DevOps, Agile Service Management, Scrum – The Common Element

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I’ve done a lot of reading lately, and collaborating, specifically about the DevOps movement, agile service management and SCRUM.  So what do these things have in common – teamwork and collaboration.

  • DevOps is defined by Gene Kim as “the emerging professional movement that advocates a collaborative working relationship between Development and IT Operations, resulting in the fast flow of planned work (i.e., high deploy rates), while simultaneously increasing the reliability, stability, resilience and security of the production environment.”
  • “SCRUM is a simple framework for effective team collaboration on complex software projects.” (SCRUM.org)  SCRUM leverages a release planning meeting, a sprint planning meeting, a daily scrum, a sprint review and a sprint retrospective . . . wow, that’s a lot of meetings.
  • “Agile Service Management (Agile SM) ensures that ITSM processes reflect Agile values and are designed with “just enough” control and structure in order to effectively and efficiently deliver services that facilitate customer outcomes when and how they are needed.” (ITSM Professor)   Agile SM leverages similar events as SCRUM with the exception of leveraging a product backlog which is replaced by the process backlog.

So why the focus on teamwork and collaboration?  Are we particularly bad at teamwork and collaboration in IT?  Perhaps it could be partially attributed to the fact that some IT professionals work in IT because they like to work with ‘things’ as opposed to ‘people’.  When I was in high school, we took some tests to determine if we would be more successful working with things or with people.  For those who had an aptitude towards things, computer programming was a suggested career direction.  So maybe it stands to reason that communicating isn’t always a natural skill for some IT professionals.  However, it is becoming more and more apparent it is a vital part of the skill-set for IT professionals.  As IT continues focusing on aligning with the business and ensuring positive contributions towards the value streams of the business, we better become better communicators and collaborators.

~ITSM Crusader

Who Is The ITSM Crusader?

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I am a self-proclaimed, IT Service Management Crusader whose 14+ years in IT have afforded me experience as an Asset Manager, Configuration Manager, Change Manager, Incident Manager, Problem Manager, Release Manager, Service Portfolio Manager and ITIL Program Manager.  In addition to the ITIL-related roles, I previously served as a member of an Enterprise Architecture team playing an active role in strategy sessions, architectural design reviews and operational readiness reviews.

I hold the following certifications:  ITIL v2 Foundation, ITIL v3 Foundation, ITIL Release, Control & Validation, ITIL Service Operations, ITIL Service Offerings & Agreements, TOGAF 8, Certified Process Design Engineer (CPDE), Certified Agile Service Manager (CASM), ISO27001 Lead Auditor.

I combine my passion for process improvement, drive for success and personal work commitment to inspire others to partner together and achieve common goals and continual improvement.  This passion led me to start blogging as the ITSM Crusader.  I hope you’ll follow along and provide feedback.

Day Two Highlights – 19th International IT Service Management Conference

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Another busy day started with a breakfast briefing at 7 am and wrapping up about 7 pm.  Here are the highlights from February 17th:

Breakfast Briefing – What’s for Breakfast session with Kirk Weisler – personal growth and development is one of the top three needs.  As part of our own personal growth, Kirk suggested some books.  His short list included:  Switch, How to Change Things When Change is Hard, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The Oz Principle, The Power of Habit , Visual Teams, Now Discover Your Strengths, Tribal Leadership.  In addition, Kirk mentioned that the Zappos headquarters is located here in Las Vegas and we can tour their office and learn a bit about their culture.  I’m hoping to get that opportunity after the end of the conference.

Daniel Burrus – Flash Foresight – Daniel talked about technology trends and a little bit about how the biggest trends are changing the world.  He believes the competency many companies are missing is execution and the ability to anticipate the future.  He suggested we start with certainty; the future is all about relationships and relationships are built on trust.  Understand the difference between hard trends and soft trends.  Think about how our kid’s gaming experience with current gaming technology and think about how they must feel like they’re taking a giant step backwards each day when they go to school.  Evidence Daniel shared about predicting the future included his sharing of a list of hard trends that he shared back in 1985.  The list included networking, virtualization and mobility.  His point – the list hasn’t changed at all and every item is still relevant.

His recommendations for us:  “Direct your future or someone else will.”  He suggested that we all spend one hour a week unplugging from the present and thinking about the future.

The Continuing Journey To Become A Strategic Advantage – This session was conducted by Anthony (Tony) Krasinski, Director of IT Service Management for Erie Insurance Group.  Tony shared that the issue at Erie was not a process problem but rather a leadership problem.  The goal of their journey was to move from being considered a weakness to a strategic advantage in three years.  They spent the first year of their journey focusing on the people with three key activities:  leadership breakthrough training, limiting what they delivered until they got it right and enforcing their processes (compliance).  Their critical success factors are operational stability and delivering on their commitments.  In year two, they accelerated delivery, implemented ‘right size, right mix’ and the ‘how’ of leadership.  With the ‘right size, right mix’ effort, they tackled an issue with too many job descriptions and job levels.  As an example, they had 55 position descriptions for analysts in IT.  The problem – they were too specialized.  They resolved the issue by creating job families.  They eliminated negativity with their people about these updates when they announced that no one would have any financial changes based on the mapping and no one would lose vacation time based on their mapping.  As part of the organizational effectiveness program (right size, right mix), they:

  • organized better to be more effective
  • eliminated specialization
  • Decentralized functions
  • Established a team of project managers in operations focused only on operations
  • Redesigned operations
  • They separated engineering, administration and support
  • Coupled architecture and engineers
  • Set the expectation – the engineering and ops teams must collaborate

The result – they delivered more than they were asked for in 2014 and their relationship with the business is better than ever.

Moving from Problem Administrators to Problem Managers – this session was conducted by Joe Gallagher, Global Head of Problem Management for Bank of New York Mellon.  This was an excellent session with so much practical advice, there is simply too much to put here.  Some key take-aways:

  • Their key pain point was stability.  After three years with problem administrators, they had seen no true improvement in stability.
  • The process was cumbersome and not effective.  They needed to leverage automation as much as possible and make it an easy, sustainable process.
  • The existing process was too slow with an average of 28 days to complete root cause analysis.  After the implementation of problem managers, they reduced the number down to 8 days!!
  • The backlog of items was large and they needed to trim it down.
  • Accountability for RCA was decentralized in the existing process but was moved to a centralized team as part of the movement.  This proved to be much more effective.
  • They set their goal to reduce major incidents by 20% and amazingly achieved a 38% improvement with the movement.

IT Transformation at Prudential Group Insurance:  The ITSM & DevOps Mashup – this session was conducted by Chris Flanagan, VP of ITSM & Operations.  Chris talked about how their team’s operated essentially as ‘islands’.  They were not good at addressing end-of-life issues and even worse, they had no plans to address the issues.  Their engagement model was essentially a ‘friends and family’ model so if you knew the right person, you could get your effort going but if you didn’t, tough luck.  Their operational model was not good either.  As part of their improvement initiative, they choose a plan/build/test/run approach.  They started addressing the ‘silo’ issue between dev and ops by having the teams share what the value proposition of each of their teams was.  The goal was to ‘find a way to go fast with quality.’  Chris shared their story and suggested that we pick which devOps capabilities make sense for our own organizations.  At Prudential, they chose continuous integration and continuous delivery.  Some take-aways Chris shared as ’10 things we wish we had known when we started’:

  1. Principles matter
  2. Get a trail guide
  3. Small teams speed things up
  4. Develop a framework
  5. Pick one application to start with (preferably a web-based one)
  6. Tools are less important than results
  7. Software configuration management is hard
  8. Elastic provisioning is a nice to have, not a need to have
  9. It’s all about testing
  10. DevOps is a culture, not a technology

I’ll be blogging about the final day of the conference soon.  Stay tuned.

Highlights – Day One of the 19th International IT Service Management Conference

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This will be one of my longer blogs since I have a lot to share.  Here are the highlights of day one:

Breakfast Briefing – An ITSM Success Story (Saurabah Dubey, KPMG)

  • Lessons Shared
    • Remember, ABCD . . . Ask, Breathe, Check, Decide.  You don’t have to make hasty decisions.
    • Fix the mix . . .  right people for right job.
    • Take the call . . . sometimes you just have to make the decision. Be assertive.
    • Adapt your planning . . . plan constantly, not just once.
    • Talk, talk, talk . . . keep talking to your customer and yours customer’s customers.
    • Be patient
    • Celebrate your successes.
    • Learn from all experiences . . . the good, the bad and the ugly.

Opening Remarks – the theme at the conference this year is an Indiana Jones theme with  ‘snakes and ladders’.  The CEO and Co-Founder of Pink Elephant, the IT Service Management experts, shared opening remarks by providing an analogy . . . snakes represent the risks and ladders represent the rewards.  Risks can bit you unless you assess and manage them.  In addition, David Ratcliffe, President of Pink Elephant, talked a bit about next year’s event . . . their 20th anniversary of the IT Service Management conference.  With such a momentous event coming, they’re offering a two-for-one offer to get the largest attendance ever. He also talked about the upcoming Cyber Risk & Resilience Summit coming in June.  David said there are two types of companies “those who know they’ve been attacked and those who don’t.”

Larry King Live –   Larry King was our keynote speaker this morning.  He shared a lot of stories with us.  One that I didn’t know . . . he once worked for the mafia.  Following his individual keynote, he sat down together with George Spaulding for a ‘Larry King style’ interview of Mick Ebeling, Nick Wilding and George Westerman.

Leading Digital:  Turning Technology into Business Transformation – This session was led by Dr. George Westerman, Research Scientist at MIT.  Being a ‘digital master’ like Nike, Starbucks, Asian Paint and Codelco, is about leadership, not technology.  He used an excellent analogy of a caterpillar that turns into a beautiful butterfly and his point was ‘if you’re thinking caterpillars, someone else is thinking butterflies’.

Catalyst for Change – A session by Dennis Quinn of Texas Health Resources where he shared their journey of updating their ITIL processes and how it helped their organization save lives.  Lots of good info from Dennis but the most compelling piece for me was the decision to move to a centralized problem management process where they had dedicated problem coordinators whose role was to define priority and to drive problem resolution.

Pink Think Tank – This was a session let by Rob England, the IT Skeptic.  Rob shared with us what the think tank team had discussed at their last meeting.  If he had to share a problem statement, this is it:  “Governance of enterprise IT is missing in action in most organizations.  We need to be thinking about how IT can address the issue.  As actions for us, he suggested we read ISACA Board Briefing on IT Governance, 2nd Edition and he also suggested that we listed to practitioner radio episode 49:  Effective IT Governance with COBIT5 – its a podcast.

Bolstering Service Delivery Success with Agile Risk Management – William J. Robinson, a principal solutions architect of Sandia National Labs, conducted this informative session.  One key takeaway, addressing scope as a risk, with scope creep (1) recognize change as a project or product condition, (2) adopt methods that provide or enhance envisioning and (3) employ envisioning in an agile way.

The Fallacy of the Impossible – Mick Ebeling, founder of Not Impossible Labs, gave our afternoon keynote and really left the audience thinking ‘WOW!!!’  He talked about opportunities to help others and how he approached each.  If you haven’t heard of Mick, take a look here. Some take-aways:

  • “Commit.  Then figure it out.”
  • “Fail.  Fail.  Fail.  Succeed.”
  • “Help one. Help many.”
  • Rules of ‘How’:  (1) singularity of focus, (2) give it away, (3) beautiful, limitless naiveté.
  • Look thru the eyes of potential.
  • Lesson’s learned:  When they trained people to create the prosthetic’s for Project Daniel, they trained ALL MEN.  When war broke out again, the men left and the women weren’t trained.  Their goal now is to train 51% women going forward.

He asked each of us to take action by thinking about (1) what is your story? (2) who is that one person you can help? (3) Doing good is good branding, really the best.

So that’s it for day one . . . now off to get some sleep before tomorrow’s 7 am breakfast briefing.

The ITSM Crusader Arrives in Vegas for Pink15

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I arrived at the Bellagio this afternoon in time to catch the second half of the conference optimizer.  I attended a session by Kirk Weisler called ‘Breaking Free & Building Teams.’  As always, Kirk never disappoints me.  He demonstrated the use of ‘Whip Weekly’ with an example of learning something as simple as what your team’s favorite childhood cereal was and he illustrated how having that kind of information could truly touch someone.  This evening, I did some great networking and had the opportunity to meet Kathy Jo Miller Taylor who is a Group Manager over Release & Request Management and also Change Management for Nordstrom.  Kathy will be presenting a session tomorrow covering ‘Enterprise Change Management in An Agile, Fast Moving World.’  In addition, I met some folks with Corning and also ran into Cathy Kirch, ITSM Office Delivery Lead/Manager for Allstate Insurance Company.  Kathy was kind enough to share some insight about some plans they have in the coming year with respect to agile change management and an approach to updating their CMDB in alignment with those changes.  All of that in just a few hours . . . excited about what the next few days will bring.

The ITSM Crusader Travels to Pink15 IT Service Management Conference

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Tomorrow, I’ll travel to Las Vegas for my fourth trip to the Pink Elephant IT Service Management conference.  I’m looking forward to traveling with a couple of co-workers and experiencing all the conference has to offer.  We’ll start with the conference optimizer followed by the networking reception and close the evening by attending the VIP networking reception.  I’ll be blogging about the conference so stay tuned.