Infrastructure management is undergoing a transformation. ITIL can help manage conflicting demands like – “low cost but high service quality”, “ubiquitous access but enhanced security”?

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July 25, 2008

Reminiscence of Consulting All Hands Meeting on 18th and 19th July 2008

Preparing the Consulting team of North America for the next giant leap – By Anurag Bahal

As we saw our turbaned colleague tethered with the fragile rope struggling to breathe and sweating profusely we were excited and thrilled, not because of the moment of doubt but on the heights he had already accomplished. We wanted him to succeed; we wanted him to ring the sound of bell at the mountain. We cheered him to continue the relentless pursuit to the top and when he made it we were all lifted to the high spirits.

At the fag ends of the Infosys Consulting N.A. rendezvous, as I saw the bodies of top brains overcoming their limitation and climbing rocks, my mind echoed the thoughts of Og Mandino ( Author and Speaker)

"Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough."

What happens when top consulting brains come together?  Opportunities abound, sky is what we can do. Rewind a few months, there was some apprehension on the value of doing an all-hands meet, but I was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of our group that put all doubts to sleep. There was a wave of exhilaration, an ocean of ideas in our 2 days meet.

Day 1

When the Infosys Leadership Institute (ILI) delivered the training program on Client Interfacing skills, all the consultants were jumping right into the thick of discussions. It is such an important area of a consultant life, that enough does not seem to be enough. The lessons on Probing Skills were very well received by the group and so was the exercise on practicing various types of questions. The Relationship Tracker is a good tool to track the client affinity for Infosys. The lesson on Polite Disagreement helped us frame our next client discussion for saying “No”.  My personal favorite is the instructor’s definition of a good client interaction that goes “It is a good interaction only when the Value is flowing in both directions”

 The 8 hours of training including the pizza lunch just flew away. We could have done for another 8 hours but for the promise of a beautiful evening at Malee’s.  As William Feather, Writer said it "Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn't stop to enjoy it.", our group made sure that they not only found their fun but also had enough of it. People were amused to see Bombay curry at the Thai restaurant. Time to booze and celebrate the bonding.

 

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June 10, 2008

Metrics and Communication

- Anurag Bahal, Senior Consultant, Infosys

How do we create a common language of Communication and create Team Synergy using metrics?
America’s first billionaire J. Paul Getty said it “I would rather have one percent of efforts of a hundred people than a hundred percent of my own efforts”

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October 23, 2007

Web 2.0 and ITSM: Long & Winding Roads?

Does web 2.0 hold any meaning from an IT Service Management (ITSM) perspective? RSS feeds, wikis, blogs - do they hold any promise of transforming ITSM as we know it?

Over the last couple of years, there has been an explosive increase in the adoption of web 2.0 concepts fuelled by the internet community. But how much of this has trickled to the ITSM space? Web 2.0 aspects including this blog have largely focused on commenting about ITSM and not really in the actual service delivery.

So are these two huge phenomena going to give each other a skip? Or are their paths destined to cross somewhere? And if so, what does that really mean?

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August 31, 2007

Engaging IT Change Management

When should I raise a Change Request?

That's an innocent enough question. So what's your answer -

  1. When Business states its requirements
  2. When Business commits its requirements to a schedule / calendar
  3. Or perhaps it's when the corresponding IT development project is identified and resources planned?
  4. Well, how about when an IT Operational Change is expected?
  5. No, none of these. I don't raise a Change Request, I just sneak them in when no one's looking - way too painful and bureaucratic otherwise. Hey, but don't tell anyone!

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July 13, 2007

Musings on Change Management Metrics - Part 2

In my earlier blog on Change Management metrics, I wrote about how several organizations use total number of Changes as a measure of the success of their Change Management process. Here, I would like to share with you some practices I have found useful in deciding what type of metrics to measure.

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July 12, 2007

Musings on Change Management Metrics - Part 1

The total number of changes has gone down - our Change Management process is a success ... Is it?

A while back, I was assisting an organization to implement ITIL based Change Management process. Apart from (the usual?) complexities of implementation, something that struck me was the trigger for this implementation. "There are far too many changes within our organization - we need to reduce the total number of changes".

So, why am I writing about this? Well, for one, I am still quite amazed by the number of organizations that use total number of Changes as a primary measure of how successful their Change Management program is.

Does it make sense? No? So, is "total number of changes" a wasted metric? Not really. Arguably, it is a relatively easy and very visible metric to measure. But is it sufficient? Does it give a sense of what impact these changes have had on services? Does it indicate whether testing happened rigorously? Or, for that matter, does it even indicate whether basic adherence to process happened or not - such as having a back-out plan, impact analysis carried out, etc. Obviously it's not a stand-alone metric.

So then, what's a better measure? Hmm ... we'll get to that in a bit.

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