Archive for year: 2021

This event is a remote Zoom event

When Paul Wilkinson announced on Linkedin (as a joke) that he had a new framework that would change everything!  He had 8 times the usual amount of hits! We in IT like shiny new things, thinking (and hoping) that they will solve our problems, but many of our problems come from the fact that we haven’t got the basics right! And we never got the old things to do what they were intended to do. He have seen this repeat in cycles over the last 40 years.

Now digital transformation is the latest Industry Shiny New Thing. But 70% of transformation initiatives fail to achieve the hoped for values. “I could have predicted that this would happen!” Not because I’m smart but because of the basics. So why are they failing? What are the basics we still haven’t got right and what is the ‘Shiny New Thing’ that would make everything better?  

Bio:

Paul has been actively involved in ITSM for more than 40 years in a variety of roles from operations, to development to IT management. He was also actively involved in the development of ITIL Practitioner which introduced the Guiding principles to align ITIL to a more Agile way of working. Paul is Business Development Director of GamingWorks, the company that developed the internationally renowned ‘Apollo 13 – an ITSM case experience’ ITSM simulation game, the ‘Phoenix Project’ DevOps simulation and most recently the MarsLander simulation which can be used to support ITIL®4 training and culture change. He was also co-author and developer of the ‘ABC of ICT’ (The Attitude, Behavior and Culture of ICT) publications, having conducted ABC workshops and simulation workshops with delegates representing more than 5000 organizations worldwide. He is a DASA ambassador.

The better ways of working that are growing so quickly challenge much that we believe. They overturn many principles we built a career on. E.g.: IT servers are cattle not pets. Breed and slaughter them. If it hurts, do it more. Don’t go

The better ways of working that are growing so quickly challenge much that we believe. They overturn many principles we built a career on. E.g.:

• IT servers are cattle not pets. Breed and slaughter them.
• If it hurts, do it more.
• Don’t go faster, do less.
• Do nothing until the last responsible moment.
• Break things to make them stronger.
• Managers don’t know the answers.
• All work is experiment.
• Failure is the path to success. It is a normal part of everyday work.
• Maximise the work not done.
• You can’t measure a knowledge worker.
• Management are the servants of the work.
• A bad system beats good people every time.

Perhaps one of the hardest to get our heads around is that we don’t know until we do something. We never know what is going to happen until we do the experiment. We can make a pun on “do” and say “You don’t know until you do”.

Because the world is VUCA.

Most of all, we don’t know the future (unless we’re psychic).

And yet we have all these rituals that imply we do know what will happen.and that it will work:

• Business case.
• Project plan.
• Total cost of ownership 
• Training programme.
• Business plan.
• Reorg.
• Business process reengineering.
• SLAs.
• Target operating model.
• Annual budget.
• Production change request rollback plan.

What if we admit we don’t know the future? How do we Survive and Thrive in a VUCA world? How do we plan?

I’ve been exploring the answers. I will talk about how S&T Happens.

 BIO :

Rob England is an independent IT management consultant, trainer, and commentator based in Wellington, New Zealand. Rob is an internationally-recognised thought leader in DevOps and IT Service Management (ITSM) and a published author of seven books and many articles. He is best known for his now-retired controversial blog and alter-ego, the IT Skeptic. He speaks regularly at international conferences.

Rob is a lead author of the VeriSM framework, and an acknowledged contributor to The DevOps Handbook, and to ITIL 2011 (Service Strategy book) and ITIL 4 (High Velocity IT book). Rob was awarded the inaugural New Zealand IT Service Management Champion award for 2010 by itSMFnz, and made a Life Member in 2017.  Rob is one of New Zealand’s first Certified IT Professionals (CITP), a global accreditation.

He provides local consulting and training to a number of business and government clients in Wellington, on IT strategy, governance, transformation (especially DevOps), and Service Management (ITSM) topics. He specialises in helping change IT ways of working and managing.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robenglandattwohills/