change

There seems to be a fashion for analysts to make rash revolutionary statements. I reckon it is in their KPIs. The normally-temperate Glenn O'Donnell said: "Abolish the CAB!". That is - to put it mildly - a bit rash.

The problem with too many ITSM consultants is that they are binder-chuckers. ITSM consulting is not about inventing a process. It is about enacting cultural change.

The latest buzz in IT is of course Agile, and its bastard spawn DevOps. I've written before about how the change is becoming the steady state and stability the exception; and how the old mainframe-centric concepts of change control will have to adapt. I'm even confident that concepts from agile will play an important part in that. But nothing in that warrants the frenzied hype around agile right now. And most of all, nothing in that warrants letting the IT cowboys out of the corral.

This has been bugging me for a long time: why on earth did ITIL V3 rename Forward Schedule of Change to Change Schedule? Beats me, and it is counter-productive.

I believe ITIL has aspirations beyond its station. ITIL is an operational framework for IT production environments. So long as it knows its place and sticks to it, all is well. But every now and then it gets an inflated view of its own importance and starts poking into the development aspects of IT, or worse still the strategic ones. This is an example of the latter, where the book is confused between operational and strategic aspects of change. The forums are littered with confused postings.

[Hi! IF you came looking for insight into the rebounding world economy, you are looking for Dead Cat Bounce. This post below is about IT project management. But thanks for dropping in! If you are interested in IT, please take a look around]

One of the things ITIL3 improves is the whole development/production interface, introducing radical concepts like production readiness, acceptance, evaluation... oh and testing. Heady stuff. But something that was omitted from ITIL V3 was documentation of Dead Cat Syndrome.

It is an interesting question: is there a useful distinction between organisational change and administrative production change?

Should we maintain the two concepts as distinct because their natures are so different?

Or should we treat them the same and see one as a small subset at the execution end of the other?

And if so, which is a subset of which? - you'll get opposite answers depending who you ask.

Triggered by a good point made by Burrado.

Change is about people. Without people, change doesn't happen. Without their assent, buy-in, cooperation, enthusiasm and effort, change doesn't happen. it seems this can't be said too often. The latest survey from McKinsey Quarterly Creating organizational transformations (McKinseys being an analyst firm whose crap factoids are less crap than most) says it all:

Something different today: some ITSM philosophy for your consideration... and debate.

A thread of discussion on this blog makes it clear that there are differing perspectives of Change. In order to further muddy the waters, here is the IT Skeptic's Change Model which attempts to draw those perspectives together.

[Updated: added point 3]