using all the various frameworks and methodologies at our disposal to create workable solutions for our organisations.
We start to then move away from the idea that ‘best practice’ remains only one framework, only one methodology.
Often, we will see these solutions become over-engineered, expensive or culturally misaligned. By applying judgement to the situations that organisations find themselves in, we can present solutions that build maturity into service management.
One of the predictions… or rather a wish… was that ‘we stop pretending everything improves all the time and get much better at intentional improvement’.
A few members of the audience mentioned that when it comes to continual improvement, there’s the impression that an improvement is going to be done because ‘we need to be seen to do continual improvement!’ – but are those improvements actually improvements that will benefit the business?
The idea behind an intentional improvement is an improvement that allows for space, learning and measurement of value and reprioritisation or course correction as necessary.
There was also a small note about the differences between Continual Improvement and Continuous Improvement – two terms that often seem to get mixed up in the industry.
Continual Improvement often acts as a closed loop system – incorporating feedback, using outcomes to recalibrate decisions and behaviours so the system can adapt and self-correct over time.
Continuous Improvement, on the other hand, operates more as an open loop system, or a hamster wheel if you will. It continues to operate without being influenced by meaningful impact and the outputs that it produces often don’t directly adjust future actions.
And the final discussion of the event centred around SLAs vs XLAs. One of the suggestions was that “Do we even need SLAs anymore when the business doesn’t understand what 95% of the uptime is and they’re more concerned about business impact?” (for instance, Payroll is up 99% of the time, but the actual business impact is that people are paid on a Thursday all the time.)
Should we, in fact, be looking at the XLA around this rather than sticking to just metrics that your average person in a business is going to struggle to understand?
SLAs still do have their place for baseline control and risk management, but XLAs should be used to help with the translation and interpretation of those SLAs
We still need those technical controls in place, but we need to also ensure that we have a clear understanding of experience, flow, and business impact.
We do need to be cautious though when using just our SLAs to help with our reporting.
This can give us what we call the ‘watermelon effect’ which often shows that the reports are looking green and good from the outside… but the business need hasn’t been met which means the reports are red on the inside.
Following the discussion, we provided an update on the upcoming events that itSMF are hosting around Australia and talked about the National Conference coming up in August in Brisbane!
It was then time to dive back into coffee and croissants as networking and collaboration took centre stage, highlighting how important it is to have these continual get-togethers to discuss current and future changes in the industry.
We look forward to our next face to face planned for June!
By:
itSMF WA Committee
Michelle Major-Goldsmith
Simon Dorst
Gail D’Souza
Vinny Govender
Stacy Thomas
using all the various frameworks and methodologies at our disposal to create workable solutions for our organisations.
We start to then move away from the idea that ‘best practice’ remains only one framework, only one methodology.
Often, we will see these solutions become over-engineered, expensive or culturally misaligned. By applying judgement to the situations that organisations find themselves in, we can present solutions that build maturity into service management.
One of the predictions… or rather a wish… was that ‘we stop pretending everything improves all the time and get much better at intentional improvement’.
A few members of the audience mentioned that when it comes to continual improvement, there’s the impression that an improvement is going to be done because ‘we need to be seen to do continual improvement!’ – but are those improvements actually improvements that will benefit the business?
The idea behind an intentional improvement is an improvement that allows for space, learning and measurement of value and reprioritisation or course correction as necessary.
There was also a small note about the differences between Continual Improvement and Continuous Improvement – two terms that often seem to get mixed up in the industry.
Continual Improvement often acts as a closed loop system – incorporating feedback, using outcomes to recalibrate decisions and behaviours so the system can adapt and self-correct over time.
Continuous Improvement, on the other hand, operates more as an open loop system, or a hamster wheel if you will. It continues to operate without being influenced by meaningful impact and the outputs that it produces often don’t directly adjust future actions.
And the final discussion of the event centred around SLAs vs XLAs. One of the suggestions was that “Do we even need SLAs anymore when the business doesn’t understand what 95% of the uptime is and they’re more concerned about business impact?” (for instance, Payroll is up 99% of the time, but the actual business impact is that people are paid on a Thursday all the time.)
Should we, in fact, be looking at the XLA around this rather than sticking to just metrics that your average person in a business is going to struggle to understand?
SLAs still do have their place for baseline control and risk management, but XLAs should be used to help with the translation and interpretation of those SLAs
We still need those technical controls in place, but we need to also ensure that we have a clear understanding of experience, flow, and business impact.
We do need to be cautious though when using just our SLAs to help with our reporting.
This can give us what we call the ‘watermelon effect’ which often shows that the reports are looking green and good from the outside… but the business need hasn’t been met which means the reports are red on the inside.
Following the discussion, we provided an update on the upcoming events that itSMF are hosting around Australia and talked about the National Conference coming up in August in Brisbane!
It was then time to dive back into coffee and croissants as networking and collaboration took centre stage, highlighting how important it is to have these continual get-togethers to discuss current and future changes in the industry.
We look forward to our next face to face planned for June!
By:
itSMF WA Committee
Michelle Major-Goldsmith
Simon Dorst
Gail D’Souza
Vinny Govender
Stacy Thomas