Q4IT

Quality Matters

Zdenek Kvapil

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New course – DCMM Masterclass

Inside organization we collaborate, which implicates different management patterns. While ITSM/Agile are designed with customer = “them” logic, in DCMM we approach IT as a nervous system of its own organization.

DCMM Masterclass key parts

  • The logic of ITSM and its consequences
  • Context of Agile
  • Management patterns
  • Key attributes of collaboration inside an organization
  • Digital capabilities management model components
  • Principles, Activities and stories
  • Digital agents and capabilities
  • Techniques – CVC, ADRA, RBA

Very positive feedback from course participants: “everyone involved in digital transformation should pass this course” said one of the initial courses delegates

Detail course description is here:

If you are interested in something really new, this course should get your attention.

 

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Quality Management skills

Quality Management skills are frequently missing in many IT departments.

– Everyone should know what IT quality is  – IT Quality Foundation

– Expert should know how to measure IT Quality and compare it – IT Quality Expert

– Manager should establish IT QMS – IT Quality Manager

Within IT Quality Index framework above areas are covered and you may consider to take courses to extend your skills and value:

IT Quality Index Courses

 

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DCMM published

DCMM: Digital Capabilities Management Model is a radically new management model designed to support CIOs with their organization’s digital transformation pathing the way for success in a new era by providing the “what” not just the “why”. It offers entirely new thinking that will help you manage complexity, speed of change and uncertainty in the digital world.

Taking inspirations from evolution, nature and collaborative networks, this new model provides you a new paradigm on managing IT, helping you initiate self-improvements and adaptations while the governing logic is focus on building digital capabilities rapidly for the benefit of your entire organization.

This book isn’t about high level concepts its practical steps that increase your ability to digitally collaborate both inside and outside of the traditional structures which is essential for adapting and surviving. The key focus is on minimizing administrative resources required to apply the model, so it releases resources for innovations and experimentation that will give you the competitive advantage the business needs.

DCMM is a leap forward from traditional service thinking and brings IT governance in to 21st century thinking and beyond, evolution teach us survival is not the fittest but the most able to adapt. The  Digital era which we have entered, should inspire us to build our management logic on collaborative effort, with shared objectives and motivations while enabling us to manage the risk of not reaching intended objectives in such an uncertain future.

Collaboration, colleagues, stories, improvements, innovations, digital capabilities are building blocks of this book, targeted to modern CIO’s, who are embarking on digital transformation and aim to be equipped with innovative and disruptive new management patterns that are driven by todays knowledge, not ideas from the past.

Book is available on Amazon DCMM ISBN: 9781723571923

If you are interested to learn more, there is first DCMM Masterclass scheduled in Glasgow 14.3.2019 organized by itSMF UK

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Paradigms and IT management models – part 3/3 context CIO

For many proponents of ITSM and agile (DevOps), CIO’s world does not exist, or they see it only as a tiny part of their worlds. But this world is far the most important. This is the world of internal IT managers who are responsible for entire IT departments, in any imaginable type of organization – start-ups, SMB, corporates, enormously large companies with thousands of people working in IT, banks, telecoms, utilities, pharma, healthcare, government agencies, education, military etc. This is the world of the CIO who is challenged with unknowns, no decisions, no right way forward, ever searching for the least worst solution, fighting with major incidents, regulations, security risks, data breaches, data consistency problems, responsible for petabytes of any possible data, fighting to preserve past investments, while it looks irrational from the perspective of inexperienced manager, who never needed to solve the complexity coming from anything legacy or never worked in organization, where rationality of one is irrational for someone else, where strategies might be hidden, not to be shared across organization.

Major challenges of the modern CIOs are:

  • What digital transformation for this specific organization looks like?
  • Does more agility generate better and more innovative, truly disruptive ideas?
  • Who should lead digital transformation? IT or someone else? Who else?
  • Should we push on cost efficiency or prioritize innovations, or both all together?
  • Which IT management model is the best for us? ITSM or agile or mix of both or even something more modern, born for digital era?
  • How should we encourage cross departments collaboration and disruptive innovations, rather than incremental improvements of what we have?
  • How to manage periods of silence and periods of radical changes?
  • How to cope with seemingly irrational decisions which happen all the time, while we know that there might be some hidden parts behind of CIO information horizon.

Many CIO’s opt for daily management of something called common sense. They adopted parts of ITSM logic and parts of agile to solve some parts of their problems. As an illustrative figure of some organizations we may indicatively claim 20% ITSM and 10% of agile. But there is still 70% remaining. Is agile answer for any CIO problem? Or ITSM?

That CIO “common sense” is about making decisions at every possible moment, based on what happened yesterday, what challenge is coming today and what is the objective for tomorrow. It is balancing available resources (skills, money) to maximize benefits for the whole organization (not IT), or to minimize damage when an outage or something really bad happens.

The world of the CIO is a combination of adaptive and strategic management, where we also may use parts of agile practices or ITSM approaches for specific areas.

The fundamental challenge and the real need for a radically new IT management model is coming from:

  • Ability to cope with uncertainty, decision making in ever-changing world
  • Built-in zero input processing logic – “no requirement”, “no decision”, “no feedback”, “no go”, “no information available”, “no response”
  • Managing self-improvements, self-monitoring, intelligent applications (aka AI, autonomous systems)
  • Ability to constantly evaluate where resources should be allocated based on actual conditions and unknown future and expected benefits.
  • Prioritize innovation effort in light of operational needs, maintain balance here
  • Ability to measure the effect of innovations, understand the effect of resources used in every management domain
  • Minimize administrative overhead while making maximum benefits through an efficient management model

These challenges require building from scratch a new management model, where the driving forces are collaboration (not profit of service provider), releasing resources for innovative effort, support for AI assisted decision making, support for intelligent agents, support for new emerging business models, where traditional profit calculations don’t work.

And this will come soon, based on actual knowledge.

Follow @Q4IT  for the next part of this exploration to be posted soon.

Previous parts of Paradigm trilogy is here

Part 1/3 ITSM

Part 2/3 Agile

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Paradigms and IT management models – part 2/3 context Agile

“What you see is all there is” – this is a biased perception of the world surrounding us, as pointed out by Daniel Kahneman in his brilliant book “Thinking, fast and slow”. Let’s explore this bias and its implications on the world of IT governance models and frameworks.

First part of trilogy 1/3 is here – context ITSM

Part 2/3 Agile

Completely new businesses have appeared in last 20 years which are not driven by IT service logic. Software-defined companies are the new phenomena, when disruptive ideas are materialized in completely new software, where radically different business models are encoded. Companies like Amazon, Facebook (and any social media), Google, Spotify, Uber are defined and represented by powerful software, where adaptations of business logic must happen rapidly, where responsiveness to changes is a competitive advantage and a way to drive constant improvements and innovations. New methods of how to adopt changes swiftly, with ability to automatically test and rollback failed changes, created fundamentals of agile development practices like Scrum, DevOps, SAFe and others.

For agilists the world of ITSM is history, slow and old fashion. A new paradigm is born – speed is everything, continual development and adaptations is the only right way of working to enable continually improving customer experience.

Agile Manifesto: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.”

Yet again this is not all there is, the reality of many IT departments is not just development of a new software, reality is frequently different:

  • Continual inflow of requirements and improvement ideas from customers (business) does work, there might be no requirement, no idea what to do next
  • Feedback does not happen, business users don’t have time for testing, no time to think about it
  • There is a world of legacy applications in a status of a clinical death while we still need the data stored there. Can agile help with authanasia? How?
  • There are security and business-critical applications, heavily regulated environments, where control, change tracking is fundamental prerequisite
  • Business strategy change, once top priority project is suddenly terminated. Can you be agile without knowing where you go next?
  • Decisions are not taken, progress becomes stagnation.

We must look deeper at another contexts, not limit our horizon of management patterns to paradigms of software developers, there is another world behind horizon.

So what is the next context?

Follow @Q4IT  for the next part of this exploration to be posted soon.