experience perspective, delegates had around 10+ years of experience on an average and belonged to some leading end user organizations/IT companies in India & abroad.

While the participants voiced out several key learning`s over the 4 rounds as mentioned below, I had some great eye openers with this event and that is the beauty of running such simulations. Every time, the context, reflection and outcomes are totally different.

My personal takeaways from the whole exercise were as follows

 a) Forming, Norming, Storming and Performing exercise /Team building that can be done easily when you have the new joiners run through this simulation as part of the New- Hire Orientation.  They have fun, learning and overall develop a personal bond quickly before they are deployed to projects

b)  While trainings like ITIL V3 Foundation need investment of 2 days of time and effort for people to gain knowledge, these simulations bring about significant learning aspects to build competency like knowledge, behaviors, Skills and attitude

 c) One of the ITIL V3 Expert trainer mentioned that this simulation was an eye opener and a great experience of learning by doing. By this way he believed that the retention of knowledge would be far more longer for students

 d) It would be a great opportunity to play a simulation with the project stakeholders before kicking off the ITSM project. There is a whole lot of things that we unlearn and learn by doing.

e) Finally, lots of people have difficulty in articulating how to drive CSI in their organizations.  With rounds 1 to 4, there are action items that get reflected by participants and see definite improvements to carry those transfer skills to workplace. This could aid them for better efficiency and effectiveness in their journey to service excellence.

Process and Tools - The Argument Continues

This blog follows on from the recent post from Phyllis Drucker and stems from my recent experience delivering Service management tools training for Service desk professionals.

I recently delivered this  foundation training on Service Desk tools for Process owners. The course outline and prerequisites were communicated well in advance and when I stepped in for the first day, I had a great surprise. 80 % of the candidates did not have a formal ITIL foundation certificate and were sitting on a class that talks about service management tools aligned with ITIL process. When I enquired why they did not get themselves ITIL trained, the simple answer was we did not have time. We have scheduled a course in 2 weeks time.

I then spent half of my day 1 to just get them familiarized with the ITIL concepts and also managed to cover the rest of topic and lab exercises.

I was curious to understand how they planned to use the tools and the team leader mentioned that they were building a Service Mgmt COE and needed all service desk guys trained and on various SM toolset.
I see this issue mainly in countries like India where there is keen interest on tools and technology while the process aspect is always expected to be a freebie and is normally ignored.
Tailoring of tools or heavy customization is done by consultants within the client environment basically because they expect the tool to behave in a certain way and are not bothered about the actual need and rationale to customize.

Also I would have to say that  I have hardly ever  seen organisations leveraging more than 50 % of the features and capabilities shipped out of the box (OOB)
So in my opinion if the situation needs to improve there are 5 things that needs attention.

1. Understanding the true need of the organization or customer business requirements
2. Identifying the key ITIL processes that are applicable and help people understand the rationale behind usage
3. Identify an appropriate Service Management tool that fits to the purpose and objective
4. Enable meaningful business reporting to measure results and customer satisfaction
5. Ensure that the whole approach is communicated throughout organization and business units supported by training and soliciting feedback for ongoing service improvement
What has been your experience in addressing such gaps? Would love to hear your feedback and insights

This post was published at Shift on 03rd July 2014 

TFT 14 - Best Practice Frameworks and Standards - Why complicate? Be Pragmatic

Best Practice Frameworks and Standards adoption- Why complicate? Be Pragmatic

Today we have several compelling best practice frameworks like ITIL, CobiT, CMMI and industry standards like ISO 20000 that makes organizations ponder the best way to go about and leverage maximum benefits. This talk would focus with pragmatic case study to illustrate a simplified approach and methodology to fit the framework and standard to the Organizational environment.

This talk is available as part of TFT14, done on 18th Feb 2014. Hope you enjoyed and feel free to share to your friends and colleagues

Link to recording: http://tomorrowsfuturetoday.com/tft14/suresh-gp

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/ServiceDeskInstitute/tft14-suresh-gp

ITSM India Podcast - Meeting with AXELOS CEO

On 5th March 2014, I had the opportunity of having 1-1 with Peter Hepworth, CEO of AXELOS as part of 4th ITSM India Podcast discussing about ITIL Roadmap, ITSM in academia, Cost of Exam impact to Indian Market, Ways & Means India can contribute to the best practice roadmap and means to get engaged to take it forward.  Peter was candid enough to be open and transparent in his communications and highlighted the importance of India as a Strategic Important Market for AXELOS.

http://shiftmediainc.com/2014/03/03/itil-india-podcast-peter-hepworth-axelos/

Can ITSM Help to Organize Events Better? A Case Study

As a practitioner of IT Service Management, I am often questioned on the relevance of ITIL^® beyond IT, and here is a classic example of my experience .

Recently, I had the experience of attending the Edinburgh International Science Festival at Bangalore and it was quite an eye opener. The event organizers had offered tickets online through a couple of websites, and also in person. I happened to sign up for this event on the last day and was left with only the option to book through ticketgenie.com. We reached the venue to get our e-vouchers validated with credentials only to find a long queue at the entrance.
I was surprised to see that there were two Service Desk staff sitting idle as they were monitoring the tickets from other websites, while one person at ticketgenie was struggling to take care of a few hundred.
A simple option of Capacity Planning based on requests received could have handled the validation and issue of hard copy tickets much faster.
I did go and talk to the other folks working about the option of adding more counters to facilitate quick processing, but nobody seem to pay attention. This clearly demonstrated that there was no Incident Management process in place to resolve requests and yield better customer satisfaction.
After a heated debate, we did enter the premises to find that each activity or experiment had a specific time slot to be adhered and booked in person. Each slot could accommodate only specific number of people for the 35- 40 minute interval. This meant that parents had to do the standing on the queues while children would go on their own to watch the experiments and science shows. So the fun of parent and child watching and working together on robotics, electronics, light and sound experiments was totally missed. This demonstrated absence of understanding customer requirements and expectations which is the fundamental prerequisite of hosting a Service Desk.
One striking difference in the whole episode was the food service (Chinese, Indian, Continental, Asian), which had provisions in plenty to accommodate the rise in demand with ease. This confirmed that good business practice was driving things from the front (with the customer in mind) . It was evident that Demand Management process had been well ingrained to facilitate business outcomes.
As expected, a monsoon played the spoilsport and had the last laugh with a heavy downpour. People were forced to stick to indoor events, and then persistent rain caused a total power outage. It was shocking (pun intended) to note that the backup generator did not start as expected which means neither IT Service Continuity nor business continuity plan were in place. The rest of the experiments and shows had to be suspended indefinitely as there was no target resolution. I wondered to myself whether, if they had understood the principles of Problem Management or Knowledge Management, they could have have effectively handled these issues based on previous experiences and best practices.
I hope that these aspects would at least be considered in alignment with ITSM during the next event to make it a rewarding and memorable customer experience.

This post was published originally on Sep 18 at HDIConnect  http://www.hdiconnect.com/blogs/servicemanagement/2013/09/can-itsm-help-to-organize-events-better-a-case-study.aspx