itSMF USA On-Line Conference: Expanding Your Toolkit Part I

Please join the itSMF USA Problem Management Community of Interest for a BrightTalk Session on “LeanIT Continuous Improvement for Problem Management”, scheduled for 2PM EDT on Wednesday, May 25, 2016.

Problem management is one of the simplest and clearest of the ITIL processes, but very few IT organizations have the process working as ITIL describes it. In his presentation, Niels Loader will look at a number of issues associated with the process, such as performance measurement, the business case for Problem Management, the challenges of getting Problem Management working, the role of the Problem Manager and applying LeanIT principles to Continuous Improvement for your Problem Management Process.

One of the key sources of improvements for ITIL processes like Problem Management comes from applying Lean principles. Niels would like to take you on a journey through insights that he has gained over the past years and, hopefully, help you to make your Problem Management more effective.

If you're yearning for more than the built-in reports your ITSM suite provides, you are in the right place. Join us as Jeffrey Toaddy, ITSM Coordinator for Miami University, walks us down the rocky road to process scorecards and service metrics the rest of the IT organization and clients can understand.

Speaker bio: Jeffrey is an ITIL Expert with over ten years of IT Service Management experience. He currently serves as IT Service Management Coordinator and Adjunct Instructor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Miami's BI unit has been supporting University-wide decisions leaving Jeffrey and his colleagues to develop their own scrappy approach to coaxing complex conclusions from internal systems.

Please join the DevOps / Agile CoI for a BrightTalk Session, “Putting the “Ops” into “DevOps”, scheduled for 2PM EDT on Thursday, April 7, 2016.



DevOps is the blending of tasks performed by a company's application development and systems operations teams in order to deliver on the IT promise of agility and elasticity to meet business demands. Unfortunately, to date, this has been more about accelerating “Dev” and less about the “Ops”. Agility and velocity does not mean the abandonment of good practices, rather mandates the transition of the ops role from one of managing physical infrastructure, to managing their infrastructure as code. To do so effectively, operations will build infrastructure as code, similar to the Dev community and leverage automation tools to facilitate transition to production using modern automation tools.



Robert Stroud of Forrester who focused on the SDDC and IaC will discuss the impact of DevOps on your existing Change and Configuration management process and how you can leverage IaC and DevOps for agility and elasticity.

Overcome the common struggle to reconcile plans and schedules between project managers and operations managers with the best-kept secret of ITIL:The Transition Planning and Support Process.

Overcome the common struggle to reconcile plans and schedules between project managers and operations managers with the best-kept secret of ITIL: The Transition Planning and Support Process

Please join the DevOps / Agile CoI for a BrightTalk Session, “Enterprise DevOps – Lessons Learned”, scheduled for 1PM EST on Wednesday, January 27, 2016.

DevOps is a cornerstone to concepts used to drive the implementation, with continuous integration and delivery as methods to deliver the actual solution. In a large enterprise, there are many front-end and back-end systems/processes that need to "talk". This presentation focuses on highlighting and breaking down the silos that exist in order to redirect energy and attention on (the more important) outcomes that are generated from lighter methods to delivery IT systems. This includes establishing similar light weight methods for all groups in the organization to publish updates and changes in the environment with, again, a focus on the values, practices, and outcomes.

Jason Walker, the Lead DevOps Engineer at Target Corporation, will discuss many of the lessons learned and best practices during the adoption of DevOps at Target.

Join Eddie and Doug on your ride home for the next itSMF USA “In the Know” podinar on Wednesday, December 16 at 5pm (EST) with guest Troy DuMoulin, VP of Research, Innovation, and Product Management for Pink Elephant. Troy will be talking with Eddie and Doug about a hot topic in the ITSM industry, Lean IT.

On July 21, 2015, the itSMF USA Higher Education Community of Interest hosted a BrightTalk session on “The Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) Difference, and Its Impact at the University of Phoenix.” To follow on with the discussion started in that session, we have invited a few practitioners to share their experiences and expertise with KCS.

Panelists for this session include:
- Rae Ann Bruno, President, Business Solutions Training
- Stephenie Gloden, Vice President, Enterprise Resource Management, Apollo Education Group
- JC Grooms, Knowledge Systems Architect, Minnesota State University, Mankato
- Eddie Vidal, IT Professional, University of Miami

The session will be moderated by Edward Gray, Systems Integration and Support Specialist at the University of Mary Washington and Assistant Manager of the itSMF USA Higher Education Community of Interest.

Join us on your drive home, Tuesday October 20th at 5 PM eastern as our guest Shep Hyken, (@Hkyen) a member of the National Speakers Hall of Fame discusses creating an amazing customer service experience. Where and how do you start creating a culture to deliver a great experience. How do you get your team on board? How do you recover from poor customer service experiences and can customer service be learned or are you born with it? Shep will be the closing keynote speaker at Fusion 15 #SMFusion15. Get a sneak peek and learn how to raise your game in delivering customer service. Your hosts for this exciting podinar are Doug Tedder @dougtedder and Eddie Vidal @eddievidal. Don't miss out!
To register go to: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/845/176231

"DevOps" is a term that has become mainstream enough to be hated, misunderstood, misused, and abused. But what is "DevOps"? And, more importantly, why should I care?

DevOps isn't a tool or a product. It's an approach to operations. By uniting development and operations teams to automate and standardize processes for infrastructure deployment, you get faster innovation, accelerated time to market, improved deployment quality, better operational efficiency, and more time to focus on your core business goals.

This presentation will explore the principles and forms of DevOps. I know DevOps when I see it and, soon, you will, too.

KEPNER-TREGOE will talk about the role of Root Cause Analysis in the context of IT support functions, the pressures they face as well as the goals and needs for specific results when deploying different RCA and troubleshooting techniques. Furthermore, they will discuss the challenges of adopting new skills in high-pressure, complex, process-driven service environments and ways to overcome the gap between the theory of training and on-the-job proficiency via coaching and simulation.

KEPNERandFOURIE will explain the problem solving processes specifically designed for the IT environment. They will focus on the application of these processes to real world IT issues in which they have been involved. K&F will explain the importance of finding the technical cause of a problem/incident before trying to determine the Root Cause. They will also highlight the RCA application developed in conjunction with ServiceNow and available in their App Store.

Continuing Professional Development can play a key role in career advancement and open you up for potential opportunities. How much time to you dedicate to it depends on various factors. Is the return on investment worth it? Does it help advance your career? Maybe you are a career learner. Join Doug Tedder and Eddie Vidal and hear their opinions on on your drive home on September 22, 5 PM Eastern. Our guest, Julie Mohr, will also discuss her own professional development roadmap. To register for this podcast click on the following link; https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/845/172483

#itsmfintheknow

In Higher Education you have unique issues. Working to fulfill the needs of academics, researchers, students, support teams and other enterprise groups can leave you feeling pulled in multiple directions. Decision – making authority is not always clear. A process culture may be seen as too “corporate” for your culture.

Join ITIL Expert, Thom Salo, to cover seven steps you can take to work to build respect and buy-in for your IT service management initiatives and super-charge your customers. We’ll cover:
• How to align with various departmental needs/goals.
• Answer the question, “Why do we care about an ITSM program?”
• Managing program expectations.
• Doing what we say we’ll do!
• Feedback – how to get it and use it.
• How to get past “creating” and get on with “adopting and embracing.”
• The role tracking of metrics will play.

Using Agile and Scrum Concepts to Improve any ITSM Project

A successful process improvement strategy will first begin by leveraging the Continual Service Improvement (CSI) model:

•What is the vision?
•Where are we now?
•Where do we want to be?
•How do we get there?
•Did we get there?
•How do we keep the momentum going?

This presentation will provide a real life example of how to apply the CSI model in order to define a problem management improvement strategy. Joseph will discuss his improvement strategy and his approach of implementing process improvements to improve the maturity of problem management process. The goal is to share with other practitioners in the problem community of interest:

•Real life techniques
•Lessons learned
•Sample artifacts

DevOps - Stay tuned for more details!

Do any of these comments sound familiar?

- “Only the new people find value in our knowledge base.”
- “Once our teams learn how to resolve something, they don’t need to use the knowledge base.”
- “It takes longer to find it in the knowledge base than it does to figure it out.”
- “Our knowledge base is out dated and cumbersome to use.”
- "I’ll ask (insert name here), he / she will know the answer.”
If so, you may be stuck in the knowledge-engineering rut. The Knowledge-centered-support methodology is a proven best practice that overcomes these challenges. Attend this session to learn about the KCS methodology and how you can use it to:

-reduce the time to resolution
-standardize answers to your customers
-lower support costs
-increase customer satisfaction
-increase employee job satisfaction

KCS becomes the way you resolve incidents, answer questions, share your knowledge with peer staff, and in short get people back to work. Because it is part of the Incident process, it is always current and accurate and enables your teams to continually support an expanding breadth of services.

Additionally, you will hear about the journey of the University of Phoenix, and parent company Apollo Education Group, in moving out of old-school knowledge engineering, “ivory tower” knowledge approaches, and into the realm of real-time knowledge management – using KCS to empower front-line staff content administration, and manage knowledge by positive peer-to-peer relationships. We will discuss the use of the Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) methodology in a highly-regulated business environment, to capture, structure, and reuse knowledge as new incidents occur and the business environment changes. Our chat will discuss the methods utilized, uncover the “ditches” to avoid, and present the metrics used to measure and prove success.