Pultorak & Associates, Ltd. ITIL blog

I was looking for the best, fastest and most way economic way to achieve ITIL® expert certification. After trying my first course with Pultorak & Associates, I didn’t think twice and decided to go ahead and complete the full track with them, and I did. Besides being professional, helpful, supportive and responsive, I found the Pultorak Team very friendly.

Thanks to the Pultorak Team who really helped me earn ITIL® Expert certification in a very short period of time. ”

Amir Allam
IT Department Head – McDonald’s Egypt
Amir@McDEgypt.com

Pultorak’s ITIL® Intermediate CBTs are fantastic and I highly recommend using them as your training provider on your path to ITIL® V3 Expert certification. Their training material is professional, comprehensive and easy to understand. After earning my Foundations level certification through self-study, I wanted to find cost effective and self paced computer based courses to help me achieve Expert level certification and stumbled upon Pultorak through the OGC website. I looked through their sample CBTs and decided to register for their Service Strategy course. I went through the training in about 10 days, and passed this Intermediate exam on my first attempt. In the proceeding weeks and months, I purchased all of the Lifecycle Track and MALC CBTs and passed each exam on my first attempt due in large part to Pultorak’s excellent courses. Their staff is great and always responsive to questions you may have about all things ITIL® including study material, exam logistics, and the ITIL® qualification scheme. Pultorak’s online learning is an ideal path to earning ITIL® Expert certification for working professionals who cannot takes weeks off of work to sit through in person training. Their CBT system allows you to work your way through the Intermediate level courses at your own pace taking as little or as much time as you need. The last but not least factor in why you should consider Pultorak is the cost structure of the training. My entire Pultorak training expenses through Expert certification were less than I would have paid taking 1 Intermediate course through many other providers. The combination of their reasonable pricing, knowledgeable trainers and friendly staff, and flexibility to train at your own pace make Pultorak a great choice as your ITIL® V3 Intermediate/Expert training provider.

Thanks Pultorak for your role in helping me achieve my ITIL® V3 Expert certification!”

Ashish Goel

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For more information, to place an order or to speak to a Pultorak Associate, call (206) 729-1107 or e-mail info@pultorak.com

Official Website: www.pultorak.com

ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom and other countries

Bob Evan of InformationWeek recently (June 15, 2010) published 10 reasons CIOs will get fired this year, a great input to your R2010 and FY11 IT strategy and planning.  In this post I provide some ideas to help you succeed that mirror Bob’s 10 reasons.

#1 Attack the 80/20 by including 20% or more projects in your portfolio that directly and explicitly support business innovation, and by including one or more initiatives explicitly designed to lower the the effort required for day to day maintenance activities in IT (much headway can be had on this latter task simply by efforts such as clarifying organizational roles, interfaces, and handoffs).  Then doggedly work to protect time is allocated to these projects despite distractions.  In other words, schedule your priorities versus prioritizing your schedule

#2 Embrace mobility Mobile devices have become the lifeblood of work and life for a lot of people in your organization, where they go to get things done, get information–you need to meet them where they are, not where they used to be.  Practially speaking, this means carefully looking at each project in your portfolio and making sure there is some business-oriented mobile functionality included and highlighted to users–you don’t want to look 1985 when it’s 2011, and it’s not just looks–mobile access and functionality are mainstream, so get with the program.

#3 Lead the synchronization of IT operations and capabilities with business opportunities and customers This requires effort in two dimensions on your part 1) understanding business drivers, problems and opportunities and matching them to affordances IT can provide to support and enable them, and 2) understanding the affordances (take, for example, self-service portals for Service Desks) that IT can provide and translating the value of these capabilities to the business where they likely support key business drivers. In IT, to lead is to think in both directions and to translate and bridge between IT capabilityand business drivers.

#4 Get your priorities straight (i.e., business priorities = IT priorities, period) Making business priorities your priorities isn’t a cop-out–you still need to think through and translate these priorities into IT initiatives and objectives where a direct line can be drawn between the capability proposed or delivered by IT and the key business driver or process it supports.

#5 Be able to articulate IT’s contribution to business revenue and profits You are a sitting duck if you cannot do this.  You are either a radiator (revenue contributor) or a drain (cost center)–if you want to survive you need to show yourself to be a radiator.  Start by making sure each project in your upcoming year portfolio has a specific explicit tag indicating its contribution to business revenue.  If one can’t be located, or it’s squidgy, drop or deprioritize the project.

#6 To tell and ask how ITcan better contribute to business revenue and profits Put together lists of ideas–start with a bullet level list, 3-5 ideas at most for each area–for how IT can support the business in three areas: driving more sales, reducing costs, and increasing profits.  Review your project portfolio against the lists, and adjust accordingly where practial and make sure the adjustment is clear in the project description and communication.  Share your lists and what more could be done with the business, and ask them for their ideas; where practical, incorporate these into your portfolio as before.

#7 Get out from behind your desk and systematically engage with customers Be the voice of the customer back to your organization.  Bring customer perspectives back to you teams, and make sure your portfolio of projects has some social networking / web 2.0 stink on it.  This doesn’t have to be difficult–manyIT products now include such features–it’s just a matter of starting to leverage them versus ignoring them.

#8 Get clear on the cloud Internal or external cloud, and virtualization in all its forms–what is the opportunity there for your business? Is it real or hype–for us, specifically?  Where should we go.  For example, cloud-based Microsoft Exchange might not make sense for Corporate offices, but may make a whole lot of sense for regional sales offices.  Similarly, virtualization could be a boon to your software testing operations, allowing for quick spin up of much more representative test environments, reducing errors in releases.  Application virtualization could be a boon to legacy applications that rely on older versions of, e.g., Word macros to function.  Translate! Separate the hype from what is helpful–specifically plan to clarify what the cloud means to your business and where to invest, and make sure something–even if it’s just a proof of concept and a couple of tactical moves–is in your portfolio in this space this year.

#9 Get with the finally-for-real real-time business program after years of being a technology futures discussion, the foundational components of what I call adaptive demand management–the capability of having insight into business processes, drivers, and demand–in ever more real-time terms (in other words, not just at a strategic or tactical level, but at an operational level) coupled with the capability to act on that knowledge and need–also in ever more real-time terms–is finally here.  While there is a whole trajectory of technologies and linking to be done over the next decade which will exponentially increase the IT organization’s ability to respond to business demand in real-time, you can start today–with business maps, service maps, monitoring and control technologies, and virtualization.  Business Service Management is the conceptual framework for all of this–if you don’t know what it is you need to learn about it, and then translate the concepts into action. As with prior advice in this post, the key is to find the subset of capabilities that contribute most to IT being able to adapt in more real-time to business demands, and incorporate these in your project portfolio.

#10 Lead Transformation New technologies and concepts present opportunities to transform the business–virtualization, cloud computing, Business Service Management, web 2.0 and social media, innovation, mobile devices.  Your job as a leader is to cut through the hype, translate the potential value to the business, and develop specific initiatives around them with clear mapping back to the business value they support.  If this sounds a lot like good, basic, blood sweat and tears strategic planning, project portfolio management, and communication (including and especially listening)–it is! So get to it and good luck with your endeavors in R2010 and 2011.

Most efforts aimed at clarifying activities, deliverables and roles based on ITIL are fairly good at getting the activities assigned, the contents for the deliverables documented, and roles assigned to individuals.  What they are typically not good at is making sure “what good looks like” is defined for each of these three.  As a result, the organization is missing the key ingredient to making all of this a success: the “why”.  While this is understandable, as there is a lot of work necessary to get the “what” to do in place, without the “why”–the end in mind you’re shooting for, chances of arriving at where you want to be in terms of improvement are slim in my experience.  This is one of the top insights I can provide you when it comes to ITIL implementation, or any organizational change effort for that matter: focus on outcomes over activities.  This doesn’t mean you don’t have to identify and assign activities–you do–but an understanding of the outcomes we’re shooting for trumps assignment of activities every time.  Said another way, if I had a choice between working in an organization that “got it” and “got on with it”, versus one that didn’t “get it”–the outcomes that we are shooting for, how we should measure each other, and how ultimately customers and users will measure us–or “get on with it”–act on that knowledge every day in large and small ways–I will opt for the former every time.  It is awesome when people know the why.  Here’s what it looks like:

1) for each activity, make sure two columns of data are defined, first, the activity, and then a standard that answers the question, “performance is effective when…”; so for example, if the activity is answering the phone on the Service Desk, the standard might be “All calls are answered within 3 rings”.

2) same goes for deliverables–it’s not enough to have a functional specification of the feature set–you must define acceptance criteria for each; so column one lists the bill of materials of the deliverable; column two lists acceptance criteria.  So for example, if the deliverable is a final report, one element might be the executive summary, and the acceptance criteria is that is is no longer than one page and summarizes the vision, the problem, the solution, and the benefits of the solution.

3) same goes for roles–these are clusters of activities usually grouped into like parts; each activity must have an associated standard of performance.

All of these things are about making sure that not only is the thing itself specified–the ‘what’–the activity, deliverable, or role–but the “what it looks like when it’s done right”–the ‘why’ or acceptable outcome is specified to the right level of granularity.  This is what we mean by conditions of satisfaction.

I encourage you to incorporate this in your ITIL efforts.  It is very interesting to watch groups put these together, to see what individuals on the same team think the relevant activities, deliverables and roles are, and what it looks like when it is done right. Besides the output of defined activities, deliverables and roles along with associated standards of performance, such sessions also result in one of the most important thing you can have to drive success in your ITIL efforts: alignment as a group on “how we do things around here” and “what good and right and done look like”.

We’ve been going through a simple but revolutionary transition with our company and with our customers, and that simple transition is: visual communication.  It all started with our adopting tools like TechSmith’s SnagIT (which allows you to capture and annotate screen shots – still images – from your PC),  PDF-Xchange (from Tracker Software)  for marking up PDF documents, and Camtasia (also from TechSmith) for recording love motion on your screen with audio and webcam to create videos.  The long and short of all of this is that we began using these tools to create learning and readiness content for our clients; then we started using them to communicate with clients–not just for deliverables–and lastly–and I suppose this is a big, ‘duh’–but better late than never–we started using them for communicating internally.

We do a lot of virtual work, both internally as our offices are spread out in Washington State, Pennsylvania, and Manila, and because our clients tend to be global.  it is amazing how much easier it is to communicate when you capture an image, mark it up, and record a voice-over, instead of trying to explain it over the phone or through what can end up being a big, hairy, obtuse email.

While this all may sound like an intuitive grasp of the obvious, if you don’t have and aren’t using these tools to communicate within your teams, with other groups, and with your customers, you should.  We “knew” a picture is worth 1,000 words before we got into this mode–but there’s a gap a mile wide between knowing and doing sometimes.  Start communicating more visually today–you’ll be glad you did.

Efficient, actionable knowledge is one of, if not THE most powerful tools to improve overall IT operational performance you can find within the four walls of your IT shop, and it’s FREE!

What is Knowledge? For me it’s any form of recorded information that describes accurately the realities of the IT landscape, and or describes in a proscriptive actionable manner how to complete a simple or complex task successfully, or educates individuals on key concepts and technology.

What forms can it take?

It can be electronic or hardcopy, but in either case it must be easily found and utilized.

1. Hardcopy or electronic media
2. Diagrams
3. Configurations
4. Functional and Technical documentation
5. Proscriptive, step by step procedures
6. Policies
7. PowerPoints, Word docs, Excel sheets
8. CBTs

Extracting it from the minds of the organization, keeping it relevant, accurate and actionable, and providing mechanisms to serve it up and be made easily and readably accessible are key challenges to getting this valuable asset to deliver it’s promise.