The IT Skeptic - maturity

Improve first

skeptic — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 08:08:59 +0000

Improve first. Measure, plan, manage, define and standardise later.

Why process maturity is a useless metric for ITSM improvement

skeptic — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 21:27:11 +0000

Process/practice maturity is a metric that should be of little interest when deciding where to focus your improvement efforts, or for measuring the results of those efforts. And CMM process management maturity is even more useless than execution maturity.

Risk and value should be the primary metrics for planning and assessing your improvement.

The uselessness of ITIL process maturity assessment

skeptic — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 21:15:38 +0000

I'm looking at a "classic" process maturity assessment done by a consulting firm for a client, and what a useless document it is. I'm not saying who sent it to me or why or where from. That isn't important here because so many assessments are similar. Compare yours.

The report analyses 8 practices. It doesn't say why those eight. ITIL has 27 or so, COBIT about 40. They are a typical eight: Incident, Request, Problem, Change, SACM, SLM, Knowledge, Catalogue.

ITSM's fixation with capability maturity

skeptic — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 21:07:32 +0000

The ITSM community seems to have some fixation with assessing capability maturity, or worse still process management maturity. These are only indirect predictors for what matters: risk and cost-benefits.

Process maturity is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for improving service.

skeptic — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:15:14 +0000

Yesterday we looked at how CMM-type maturity is not a measure of how well you are delivering service. CMM only measures sophistication of management, and actually only sophistication of empirical management. The corollary is that maturity assessments are not a measure of whether an improvement exercise was successful, not if the objective was to improve quality of service.

But wait! there's more! Mature management-by-numbers of process is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for improving service.

Practice maturity is a measure of management not performance

skeptic — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:53:49 +0000

Explaining the basic CMM 5-level model today I was reminded of a common misunderstanding about maturity: it measures how sophisticated or smart or advanced you are at managing a practice or process; it doesn't measure how well you are doing it.

OGC gives us an ITIL V3 maturity assessment standard, but they won't publish

skeptic — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:13:39 +0000

A recent blog set me thinking. Since OGC have now set a standard for assessing software products against ITIL processes, that should also form the basis of ITIL maturity assessment too. All we await is OGC publishing the standard. I bet they don't.

Setting the target goal for service management initiatives

skeptic — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:05:50 +0000

When we want to know how to, say, measure a service desk, we can find quite exact guidance everywhere. But it seems to me the depth and specificity (specifity? specificness?) and usefulness of advice is inversely proportional to the importance of the question. Consider the most important question we need answered in a service management initiative.