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Stuart Rance

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Stuart is an ITSM and security consultant, trainer, and author who has worked with clients in many countries, helping them create business value for themselves and their customers. He was the author of the 2011 edition of ITIL® Service Transition and lead author of RESILIA™ Cyber Resilience best practice published in June 2015. Now that his children have all left home, he has plenty of time on his hands for contributing to our blog – lucky us!

1323 Views

March 24th, 2020

Processes are an Important Part of IT Service Management

When everyone in a team is working together effectively, and chatting to each other in the office, you may not see the need for formal processes. Now that lots of us are working from home, keeping us all safe from COVID-19, we need a little more consistency in our processes, to ensure that we deliver...

1220 Views

February 11th, 2020

Continuity Planning for the Service Desk

About 30 years ago, I worked for a multi-national IT company and one of our buildings burned to the ground. This building included a data center that supported lots of essential services, and yet most of the people who used those services were unaware that anything had gone wrong until they heard about it from...

1356 Views

January 7th, 2020

Service Management in 2020 and Beyond

I’ve seen many organizations work hard to improve how they manage IT services. And almost every time they’ve focused on changing the way they run their internal processes, and the tools and technology they use. This focus on processes and technology does deliver improvements, but there’s is a limit to how far it can take...

1072 Views

November 26th, 2019

How Planning User Journeys Can Improve Your Service Desk

The service desk is all that most users see of their IT service provider. Consequently, it’s often how they experience your service desk that determines whether or not you earn a reputation for excellence. Even if IT services never failed, you’d still need a service desk. Organizations have to manage all sorts of interactions with...

2505 Views

October 22nd, 2019

The Best Way to Prevent Incidents

Organizations that put time and effort into problem management get a huge return on their investment. Although fixing incidents when they happen is important, it’s much better to stop them happening in the first place; and if you can’t do that, then at least make sure you know what you can do to minimize the...

1290 Views

September 24th, 2019

How Value Streams Can Help you do a Better Job

People who work in IT service management (ITSM) spend a lot of time thinking about and perfecting their processes. And that’s a good thing. But when we focus on processes to the exclusion of everything else, we lose out. In this blog I’m going to explain why you need to think about the things you...

1293 Views

August 27th, 2019

What’s the ROI of ITIL?

Somebody asked me recently how they could get a return on investment (ROI) from investing in ITIL. I found it really hard to answer the question, because of the way that they’d phrased it, so I spent a while thinking about the topic, and here are my thoughts… ITIL training The first thing I wanted...

1697 Views

July 30th, 2019

Problem Management: Most Problems Don’t Have a Single Root Cause

If your problem management just identifies one root cause for each problem, you’re missing out on lots of opportunities to improve. One of my clients had a problem that caused lots of incidents. They investigated the problem and identified the root cause. It was, they agreed, a bug in a software application that had been...

1164 Views

July 2nd, 2019

If You Ignore These 7 IT Operations Activities, You’re Heading for Failure

IT organizations tend to devote most of their time and effort to two areas: Design, development, testing, and deployment of new and changed software and infrastructure Managing incidents and problems. These activities are very important, but if you want to deliver high quality IT services then you need to manage your IT operations. If you...

3950 Views

May 28th, 2019

ITIL 4 Practices – What’s New and Changed

The ITIL 4 Foundation publication and exams were released in February 2019, and I hope that you have seen some information about this new version. But if you haven’t, then reviewing some of my earlier blogs should help: What’s coming in ITIL 4? Everything You Officially Need to Know About ITIL 4 Your ITIL 4...

2670 Views

April 23rd, 2019

ITIL 4 Value System, Value Chain, Value Stream: What’s the Difference?

ITIL 4 Foundation was released in February this year. This new version of the leading best practice framework for IT service management (ITSM) introduced a number of new concepts. You can read an overview of ITIL 4 in my previous blog: Everything You Officially Need to Know About ITIL 4. Three of the concepts introduced in...

6281 Views

March 26th, 2019

The 7 Guiding Principles of ITIL 4: Practical Advice to Help You Make Decisions

The guiding principles are one of the most useful and practical parts of ITIL 4. If you share these principles with all your people, and use them when you’re making decisions, then you’re going to do a much better job of creating value for your customers, your users, and your own organization. ITIL 4 was...

6281 Views

March 26th, 2019

The 7 Guiding Principles of ITIL 4: Practical Advice to Help You Make Decisions

3950 Views

May 28th, 2019

ITIL 4 Practices – What’s New and Changed

2737 Views

February 18th, 2019

Everything You Officially Need to Know About ITIL 4

This year sees the publication of a new version of ITIL, the world’s leading best practice for IT service management (ITSM). The rollout of ITIL 4 will come in sections. In this blog, I want to give you an overview of what you’ll find in the just-now-released ITIL 4 Foundation. About the release plans ITIL...

2670 Views

April 23rd, 2019

ITIL 4 Value System, Value Chain, Value Stream: What’s the Difference?

2505 Views

October 22nd, 2019

The Best Way to Prevent Incidents

2029 Views

November 6th, 2018

What’s Coming in ITIL 4?

Update since publication: The latest version of ITIL – ITIL 4 – was released on Monday 18th February. To find out what is covered in the latest version, along with what has changed, please read this blog also by Stuart Rance. A new version of ITIL will be released early in 2019. Much of the...

1982 Views

October 31st, 2017

7 Ways to Diagnose IT Incidents and Problems

You need to train and mentor service desk and IT support staff in techniques they can use to diagnose incidents and problems. They won’t become good at this just because they have the right technical knowledge and ITSM process skills. Every IT organization has processes for managing incidents and problems. Often these are based on...

1936 Views

February 6th, 2018

9 Guiding Principles That Can Help Improve Your Service Desk

The ITIL Practitioner Guiding Principles aren’t just for management. Here are some examples of how service desk agents can use them too. I often talk to people about the ITIL Practitioner’s Nine “Guiding Principles,” which are helping many IT organizations move from a process focus to a more business focused view of how to manage...

ITIL Practitioner’s Nine Guiding Principles

1782 Views

June 12th, 2018

How to Design an ITSM Process

I was working with a customer recently to help them design a new change management process. We were able to work very quickly because fortunately it was quite easy for the many different teams involved to agree to adopt the new approach; and the customer seemed very pleased with the way things went. I can...

1751 Views

January 31st, 2017

Back to ITSM Basics: The 9 Guiding Principles of ITIL Practitioner

In a previous blog I talked about “starting where you are” as a guiding principle for people who want to improve outcomes for customers. I talked about how this means not throwing away everything you already do and starting again from zero, and how following this principle can really help you to do a great job...

1711 Views

September 23rd, 2014

Defining Metrics for Incident Management

I have written about how to define metrics and KPIs for IT service management processes before. In Defining Metrics for Change Management I discussed the importance of identifying stakeholders, and defining CSFs and then using these to help you think about what KPIs you should measure and report. In Defining Metrics for Problem Management I...

1697 Views

July 30th, 2019

Problem Management: Most Problems Don’t Have a Single Root Cause

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