Making IT Work Archives - Deep Creek Center

The Great Convergence

One of the spectacles of the past 20 or so years has been the competing approaches and frameworks for improving governance, streamlining workflows, and delivering services. Practices like LEAN, Agile, ITIL, DevOps, and even governance frameworks like CObIT all competed for attention in promising adopting organizations more efficient and more effective teams, better results, and […]

ITIL Capacity Management – As Easy as 1-2-3

In the ITIL guidance, Capacity Management is broken down into three related sub-processes. In this blog we will look at the three subprocesses and how they help us have better visibility into customer needs. The first of the subprocesses is Component Capacity Management. For this subprocess we could easily substitute the word Utilization, for the […]

3 Critical Factors in Successful ITSM Adoption (and one to grow on)

Many organizations are working to adopt ITIL practices and improve the quality of services they provide to their customers. Yet many organization, especially larger ones with a broad array of potential areas of opportunity, struggle to identify the key critical success factors that make ITIL adoptions successful. We’ve had the privilege of working with hundreds […]

Why organizations fail in using Agile/Scrum practices – missing the forest for the trees

One of the deeply fundamental problems with the adoption of Agile practices is that the “point” of using Agile is often lost on most of the participants.

Agile as a Business Transformation Practice

Agile as a Business Transformation Practice One of the deeply fundamental problems with how people wrestle with the adoption of Agile practices is that the “point” of using Agile is often lost on most of the participants. They often hear Agile and think New meetings Continuous Deployment No changes during sprints Visual Task Boards While […]

ITIL Practitioner: Finally the ITIL Certification we actually wanted!

With the upcoming February launch of the new ITIL Practitioner certification, we finally have the answer to the most frequently asked questions about ITIL. What do I do to get started? What should I focus on first? What is the “next class” after Foundations? ITIL Foundations has enormous scope; from strategic planning to continual improvement, […]

Portfolio of What?

Many organizations struggle to understand and differentiate project portfolio management from service portfolio management. This is an important distinction, because project portfolio managers understandably focus on the project portfolio. This is useful, but ultimately misses the point of looking at the investment of service assets across the service lifecycle. The basic idea behind service portfolio […]

Putting the Service in IT Service Management

Many people understandably think about ITIL as a process framework. When you describe good practices for 25+ processes and capabilities it seems a no brainer. Yet when you look at the books, their names, and their objectives, it becomes clear that processes are an important means (COBIT calls them one of seven enablers), but that […]

Categorize this!

Several ITIL processes include a categorization activity, most prominently Incident and Problem Management. Categorization capabilities in most of the major tool families are widely misunderstood, and because of that, organizations lose some of their most valuable data.

Crossing the Chasm – Projects, Operations, and Best Practices

Deep Creek has worked with customers for many years to help them better align IT services to business needs. This has drawn us to provide training and mentoring support in lots of different best practice areas, from governance, to quality management, to project management, to service management, and so on. When ITIL restructured itself in […]