As I mentioned last fall, we manage our continual service improvement program quarter by quarter: each quarter we select certain critical projects, and then as we have time we "pick up" other work and add it to our list.

Separate but related to this concept of quarterly improvement "releases," we have also created a "semi-annual governing document review." Twice a year we get several relevant staff members together to review our "governing documents"--our policies, standards, and procedures. We don't make major changes, but we make sure that everything makes sense together, uses the latest template, etc.

People talking about "Lean" principles can mislead their audience, because often "Lean" to the speaker means something very different (e.g. that "Lean" means holding kaizen improvement sessions, and that's it). So, take what I'm going to say with a bit of salt, because I have no Lean credentials.

In reading about Lean manufacturing (through "Lean Thinking," "Getting the Right Things Done," and now "Learning to See"), I have been working through how Lean concepts might apply to an Information Technology environment. One of Lean manufacturing's focuses is to create pull-based processes that minimize inventory on-hand, for example. By minimizing inventory you free up cash for new things and can respond more quickly to changing demand.

So--how does this relate to IT? Inventory, in a value-stream mapping, is the stuff waiting between groups. The two ITIL processes that seem to relate the best to the inventory concept are incident management and request fulfillment. Here's my thoughts:

Like many organizations, we have been trying to understand how project management and (service) change management interact. There are a few confusing components:

• Project management texts sometimes use the term "change management" when referring to "project scope change management" aka controlling the scope of a project.
• Projects need governance. Change management also facilitates governance decisions.
• Very early on, it can be hard to determine if something is a project or not.
• Projects have products or deliverables, and these deliverables often follow a change management process.

IT Service Management concepts are supposed to help align IT with the business by making IT think in terms of services--and by then asking, what value does each service provide? IT and the business then agree on the value and sign a Service Level Agreement that (in part) proves IT is providing value to the business. So that's thinking about value in terms of services.

Then recently I have been learning more about Lean Manufacturing, from lean.org and several books such as "Getting the Right Things Done" and "Lean Thinking". Lean again focuses on value, mainly in terms of the value added by each step of the process of creating something for a customer. So that's thinking about value in terms of a process or "pipeline" of events leading to a consumable product.

Our ITIL v3 Foundations training went very well this week! We had 14 students, 6 from Wake Forest University and 8 from elsewhere in North Carolina!

It was neat to have several Universities together; we could talk in more detail about what each campus is doing, and we could talk a little about the various user profiles around campus. How do you understand the value being delivered to students, for example?

We are tentatively scheduling the next ITIL v3 Foundations session for April 7-9, 2009. The cost will be $600 per student. All students must qualify for an academic discount by being faculty, staff, or students. Please let me know if you are interested.

Tomorrow through Thursday we will be holding ITIL v3 foundations training. Seven people from WFU's Reynolda Campus Information Systems and seven people from outside the department will be attending!

I've updated the instructions on how to get to the conference room.

We are tentatively scheduling another training session for April 7-9; please contact me, John Borwick, if you're interested!

I have been reading and taking notes on the ITIL v3 core books (Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operations, and Continual Service Improvement). When we first got the books in May 2007, right when they were published, I remember being so excited about them. It was too early for there to be many webinars or presentations about the materials, and that was a Good Thing: sometimes webinars and presentations trying to distill five books into 60 minutes miss a few things :-)

I remember being excited that each book has a section on organization: ITIL's recommendations on how IT can organize itself, and/or how it can perceive its organization. Service Strategy, for example, presents a five-staged model for how organizations tend to be structured. Sometimes this content gets watered down, or worse ignored, in summary materials.

Three presentations submitted by Wake Forest University IS staff have been selected for the 2009 EDUCAUSE SE Conference in Atlanta, GA on June 1-3:

“Sustainable Governance: Transforming IT from an oral to a written culture” will be presented by John Borwick and Jim Love discussing the value of establishing a formalized management process for departmental governing documents.

We have several means for learning about ITSM: books, training, user groups like the itSMF, fellow Universities, and sites like this one. Last Friday I explored another means: I talked with a Gartner analyst for the first time. If your University has a contract with Gartner, then the odds are someone on campus has the ability to schedule 30-minute calls with a Gartner analyst. There are over 600 Gartner analysts.

I talked with someone from the "CIO Research" team, a team of 20 people. The analyst point me to some case studies supporting our service catalog implementation and helped me understand the value of a Business Service Catalog. He said that it's not uncommon to schedule several calls with the same analyst to "follow up" and see how things are going.

Tomorrow a couple of Universities are coming to campus, and we will talk for a few minutes about ITIL. Here are the slides we'll be using, in case they're helpful to anyone! (These slides were designed for narration, but might be useful as is.)