USM and the order of improvement
People have their own perspectives and preferences, but when it comes to continual improvement the order of improvement matters.
Tag: best practice
Mindful Monday: The Importance of Re-Thinking
As the amount of knowledge and the pace of change overwhelms us, perhaps the most important lesson to learn is the ability to rethink and unlearn. Nowhere is this truer than in the continual improvement space.
Mindful Monday: Is the Enterprise ready to strike back?
While simplifying things is not so simple, it remains an important key to a great customer experience. The enterprise needs to simplify services, as well as how they are managed.
(another) Mindful Monday: The enterprise service management mountain
An enterprise service management system drives continual improvement, and for many this mountaintop seems far away. But a standard management system for the enterprise can be established one rock at a time. The Unified Service Management Method’s universal approach to defining ALL services — along with 5 processes and 8 workflows that apply to ALL … Continue reading (another) Mindful Monday: The enterprise service management mountain
Mindful Monday: Wisdom and the Nature of the Beast
get your service management system in order with a simple method.
Mindful Monday: Ask yourself…………. is The USM Method 4me?
Today’s enterprise portal encompasses all enterprise services and demands a simple, sustainable service management system at its heart. Attempting to adapt a single practice framework makes service management increasingly complex.
Will tomorrow always be another day away?
Starting my mindful Monday listening to Beaming Ortelius may have been a bad idea. Half-awake and listening to a podcast about CDEvents and a Keptn Deep Dive got me wondering if tomorrow’s always a day away… Just because I’m not a developer doesn’t mean I’m not interested in development, and it doesn’t mean that lessons … Continue reading Will tomorrow always be another day away?
Is IT4IT for you?
I recently took a look at IT4IT’s version 3, and while there’s a wealth of information in there, I’m not sure it’s for me. Frameworks and standards such as ITIL and IT4IT provide huge bodies of knowledge, but today’s complex digital services demand a simplified and sustainable management system.
As the name suggests, IT4IT is limited to digital services. In fact, the IT4IT standard not only changed IT service to digital product it ‘changes this focus to address technology or code as the main actor in the delivery of an outcome of a service, removing those services performed by human labor .’
People are still actors in the delivery of outcomes. USM provides a sustainable management system for any enterprise service, not just IT services, so it applies to everyone in the enterprise. This also makes it far easier to consume than the IT4IT standard.
Again, as the name suggests, IT4IT is inside-out. The seven value streams described in the standard are designed to ‘combine all of the necessary capabilities to deliver value and support to the dependent parts of the Digital Product lifecycle’. Only one (consume) of these value streams is customer-facing.
USM describes customer-driven service delivery. Four of the five processes and five of the eight workflows are customer-facing; USM is very much outside-in!
IT4IT provides a very detailed reference architecture that is designed to manage the business of IT. It ‘prescribes the value streams and capabilities required to manage the Digital Product lifecycle’. Similar to ITIL, IT4IT is practice-oriented; it provides ways to perform tasks in actual situations.
Whether IT4IT is for you depends on who you are and what you’re looking for. Jan van Bon posted about this years ago. I think large enterprises in particular will find plenty of good information in the IT4IT standard, and it should find a place in the enterprise reference library.
But what all enterprises need today is a dose of simplicity, and the Unified Service Management Method delivers that very well, as outlined in a single book.
USM is a method that provides the architecture and the management system to deploy any combination of practices in one integrated system, for any combination of teams or organizations, in any line of business.
Get a simple, sustainable management system in place with the USM Method; then pick and choose what other parts of your reference library apply to you.
Inside-Out Value Streams
the most important value stream is the customer journey value stream. And as that leads us to dive deep into the process river searching for ‘no-value-added activities’ we should be mindful about getting stuck in the ‘Muda ’ all over again.
A Mindful Monday repost…
Gonna go for a walk this morning, so today’s mindful Monday is a repost from Medium yesterday…. just started reading The agile Manager by Rob England and Cherry Vu….perhaps I’ll post some thoughts once I finish it…. subscribe to my blog!