itSMFI 2017 Forum Focus - June Forum Focus ITSMFI | Page 22

By Stuart Rance
I had a busy few days at the itSMF New Zealand conference in
Wellington this year.
This conference was one of the best ITSM events I have
attended in a long time. It was in a great venue (Museum Of
New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa), and included a wide
variety of speakers on a range of topics. The presentations
included lots of practical stories about people’s experience, as
well as some very thoughtful sessions developing new ideas.
It was interesting to see how different people had found
similar solutions to solving their problems.
Service Bazaar
The conference started with a service bazaar, planned and
managed by Sofi Fahlberg. She had organised three parallel
streams of workshops where the people running them had
been briefed not to bring PowerPoint slides, but instead to
use pens, whiteboards, paper, and, of course, their ideas.
Each workshop topic ran twice so that people did not have to
miss out on any topics that really interested them.
The workshop I facilitated was called “Change Management
in an age of Digital Transformation”, and challenged people
to think about how they could transform their ITSM change
management to be fit for purpose in a rapidly changing
business environment. I ran the workshop twice, and was
interested to see how different the two workshops turned
out to be. The same basic themes were there, as I had
planned, but different people, and their different experiences
of IT, created different perspectives. For example, one group
was much quicker than the other to identify that change
management can be a positive influence that helps the
organization to adapt.
Overall,
we agreed
that
change management
22 itSMFI Forum Focus—June 2017
must
acknowledge that its primary purpose is to facilitate the
rate of change that a business needs, and not just focus
on reducing risks.
DevOps
The conference had been advertised as covering DevOps
and ITSM and there were lots of DevOps sessions. The
first conference keynote was Rob England talking about
“The Impact of DevOps on ITSM”. This was a wide-
ranging overview of DevOps and the impact it has on
ITSM, and amongst other things Rob talked about how
change management needs to evolve to support
DevOps. I was interested to find that Rob’s presentation
addressed so many of the ideas and issues raised by
people who had attended my morning workshops.
Jayne Groll then talked about “Keep CALM and Carry On:
Is DevOps the SuperFramework of IT?” Jayne explained
the DevOps acronym CALMS (Culture, Automation, Lean,
Measurement and Sharing) and discussed how we can
use DevOps to help combine ideas from multiple
frameworks.
In my own session, “DevOps, ITIL and the 3 ways”, I
talked about the 3 ways of DevOps: Flow, Feedback, and
Experimentation and Learning.
These three ways
capture the most important aspects of systems thinking,
and help organizations to focus on things that make a
difference, rather than just following a set of rules.
There were lots of other DevOps related sessions,
including some that I missed because I couldn’t be in two
places at once. They included:
•
Scott Brown - ‘IT Mashup’ – DevOps, ITIL, Agile,
Waterfall, Prince2 and WASP