Collaboration was the top scoring takeaway from my sessions at the annual ITSDFI conference in Brno in the Czech Republic. In both my DevOps presentation as well as my ITIL practitioner workshop this was raised as a core competence area that needs to be developed. Indeed the need to develop new skills was a theme throughout the conference.
Workshop findings – ABC THE number 1 success or fail factor!
One of the goals of the workshop was to show how ABC (Attitude, Behavior, Culture) is STILL the number 1 success – or more commonly -‘FAIL’ factor in ITSM improvement programs. It was this workshop that prompted a CEO at another conference to ask ‘Why wasn’t this session a keynote session’? As she recognized not only the ABC issues but also the value of the ITIL Practitioner concepts.
“ABC is like an Iceberg, much of it is hidden, we don’t see it, we don’t talk about it and we HOPE that it won’t grievances our ITIL/ITSM initiative”. Yet our surveys reveal that a large majority of organizations do not get the HOPED for value from their ITIL/ITSM investments because of the ABC hidden Iceberg.
Workshop exercises – Making the hidden Iceberg visible
In the workshop we used the ABC cards (ABC is named in the ITIL Practitioner toolkit) as an awareness and assessment instrument to conduct two exercises that are critical to the success of an ITSM initiative.
Exercise One -The Customer exercise: ‘Why are we doing? ‘What does the Customer need’? ‘Do we really KNOW what the Customer needs’?
Exercise Two – The Resistance exercise: ‘Adopting ITIL represents an organizational change – which always meets with resistance. What does that look like and how can we deal with it’?
The ABC of ICT card set represents 57 worst practice cartoons in Attitude, Behavior and Culture, displayed by both IT and the Business. Delegates representing more than 4000 organizations have participated in workshops using the cards. The output of the exercises can be used as input to a CSI (Continual Service Improvement) initiative.