Real ITSM in the Real world

Just been to a session on Real ITSM in the Real World, a personal story about the Service Management journey at Newcastle University.

Have IT teams based in departments with their own processes etc, but are all now part of same central department.

Different levels of digital literacy. A couple of good examples. One caller phoned service desk with an intermittent problem printing. Found out it was only while they were having cup of tea. Problem solved by identifying that they were unplugging the printer to plug the kettle in. Another user phoned Helpdesk and when asked if the network cable was plugged in, he said he didn't know because he was only a brain surgeon! Teaches you not to make assumptions about what people understand when you are communicating with them.

In the early days of their ITIL journey, they documented processes, and published good practice guides. Then had a departmental reorganisation, and got a dedicated service management team. Defined roles for service owners and service leads, drew up a service catalogue, made people think about things from a service perspective, not a technology perspective.

Drew up ITSM roadmap, put in place incident management process, and held incident reviews. Recently replaced ITSM system, and introduced self service so calls could be tracked. Now introduced change and problem management for first time.

As a result, have seen benefits including learning from major incidents. Identifying causes of major incidents. Biggest cause was implementation of changes, which helped them introduced change management. Next biggest was electrical contractors causing power problems. They publish operational reports for managers, including the date of oldest open ticket. In two cases, customer had died before the problem had been resolved!

Department is now much more focused on the customer. They think more about impact and communication.Technical teams have gone from causing incidents by making unplanned changes from home on a Saturday evening, to piloting the change management process. Everyone is less defensive, incident reviews are blame free with a focus on learning.

Personal learning has included:

• Adapt. Understand your environment and adapt to your organisation's requirement, don't just blindly implement ITIL. Embrace the culture and get allies wherever possible.
  
• Improve. Start somewhere, then improve. Balance idealism with pragmatism. Evolution not revolution.
  
• Don't forget the people. Engage early and engage often and give constant reaffirmation. Set a good example, explain why and make it easy to do the right thing.
  
• It's a never ending journey. Break it into chunks to make the big changes seem less daunting. Focus on issues causing problems. Build on your successes, and accept there's no final destination.
  
• Never stop learning. There's always more you can learn. Talk to people - we're lucky that in HE we have a very collaborative culture. Use free resources, especially social media.

Enjoyed this very personal talk. We've implemented already some of what Newcastle have, but the learning is very applicable across the board.

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Planning, stakeholders and Netflix

For the last couple of days I've been on an awayday with the rest of my colleagues in our executive team. once or twice a year we try and get away from the campus to have a look at various strategic things which need some quality time, away from interruptions. This year we looked at several themes.
The first was how we plan and how we might develop Strategic Themes to help us focus on what our objectives are in each area. We looked at a number of themes we might want to adopt including:
Achieving operational excellence
Delivering an excellent customer experience
Working in partnership with the University to ensure it meets its strategic objectives
Implementing innovative solutions
When we've identified what our themes are, we could draw up a strategy map for each of our service areas, which should make defining our objectives much easier. It is definitely something to consider.

Another area we looked at was stakeholder management. Stakeholders are anyone who is affected by our work, anyone who contributes to our work, any entity which can affect our work, anyone working internally contributing to the delivery of our work.  We have a lot!  We tried looking at them from a number of different angles, including using a couple of matrices. I blogged about one a couple of weeks ago:

 Which had the interesting conclusion that you should not waste time on "enemies" - merely neutralise the damage they can do and ignore them. That's sort of counter intuitive, as you would think that you need to put more effort into them.  The one we worked on was this one:

 where we mapped groups of people and individuals according to how much power they had, and the degree of interest they had in us or individual projects. Some very interesting results, and a list of actions about how we might put a plan in place to move people more towards the top right.

The  third thing we looked at was our service portfolio, where we've been doing some work on how we might realign some of our services to make them more readily understandable to our customers, especially senior ones. This led to discussions on how it fitted with the broader themes of service management, especially service design and service delivery, and we have a number of actions and consultations there.

Finally, we looked at customer service, including the output and feedback from our recent customer service conference. One of the things we want to do is walk the customer journey for a few services, and identify customer touch points. then identify what excellence would look like at each touch point and whether we're delivering it or not.

As usual, a lot of work, and a lot of actions, which we're busy writing up and allocating at the moment.

Finally, during the awayday we looked at a presentation from Netflix which their HR director gave to their staff about their  attitude to talent and culture. If you search around on the web you'll find the video, but the slide deck is here, and that's all you really need.
I like how they reward adequate performance....

The Mystery of the Bicycle Book..

Yesterday was our Service Strategy Board, where we covered a lot of business in a couple of hours. Looked over the objectives for each Service Area for next year, which will form the basis of all of our operational plans and objective setting in our SRDS process which is about to start.  We also looked at a new Service portfolio which changes our service headings, and consists of a description and value statement  - hopefully to make it easier to communicate our value to our senior management.

This morning I went to a presentation from one of our Sheffield Leader cohorts at the end of their project work. Very interesting analysis of how we can improve communication and collaboration across the University in order to work more productively together. For example, analysis of the work shadowing programme had shown how valuable it was in increasing understanding of what different work areas do. During one of the discussions we were talking about barriers to improving processes through working together, and we touched on the importance of the question "why". Why are we doing this, why are we doing it like this, etc.  An amazing story came out, which hope is true.  It goes like this.  During some process improvement work on a reception desk at a hospital, it was noticed that everyone who cycled to work signed a book - the bicycle book. When asked why, the reception staff admitted they didn't know, it had always been done, and books were sent to HR. HR admitted they didn't know why reception sent the books to them when they were full, but they carefully boxed them up and stored them. After much investigation, the signing of the bicycle book was traced back to the introduction of rationing during the second world war, when people who cycled to work were entitled to extra rations. And so it had carried on, for nearly 60 years!! That little question, "why?" is so important.

This afternoon I've been in a long meeting of the SMG for The Diamond. We're approaching the design freeze in only a couple of weeks, and everything has to be finalised by then. By the end of May, the whole design must be agreed, with only the interior finishes and some fit-out subject to
further discussion. Getting really exciting now - great to see it going up, the concrete slabs are being poured, the cores built, and a section of the facade has been built and tested successfully.

UCISA14 part 2

You may have noticed a distinct lack of blogposts from UCISA last week - truth is, I was either too busy, too enthralled, or sitting on the stage chairing sessions - to take notes and post. So here's a summary of what I got from each sessions, as well as links to some of the talks which were recorded. This year we made a real effort to "up the game" of the conference, bringing in outside speakers and moving away from technology and towards leadership.

Clay Shirky is a very well respected american writer, educator and consultant on the social and economic effects of internet technologies - I've heard him speak a couple of times, and there are some excellent talks on the TED website of his.  Clay flew in to give his talk, and it was extremely thought provoking. He talked about IT becoming the central function in the HE enterpise as it already embedded in the way we live. IT is not just being asked to do more, but different things, and we may have to lead change without buy in from our senior managers.
Watch the talk - you'll enjoy it.


Simon Fanshawe is a writer, broadcaster, stand up comedian, founder of Stonewall and describes himself as a Provocateur with a Purpose. He's been working with us here in Sheffield on our equality objectives, and dos a lot of work with organisations on why diversity matters, and how it produces better performing teams. It was an entertaining talk - getting your lovers knickers off in the first few
minutes - but full of really good content. My take home moment, possibly of the conference was - "don't appoint the best person for the job". In fact, never appoint the best person for the job. Appoint the best person for the team. Some interesting HR issues around this one, especially with job specs etc.
Again, the talk was recorded and its well worth a watch.

Vorsprung durcht Technik was the unusual title of a talk given by our own Heidi Fraser-Krauss,

Director of IT Services at York University, and Professor Thomas Krauss, Professor of Photonics at York University. Think it was the first married couple double act we've had at UCISA, and I was hoping that we didn't witness another conscious uncoupling. Luckily we didn't, but we did see a great role play of an IT director trying to deal with a very excited research professor. Anyone who has to deal with academics should watch this!


The final talk on Thursday was from Professor Sue Black, Computer Scientist, founder of the campaign to save Bletchley Park, recently voted Inspirational Woman of the year, and a champion for women in computing. She gave a potted life history, from leaving school and 16, through being a watch here. One of my favourite bits was about her campaign to save Bletchley Park, where Stephen Fry retweeted one of her tweets really showing the power of social media.
single mum of three children, to getting back into education and becoming an academic. Truly inspiring. She's recently formed Savvify, a social enterprise which is currently running techmums - a programme to get mums to be more tech savvy. Another great talk which you can watch here.

Thursday night was the conference dinner, where I had the honour of sitting with John Lloyd who was our after dinner speaker. John was the producer of Spitting Image, Blackadder and QI to name
just a few. Fascinating chatting to him about possibly bringing Spitting Image back - can you imagine Boris's puppet? he gave a great afterdinner talk - so funny, and quoting some great bits from the meaning of Lif, which he co wrote with Douglas Adams. Of course, there was the obligatory selfie.....



Friday morning strarted with Simon Mingay from Gartner talking about Service Porfolios. I've heard Simon to do this talk before, and blogged about it - excellent talk as alwyas, but not recorded.

Next up was Dave Coplin from Microsoft talking about the Future World of Work - excellent presenter and thought provoking talk about how our working lives and environments might look in the future. Also what skills our students and children might need to succeed. He's written a book - Business Reimagined - which is free to download for the kindle edition.A good soundbite from this - its not emails fault we get too many emails. It's ours for not using it properly. Do watch the talk if you get chance - there's lots of really good stuff in it.


Final two talks of the day weren't recorded so you can't watch them - first was from Linda Davidson, now a Global CIO but started life as an actress (you might remember her as Mary the Punk from Eastenders) who had some fascinatng insights into leadership:

She started with a great video predicting what technology might look like from the 1960s - love the bit about the husband paying!



Finally, we closed the conference with a talk from Alex Hunter who was responsible for getting Virgin America off the ground and then became head of Virgin Online talking about how to engage with customers, how to build a relationship with them, how to create a fantastic use experience with the wow factor. Couldn't record this, but there's a number of clips on YouTube of him speaking if you want to look him up, and his website has one of his good examples of customer service and how he fell in love with Pact Coffee.

Though I say it myself, it was one of the best UCISA conferences, and the difficult part starts now - how do we follow it next year?

Innovation....

Kicked off this week with our Human Resources Committee - good progress being made on our Talent First strategy, and we had a interesting discussion about what an ideal Reward and Recognition strategy would look like. Answers on a postcard please :-)

We're looking at making some major changes to our service cataologue, and we're working on a much higher level Service Portfolio which describes what we do, and how it brings value to the Univeristy. Made a lot of progress, and it's been good recently to catch up with the Gartner Analyst who's been advising us. Glad to know he was very complementary and thinks we're going in the right direction!

Its also that time of year for planning, budgeting, forecasting, looking forward to the next academic year, and sorting out our objectives, making sure they align with what the University's plans are, and that we have the necessary funding to achieve them. Lots of work.

Finally today I had a conference call about the Summer of Student Innovation - blogged about it before so this is another plug! There's £5000 available, and a lot of help, for students who have a great idea about how to improve student life with technology. All they have to do is go here and enter. One of the major points of discussion was how we get the message out to students. Blanket email we know don't work, and although there's a press release and a number of media articles, that's not going to get to the students. We know how hard it is - even Fileman didn't get to all of them.  I'm looking for an eye catching, maybe whacky, graphic image that basically makes it clear that there's money available for great ideas. Hopefully this year we'll get an idea from Sheffield.

This initiative is being funded by JISC, and we're meeting soon to look at other innovative ideas to fund - let me have any. My suggestion is a Summer of STAFF Innovation - I'm sure there are plenty of staff out there with ideas who just need a bit of time and funding to make them happen - what do you think?

Services, Planning and Water

When  we introduced Service Management a few years ago, one of the first things we did was construct a Service Catalogue, and divide our services into seven categories, each one having a Service Manager and Service Advisory Board.  Recently we began looking at constructing a service portfolio, which has a different audience and purpose, and as part of that it was natural that we review whether our service areas are correct and still fit for purpose. We come up with a new suggested structure, and have started to look at how it might work, and yesterday our Service Managers and Process Owners met for a first look at it. The portfolio is written very much from a service and value perspective - what do we do that adds value to our customers, and I think we've made a very good start. Lots more work to so though - watch this space.

We've also started to look at our plans for next year, and the first thing we do is look at our top five priorities in the following areas:
New developments
Business as usual
Things to change.
Its a nice easy way of focusing the mind on what we want to achieve, and we've put together a first draft which will get refined over the next few weeks and incorporated into our final planning statement.

Today I've been to Oxford as I'm on the University IT Committee  - always interesting to see how another place works, and also to give them some helpful advice if they're doing something we've already been through. Implementation of major new Business Systems is something they're in the middle of, and Information Security also high on their agenda, as indeed it is on ours. One of the advantages of a long train journey is the amount of work I can done on it, including reading lots of papers - about the only time I get chance. Although yesterday I spent the latter part of the journey looking out of the window at the water everywhere - there were times when the train looked as though it was going through a lake!

Is the world flat?

This morning I got together with colleagues from the HE Sector across Europe to talk about service portfolios and catalogues. Was really good to exchange ideas and see the different stages in the process we all were. Many different models, and different stages of maturity. Challenges across the patch also similar, and we will be sharing our work with each other to see what we can learn.

At lunchtime I went to the CIO lunch, and listened to a talk by Pankaj Ghemawat on Globalisation and the CIO. An excellent speaker, with a really interesting website.

He's done a lot of research on globalisation, and how the world is not exactly flat yet! It has been said for over150 years that the technology of the time is going to destroy national boundaries and make one world, starting with steamships and railroads.

Rather than summarise everything he said, (I was too busy eating to take notes), I suggest you play with the maps section on his website, or watch his TED talk:



Also today I've had a good walk round the exhibition floor where there are about 150 vendors, some we use, some offering new technologies. Always good to get a feel for what's out there.






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Top Ten

As well as large sessions, there's round table discussions, workshops and one to one sessions with Gartner analysts to schedule in. This afternoon I had a session with Simon Mingay who ran a workshop for us recently on service portfolios, discussing with him our latest thinking on where we might go with our service catalogue and transforming it into a portfolio. It was great, well worth it. Lots more to think about now.

This afternoon finished with a session on the top ten strategic technology trends that CIOs should be aware of and factoring into their planning over the next three years. In summary they are:

Mobile Device Diversity & Management
Mobile Apps & Applications
The Internet of Everything
Hybrid Cloud & IT as Service Broker
Cloud/Client Architecture
The Era of Personal Cloud
Software Defined Anything
Web-Scale IT
Smart Machines
3D Printing

Most are self explanatory and not surprising. But a couple of interesting ones.
So, some notes about each one. I might not quite have grasped some of them, but I use the excuse that it's late in the day and I'm tired. :-)

Mobile Device Diversity & Management
No single vendor will dominate, will still be multiple phone and tablet platforms.
Will be many form factors, screen sizes, interaction styles, platforms, architectures. Knowledge workers will use at least 3 to 5 devices by 2016.
Will be management and security issues but many opportunities including new ways of working.

Mobile Apps & Applications
Will be much richer User Interface models – Voice, Video, (gestures, eye tracking).
Microsoft, Google and Apple will battle for leadership.

The Internet of Everything
Connected stuff. Lots of it.

Hybrid Cloud & IT as Service Broker
Hybrid is the future. Along with garlic bread.
It's about linking internal systems with external services.
Combining services to add value.
ITs role will be as an adviser, broker, provider and integrator.

Cloud/Client Architecture
This is very important. It's also very technical. My mind might have wandered off a bit here....

The Era of Personal Cloud
Center of each user's personal digital ecosystem, a unique collection of services for each user, assembled and evolved by each user.
It's the glue connecting the devices and services they choose to
use daily.

Software Defined Anything
Everything will be programmable.
Will have implications. Not sure I understood what they were.
We will live in an API economy though.

Web-Scale IT
A pattern of computing that delivers the capabilities of large scale cloud service providers, eg Amazon, Google. They have had to build their own infrastructure. Some of their best practices will leak down to our environment, eg DevOpps.

Smart Machines
These are cool, and I've blogged about them before.

3D Printing
Growing area. Will be lots of opportunities. Work out what they might be for us.

The end. Thank you.



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Time To Ring Some Changes

Yesterday we had a visit from a Gartner Analyst, Simon Mingay,  to talk to us about the "art and science of service portfolios". We had as many service managers, process owners and exec as we could get, and it turned into an excellent workshop. Simon talked us through a number of principles - for example, the service portfolio is an outside-in view -  nothing to do with how we do stuff, how many people we have working on stuff, how much stuff has cost, or how important stuff is.

It is a demand-led tool, there for the benefit of our customers, not there for the convenience of the IT department.

We talked a lot about why we need a service portfolio - common reasons are to communicate the value we bring, to define what we are trying to optimiise, and to make it easier to do business with the IT department.

Defining what we mean by a service also sparked an interesting discussion. A service is an action, not a thing. If you can point a stick at it, it's a thing not a service. So, servers and networks are not services. What runs on them probably is. So, a service is an action that delivers a benefit to a customer, and often, but not always, involves a technology, people and processes. Not all of our services involve a technology - process improvement or project management for example.

The difference between a service portfolio and a service catalogue was something that we haven't really thought much about before, but now need to get our heads around. The portfolio's audience is usually the senior executive team of an organisation,  and it should be is a strategic, value based description of the IT organisation's mission role and capabilities. It can be used for investment planning, prioritisation and business justification.   The catalogue is used more on a day to day basis by customers and is an operational tool to simplify service requests from customers and to link to automated back off processes for improved IT efficiency.

We've been developing our own service catalogue for a couple of years now, and Simon had seen it in advance and reviewed it for us. Definitely time to make some changes. We need to separate it out into a portfolio (which will mainly be the top level - the left hand column) which will need value statements adding,  benefits listing, and SLAs writing, and a catalogue, which will be mainly the right hand side column. Once we've weeded out the technologies masquerading as services.

Good debate about what is in ours that shouldn't be - there was general agreement that "infrastructure", where it refers to hardware, is not a service , but there are aspects of it that can be described as services   - access to the internet for example. I was also surprised at how much was missing. High value services such as process improvement, project management, consultancy services including advice and guidance don't appear at all.

An excellent session with lots of debate and questions, and I think we were all agreed that it's a good time for a review!

Back to work, again

Hi folks - I'm back, and have just logged into blogger to find my last post stuck as a draft - hence it only just being published. You must have wondered where I'd gone :-)   Whitby was fantastic, in case you're wondering. If you're really interested you can read about it on my personal blog. This year you're not getting the obligatory morris dancing photo, but one of the cottage we used to stay in a few years ago. Or rather, where the cottage used to be - lost to a landslide, and I must admit, many of the quaint cottages perched on the cliffs now look a bit unsafe to me...

So, back to work. This week has so far been about meeting the new Student Union officers - always a pleasure, looking at a number of HR matters, and dealing with an incident. For obvious reasons, can't say too much about it, but it involved three people thinking about it, one watching them, and a huge chocolate cake, which is out of shot!

Also had a good conversation this morning with a Gartner analyst about a workshop we're doing next week on service portfolios and service catalogues where we'll be reviewing our existing service catalogue and looking at how we might develop a portfolio. Should be interesting.

Business capability modelling

In a session on business capability modelling, which I know very little about.

Organisations often struggle with a gap between strategy and execution. High level ambitions and goals need to be translated into actions. Often just jump straight to how we need to change, without looking at what we do.
We need to understand what our organisation does, and what we need to do differently in response to strategic challenges and opportunities.
Need to understand what is commodity and what is unique and differentiating. Different set of questions for different capabilities. Differentiating ones will have more investment and be more strategic.

Can create a map of your organisation on one page. Effective tool for having discussions about where strategies need to change, and where there needs to be investment. Look at what is strategically important to your organisation, and how mature or effective the processes are within it. You can very quickly see where there is a mismatch, ie things are strategically important, but have low maturity. Helps to identify where focus for change needs to be. Difficult to describe, but some good diagrams in the presentation.



Can also map where spend/investment is happening, and compare with what's strategically important. Often see a mismatch. High levels of investment going into areas which aren't strategically important, often historical.



Business capability models can be very effective as translation devices, using a common language which is not technology based so you can have meaningful discussions with your stakeholders.

I've just had an aha moment. I can see how we can use this to discuss prioritisation with departments, especially when we get a number of requests from the same area. Also how we can test whether we're investing in the right areas.



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Gartner HE session catch up

Following the session on service portfolios and catalogues, we had a workshop where we worked with one of the Gartner analysts to write a service portfolio. Starting from scratch, we came up,with suggestions which we discussed as a group, and then with the session. Some of the ideas we have in our service portfolio/catalogue such as Support for Teaching and Learning, and Support for Research as headings were well received, but I realised that there were areas we had missed out, for example project management and process improvement are services which have a high value, but we don't include them. Lots to think and talk about when I get back!

We've also had a session from a colleague at another University about the challenges he faced when appointed recently, and some of the actions he's taking to implement transformational changes. Very inspiring, but obviously confidential so I can't say much, but I did like his use of pictures, maps and diagrams which he had used to have conversations with senior executives. An architecture map which showed the linkage between different applications and services had been very helpful in explaining why changes considered simple to the customer, were in fact quite complicated.

Finally, we visited the University of La Sapienza, one of the oldest Universities in Europe, but housed in a very 1930s Mussolini inspired building! With 140,000 students it was huge, and they had some interesting IT challenges. One of the systems they had recently developed was to help them in their Research Assessment exercise, and was a very complex algorithm to assess which research papers to submit based on criteria including journal impact, citations etc. They'd also made big changes to their student systems to implement many self service processes.


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Service portfolios and service catalogs

Now a session on the Art and Science of Service Portfolios and Catalogues.

IT organisations are transitioning to service based organisations. The service portfolio is critical to this. Defines what you are trying to optimise and is a critical communication tool, especially with senior executives. Also important for IT staff in terms of what it is the IT organising is optimising.

Need to be very clear about why we are doing this, what is it we're trying to do. Also, don't copy somebody else's! Don't do it bottom up. Don't creat the service catalogue first, or you will create a technical service list. Needs to be top down to create a service portfolio.

Why is service management important? IT is a service organisation. It cannot optimise what it does not manage.

What is a service? An action that delivers a benefit to a recipient. Hardware and applications are not services. It's an action, not a thing. There has to be a recipient - a buyer or a consumer. Also, must be a benefit and you must be able to articulate it. Service typically made up of 3 components, a technology, people and processes. But, doesn't have to have all, eg project management, very high value but doesn't involve a technology.
For example, eMail is not a service. Communication and collaboration is the service. That's what we need to optimise. Email is a technology.

Traditional IT based organisation supply drive, very technology and asset centric, inward looking, insulated and monopolistic, cost obsessed.
IT service based organisation is demand driven, internal customer centric, process based, competitive and engaged, service obsessed.

In a service based organisation, process improvements have to be correlated to required service outcomes and outcomes have to be measured with SLAs. Staff need relationship and business expertise, as well as technical and process expertise. Strategic multi sourcing important. Also need good costing models. Anything that is free or seen to be free is undervalued by the organisation.

Relationship managers are trusted and strategic advisors.
Product management also key, responsible for service end to end and defines the improvement path.

Services should be expressed in terms of the ultimate end customer. Need to collectively agree who the real end customer is. That's who the service portfolio is aimed at. Other parts of the IT organisation are not the end customers.

Have to be careful that you are improving services not processes. Change management , incident management, problem management, etc all important and have to improve them, but can only go so far with them.

Difference between service portfolio and service catalogue? Hierarchically related. SP is a strategic value-based description of the IT depts mission, role and capabilities. Contains roughly 15 things. No mention of technology or vendors. Ignore IT department boundaries and think about the whole service to the customer.

SC is an operational tool, aimed at day to day use, transactionally orientated, should simplify service requests from customers. Can mention technology.

Typical items frequently masquerading as services:
Email, network monitoring, security, videoconferencing, PCs, printing.
All important, but reinforces the message that It manages the technology and the asset. Underselling ourselves, and missing what the organisation actually wants.

A business value orientated service portfolio would include things such as communication services, workplace services, project management.

Value statements are important in setting out the portfolio. Aimed at senior executives, so need to think about how they see value. Some examples, Employee retention, employee productivity, reduced risk.
Must be explicit, meaningful, defensible, measurable, differentiating, crisp and memorable.
Structure could be:
Action .... in order to..... deliver benefit
Anytime anywhere work capabilities in order to improve job satisfaction, reduce travel expenses.
Then think about whether you have meaningful SLAs for them.

Summary

Build portfolio from scratch. Don't copy generic examples
Don't ask a customer to provide your value statements
Build a catalogue only after creating a portfolio. If you've created a service catalogue first, set it aside and go back and write the value based portfolio.
Don't publish portfolio until its polished
Refresh it annually
Remember both the portfolio and catalogue are user tools, and are not there for the convenience of IT!



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Agile, Audit and Availability

Yesterday we had our monthly meeting of Service Strategy Board. We don't get project reports in August, but we had a number of items on the agenda to discuss. These included:

We're moving towards much more agile, faster development, and so we need to look at how we run and manage projects alongside this. We had a presentation on Agile Project Management which was very interesting, and well received. In summary, this involves a more iterative, collaborative development between the customer and the developers, keeping customers continually engaged and with a shared ownership of outcomes. Use of prototypes early, not waiting till all specs are finished, More consideration of different options, less getting fixed down one route early. More staging of delivery, short development cycles, release of different stages early. More harnessing of users creativity - this is particularly beneficial when prototypes are used.  Of course, we already embrace some of these concepts to a greater or lesser degree, but we are now looking to increase them. With my customers hat on, I particularly welcome iterative and collaborative development using prototypes - I find it much easier to think about what I want when I can see something in front of me. For those in CiCS, there'll be more info at the next departmental meeting.

Another thing discussed was an audit of learning objects within the University. At the moment we have a range of different sorts of learning objects including audio, video, captures lectures etc, stored in a number of different places and not necessarily easily discoverable by all users. This audit will help us come up with a plan to index, catalogue and make easily available all learning content, which will be a collaborative venture between us and the Library.

As part of our Service Management implementation we looked at a proposal for Availibility Management, and the role of Availability Manager will  initially be to produce a mechanism for automated testing on the availability of our IT services. The aim will be  to provide availability information on all the IT services as defined in the service catalogue (which we also discussed at SSB as we've made a number of revisions to it). So, we 'll be  putting in place automated testing  using the most appropriate technology, but of course there'll  be instances where it may not be practical to put these in place  due to  overhead  issues. Hopefully the outputs of the tests will be developed into appropriate dashboards to help improve information and therefore the quality of our services.

We had a couple of "lessons learned" project reviews to consider, of our SAP upgrade and our Google Apps implementation, so, a busy meeting.

Service Strategy Board

Service Strategy Board yesterday. Another good meeting - always lots to discuss. As usual we went through  reports from all of our projects as well as getting reports from all of our service managers.

Particular things we looked at included:

• A review of our recent filestore upgrade. This had a timeline of everything that had happened, and focused on lessons learned, and made a number of recommendations for future such events. The timing of this one hadn't been easy, it had to come before our VLE upgrade, and it did have the potential to disrupt some exams processing, which is one of the reasons the work was carried out through the night. We discussed whether we should have a dedicated upgrade/downtime window during the summer, but discounted it as it was felt that users would expect all work to be done within that period, which would carry its own risks, and it would be difficult to time. We agreed that we would probably  always have to build at least one downtime window into our planning for the summer, and we would have to ensure that our customers understood the reason for this, but that we would arrange the time in order to cause as little disruption as possible. 

• A proposal to build more formal gateway reviews into all of our projects. This will be at major milestones, and will give SSB the opportunity to consider strategic priorities  at key points, and contribute to the consideration of project options.

• A proposal to look at providing a mobile print service to allow students and staff to print from all of their mobile devices. The first stage of this will be to assess demand.

• A proposal to implement a mobile app for our VLE.

• A revised service catalogue - our first major review has taken place.

And I thought I'd share this with you - you'll know I was at the JANET Brokerage last week, and I admired their new mugs. So they sent me one. This is how it arrived. Well, that's the Brokerage for you.

Availibilty and Common Sense.

Over the last couple of days I've been in some meetings talking about new developments - always exciting. First was a way of better testing and displaying the status of our services (as opposed to systems). We currently have a status page which is excellent and very well used by our staff and students but it's really a list of issues, rather than a list of what's working and what isn't. An interesting new dashboard has been developed, and we're working on appropriate tests now as to whether a service is actually working from a user perspective, rather than whether the server is up and you can log in. Watch this space - availability management is an important part of our service management strategy. 

Currently I'm writing a presentation I'm giving at the JANET conference tomorrow on our move to cloud based services, and the issues around security and privacy and how we've dealt with them. Suspect I'll be putting the finishing touches to it on the train on the way there!

Whilst I'm doing that I'm following the progress of Paul Chamber's appeal at the High Court against his conviction for sending a menacing tweet two years ago. Lots of coverage in the press about it, and I've got the hashtag #twitterjoketrial set up as a search on tweetdeck, and it's beeping so much I've had to turn the sound off my mac. Absolutely ridiculous waste of public money, and huge implications for the use of social media whichever way the verdict goes. Fingers crossed that common sense will prevail, but given the judges' comments when this has been considered previously, I'm not holding my breath. I'm tempted to say that if this goes the wrong way I'll blow Doncaster Airport sky high, but that could get me into a lot of trouble!

Meetings, meetings....

Today I was in back to back meetings for almost 7 hours - tiring, but all of the meetings were good, so it could have been worse! First off was Service Strategy Board - we look at a monthly report from every Service Manager, including reports from our Service Advisory Groups which have just started meeting. So far we've had meetings of the Teaching and Learning Group, and Research and Innovation. We also look at progress of all of our projects, and discuss proposals for new ones. Main items of discussion today included how we take forward our mobile strategy, and particularly how we continue to develop our mobile app, CampusM. It's important that we do to stay ahead of the game, and we're looking at adding functionality to it.  We also talked about desktop video conferencing and the different packages people are using, and whether we should standardise on one centrally supported one.  New projects approved included implementing a text messaging service for students and staff for incidents, and implementing HEAR  -  the Higher Education Achievement Report.   I'm pleased that we're part of a consortium led by Liverpool John Moores University to have been awarded funding under the HEFCE/JISC Cloud and Services for Education programme to develop the secure document service for the HEAR project.  We also looking at how we were approaching Business Process Review, and I'm hoping that we will soon be implementing LEAN, and the tow pilot processes we will be looking at are Programme Regulations Maintenance and Computer Account Registration.

Next up was the Section heads meeting - the Exec join them for every other meeting - and on the agenda today was a discussion on Investors in People. We already have the standard, and we're being reassessed later this year, so need to make sure that all of the good practice is still embedded.  We also talked about the scenario planning the Exec did on our last awayday. In a nutshell, we looked at trends and drivers that will shape the Higher Education Sector, the university and the department over the next 5 to 7 years. Then we imagined what the future might look like if you push these to extremes and produced a number of different "worlds". The most important bit is then looking at how we might have to change to deal with these scenarios. Its a strategic planning tool to produce flexible, long term plans. JISC have produced a good toolkit for it here.  It's something we'll be taking forward over the summer with the senior managers in the department.

This was quickly followed by a Business Continuity Meeting where we were looking at plans and policies for incidents which involved possible occupation of University buildings. Final meeting was Senate, where a new Learning and Teaching Strategy was approved. Lots of innovative ideas, and plans for some changes in the way the University teaches.

There was also a very good presentation at Senate of some of the highlights of the year, which I'll try and summarise tomorrow.

Business Continuity and Service Strategy

Yesterday had back to back meetings from 9 to 5, with a sandwich grabbed at my desk at lunchtime. Explains my very grubby keyboard and sticky iPad screen!

Started off with the Business Continuity Operations group which I chair, and we had a full agenda. Incidents that we've had over the past few months have generated a number of actions which are being worked through, as well as the various simulated exercises. Today we discussed the priorities for clearing snow across the campus. Pretty difficult to concentrate on that when the sun is shining! We're doing a lot of work on communications, for example looking at how we use SMS messaging to communicate between the Incident Management Team and with the wider body of staff and students. There's also a lot of debate about emergency contact details - how they're collected, stored, accessed and kept up to date. Pretty simple you might think, but it always seems to be an issue. So we're carrying out a process review to determine what we need to change. Lots of stuff going on looking at reciprocal arrangements with other bodies including the local hospitals, work on how we monitor alarms for fire, intruders, sensitive equipment and processes, and liasion with local emergency planning teams. My favourite part of the agenda is where we share details of incidents and near misses - which can be many and varied!

A big piece of work is the review of our Incident Plan, which is very thorough and is coming up with some major changes. As someone who's been an incident manager in the past although I'm not on the group, I do get a briefing on progress. Today looking at the different roles we've identified - from Duty Manager, to Incident Manager and Gold Liaison Officer. I've always wanted to be part of something called Gold Command.....  This is going to be one of those documents that you hope we never need, but we will, especially if the last year is anything to go by, and there'll be a big training exercise to be undertaken, as it's important that everyone understands exactly what there role is. During an incident you rarely have time to consult the manual!

The afternoon was taken up with our Service Strategy Board which is proving very useful for airing issues around projects and service changes, and for catching up on what's going on across the department. Today we discussed whether our DEV and QA systems should be subject to the same level of control that our production services are (in service management terms, change management etc), how we handle changes to our managed service, how we handle password resets and whether we should take part in World IPv6 day. I suggested we should declare it a bank holiday and have a street party, but that wasn't what was meant....

Some decisions taken about our Google implementation including which apps will be turned on and  looking at giving students accounts for life. We catch up on progress on all projects - some going well, and some slower than I would like, but there are risks to be managed which might be mitigated by delaying implementation if it means more testing can be done.

A very positive final item was our Innovations Space - a space in our collaboration system where people can discuss and suggest innovative projects, and those that look promising  are given the go ahead for some investigative work. Lots of lively discussion happening in the space, and two proposals given the go ahead today  for some work to see if they're feasible.

From Drama to Bums on Seats

Quite a lot of meetings to catch up on, so here's a quick round up.

Friday morning was the Drama Studio User Group, which we effectively disbanded!  Well, in its current form. Rather than try and look at operational issues, management and policy, the group will reform and look at operational issues, becoming a consultative groups for all users of the Drama Studio. There's a wide range of them - academic departments, students, local amateur dramatic groups, and we'll be meeting for some of the time in the evening to make sure all users are represented.

Then on Friday afternoon the Exec spent 2 hours going through our operational plan and prioritising all of the different objectives to present to the Service Strategy Board for their comments. A big job, and interesting to see where we might have different views to the managers who have put it together. In these tight financial times, and where our users want more services than ever, it's important we get this right.

Today I had the first meeting of an important project - we're calling it IT as a Shared Service, and it will be looking at how CiCS and Faculty and departmental IT staff can work more closely together. Lots of benefits to be had if we get this right including better IT support in departments, efficiency, less duplication, better career development for staff.

Then this afternoon it was the Service Strategy Board.  Lots of good discussion. Topics covered included how we're coordinating improvements to the registration process for new students, how we ensure development work done outside of the development team gets the right technical advice and progress on all of our projects. No new projects to approve today, but one "lessons leaned" review which we carry out on all completed projects.

Each month for  the  meeting of the SSB the service manager produces an overview report of their own area - not just projects, but other developments and significant changes. These are invaluable for me and the rest of the team to keep up with everything happening in the department. I can't summarise all seven of them here, so I thought I'd highlight one or two after each meeting. Today it's the turn of  Teaching and Learning, and the following new developments were reported:

• Managed laptop service being piloted to allow departments to use space more flexibly, eg using teaching labs as IT spaces

• New PC availability service (or Bums on Seats as it's affectionately known in the dept) which will graphically show individual PCs on each floor in the IC and display availability status. This will be linked with the PC booking system so you can walk into the building and book a PC on level 0 and it will be ready for you as you reach the higher levels

• Creative media space opening in the IC where students will be able to produce audio and video material

• Laptop loan service in IC being piloted

All good stuff and well done to everyone.

Off to Loughborough tomorrow for the Google Apps for Education UK User Group.

SMS and SSB

Started this morning with a discussion on using SMS services for communicating with staff and students. Currently we have a couple of ad hoc solutions for some departments, but we want to put something in University wide. There's a number of reasons, including communicating changes - this morning's lecture's been canceled for example - but also, in the light of recent incidents, emergency communication. That could be with members of the University, staff and students during the bad weather for example, but also between members of the incident management team. There's a number of things to overcome - linking any system to our main corporate systems for example so we only store data in one place; getting members of staff and students to keep their contact details up to date; moderating what it's used for so we don't bombard students with messages; cost - at about 5p per text it's not a cheap option.  There's also the issue in incidents of texts not always getting through if the networks are busy. Anyway, a pilot service is about to start within a couple of areas including an academic department,  our department and  the incident management team, so we'll see how it goes and if we can get some of the issues ironed out.

Service Strategy Board had a good meeting this afternoon - some full and frank discussions, so it wasn't boring! It's proving to be a very good forum for discussing issues and getting different views of how we might do things. We had an interesting discussion on how we might take forward development of our new portal and our enquirer and applicant portal, and how that fits in to plans to change the way we  register new students. Some conflicting priorities we need to sort out. Also some differing opinions on our Google apps implementation - especially whether we turn any apps off, or leave them all turned on. No final decision on that one so more discussion needed. We've just started our managed staff printing project, which hopefully will reduce our printing, and make what we do print more efficient and environmentally friendly.