ITIL Process Quotes
By ITIL® from Experience©
| Continual Service Improvement (CSI) Quotes |
Service Strategy
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." Winston Churchill"Strategy is creating fit among a company's activities. The success of a strategy depends on doing many things well - not just a few - and integrating among them." Michael Porter, Nov. 1996
"Segment a market until you are nose-to-nose with a HUMAN." Roy Osing http://www.bedifferentorbedead.com
"Your value equation is found by answering two key questions. 'What is my promise?' and 'What is my process?'" Scott Plaskett, financial advisor and CEO of Ironshield Financial Planning as quoted in How to establish a repeatable process
Financial Management
"CTOs need to have invoices come across their desk, be responsible for billing and be cognizant of application costs," he says. "It's very easy for an organization to spend money on two or three products that do the same thing." In addition to the support issues, this can mean the enterprise can't claim the vendor's licensing discount for multiple seats." James Gordon, vice president, technology and operations, Needham Bank. Whittle down application sprawl, by Sandra Gittlen, Computer World, March 6th 2014"The hard work of developing a cost model is in identifying products & services-what each groups sells, and to whom." N. Dean Meyer Internal Market Economics
"It's easier to explain price once than to apologize for quality forever." Zig Ziglar
Demand Management
"Demand Management is not just about forecasting increased demand. It is also about identifying services to retire."
"Planning for average capacity usage is like a Canadian dressing for the average yearly temperature: you'll freeze in winter and swelter in summer." Denis Matte
Service Design
"Value is destroyed if an activity is overdesigned or under designed for its use." Michael Porter, What is Strategy Harvard Business Review, Nov. 1996"Achieving fit is difficult because it requires integration of decisions and actions across many independent subunits." Michael Porter, What is Strategy Harvard Business Review, Nov. 1996
"Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it." Peter Drucker
Service Catalogue Management
"When you wrap a product with processes you get a service. A service can exist without a product.""A product cannot exist without a service. A service can exist without a product."
"...the best way to understand customers' needs and wants is to ask them directly." Best Practices: Building Your Business with Customer-Focused Solutions by Arthur Andersen, Robert Hiebeler, Thomas B. Kelly and Charles Ketteman. Simon & Shuster 1998, p.39
"Massive organizational transformation brought by ITSM can prove to be difficult. Altering the beliefs, habits, roles and responsibilities of so many people engaged in such a wide variety of activities across the enterprise can appear, at the outset, to be an impossible task. But when undertaken with care and planning, the results are overwhelmingly positives. Companies that have accepted the challenge and implemented Service Catalogues are realizing enhanced operational efficiency and greater customer satisfaction." Defining IT Success through the Service Catalog by Rodrigo Flores, Bill Fine, Troy DuMoulin, 2007, p. 102
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse." Henry Ford
"With responsibility for their individual catalogs, managers gain a clear understanding of the lines of business they run and the results (products and services) that they're accountable for." Meyer, Dean. Internal Market Economics, 2013. p. 193
Service Level Management
"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind. It may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science." William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." Aldous Huxley
"The SLA explains the service. It does not predict the performance of that service. Explanation does not mean prediction." Denis Matte
"A performance report is like opening a door to a conversation."
Availability Management
"The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity." C.A.R. Hoare"The cloud data center is like an airplane, a complex set of systems with a lot of moving parts. On average, it takes seven simultaneous failures for an aircraft to fall out of the sky. The odds are astronomically against it, yet we still see the occasional failures." Cloud computing is nowhere near the airline industry's reliability -- clouds can go dark with far fewer than seven simultaneous failures." Randy Bias, CTO of Cloudscaling and designer of the CloudStack implemented at Korea Telecom as quoted in "The Cloud's Points of Failure Are Showing" by Charles Babcock, Information Week, October 15, 2012
"The simplest way to increase availability is to focus on Incident Management and Change Management."
IT Service Continuity Management
"Business Continuity Planning is seen as a cost item until risk management and Business Continuity Management is part of the organization’s modus operandi at all levels, in other words its culture.""BCM is part of risk management. You can’t separate them, and you shouldn’t try." Gartner, The Benefits and Costs of Business Continuity Management
"In your Business Continuity Management simulation did you test the plan or your response to the event?"
Information Security Management
"IT Security is a form of Problem Management. It looks to pro-actively prevent Incidents.""When working for IT Security, you are only one Incident away from being the most important group in I.T."
"If you leave it to IT Security there would be no network. You would be using pen and paper instead of managing risks to enable the business."
"Have a policy in place where everyone agrees that if a certain piece of equipment is not updated or patched within a certain amount of time, it is taken offline." Greg Kushto as quoted in 6 Biggest Business Security Risks and How You Can Fight Back
Service Transition
Release Management
"Trust, but verify." Ronald Reagan"Trust is good, but control is better." Vladimir Lenin
"Process Policy: A release can be deployed when the individual doing the work is not on leave within 3 days of the release." Denis Matte
"The 4 Ps for Change and Release: Planning Prevents Poor Performance."
"A release checklist gives you the objective leverage to say "no." Otherwise its your word against theirs."
"A release is like a boat. 80% of the holes plugged is not good enough. You will sink or be busy patching."
Configuration Management
"A configuration item is an asset in its context.""You don't want to rely upon Auto Discovery as your only mean to manage the accuracy of the CMDB." Gary Case, Pink Elephant “Are you implementing a CMDB or a Process?” 2010. http://www.pinkelephant.com/ressource/pinklink/PDF/Implementing-CMDB-Or-Process.pdf
"It's easy to use a CI attribute in the CMDB structure or in CI naming convention. If it may change during CI life, its an attribute."
"CMDB across the nation...you are littered with CIs that were loaded without a process to maintain or retire them."
"A CMDB definition workshops is a waste of time if it's not focused on one CI type & started from a sample structure and CI attributes."
"Don't start by defining the CI. First, figure out your process, then identify the data, CIs and attributes required to enable it."
"Don't build a CMDB to have a CMDB. Do it to fulfill requirements. If it delivers value people will do the processes to maintain it."
Change Management
"Implementing Change Management is like driving from New Hampshire where you "Live Free or Die" to Missouri, "The Show Me State.""The change manager is like the air traffic controller of the production environment."
"There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction." Winston Churchill.
"The 4 Ps for Change and Release: Planning Prevents Poor Performance."
"Not clearly defining the mandate of the CAB can result in wasted effort as business decisions are second guessed. Tail is wagging the dog."
Service Operations
Incident Management
"Urgency does not warrant changing methods that work for methods that do not work." Movie Body of Lies (2008)"You cannot have two priority 1. Priority 1 means ASAP (As soon as possible). If you have two Priority 1, how can you do two things at once?"
"Only the user can explain the priority based on business impact. IT setting the priority is like marking your own paper in school."
"To set the right priority, ask yourself the question "if one had to go, which one would it be? Repeat until the last item." Unknown
"If we don't set priorities, fate will."
"On average, fewer than 30% of trouble tickets are automatically generated from alerts in most IT organizations." Transforming IT Operations: From Utility Monitoring to Optimizing Business Service Delivery and Reliability March 2014
"Not declaring a Major Incident is disruptive & wasteful. People scramble to understand what is going on while someone already does."
"The best way to discourage people from declaring a Major Incident is for management to interfere by micromanaging the situation."
"During a Major Incident, manage upwards to minimize interference from above (i.e. Management)"
Request Fulfillment
"Good customer service takes time. Great customer service saves time." GM Goodwrench advertisement 2001
Problem Management
One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency."Arnold H. Glasow"No problem is ever solved in the same consciousness that was used to create it." Albert Einstein
"Because the world has become more complex, that means quick fixes are even less effective than they were in the past"
Carl Honoré, the Canadian author of the forthcoming book The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed as quoted in "Sweeping lack of patience in Western society comes at a serious cost, slowness advocates say" by Sarah Boesveld, The National Post, Jan 26, 2013
"A problem is a chance for you to do your best." Duke Ellington
"If people resist Root Cause Analysis, ask what they will do to prevent it in the future." Denis Matte
"Problems are messages." Shakti Gawain
"A perfectly-defined problem is not a problem anymore." Luciano Passuello in his post Einstein's Secret to Amazing Problem Solving (and 10 Specific Ways You Can Use It)
"There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all." Friedrich Nietzsche
"Don't find fault, find a remedy." Henry Ford
"Today's problems come from yesterday's "solutions." Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated." Poul Anderson
"Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature." Rich Kulawiec
"The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution." Bertrand Russell
"Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back." Piet Hein
"Sometimes we're wrestling with the problem because of the way we framed it - not with the problem itself."
"A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it." Albert Einstein
"Define the problem. Before the solution." Albert Einstein
"Try harder next time...is not a problem management method mentioned in ITIL®." D.Matte
"If I only had one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes to define the problem and five minutes finding the solution." Albert Einstein
Service Desk
"The more complex your service offering the more streamlined your Point(s)-of-Contact(s) should be.""If you want to show the need for a SPOC, ask Finance how many toll free phone lines the organization pays for."
"There is no more valuable time to listen to your customers than when they disagree." https://hbr.org/2014/02/listening-to-your-customers-when-your-customers-disagree/
"The Secret of Customer Service? Being Good at Not Being Bad." http://250words.com/2014/05/the-secret-of-customer-service-being-good-at-not-being-bad/#sthash.mhYWMaVx.dpuf
“As I often tell people, Steve Jobs used to call the regular Apple support line when he had a question or problem.” Roy Atkinson, HDI
Continuous Service Improvement (CSI)
"Nodding the head does not row the boat." Irish Proverb"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." Aristotle
"To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often." Winston Churchill
"Like distinguished craftsmen, organizations become distinguished because they master the details." Henry Mintsberg, "Crafting Strategy" Harvard Business Review, July 1987
A visitor to an operation that follows the Toyota Production System philosophy often encounters signs with expressions like "In our company, we all have two jobs: (1) to do our job and (2) to improve it." Matching supply with demand: An introduction to operations management 3nd Ed. Boston, MA: McGraw Hill. by Cachon, G. P. & Terwiesch, C., 2012, p. 236
"Continuous Service Improvement is more difficult than the natural evolution of species. Mistake in the wild means death. Learning is tough. It takes generations to evolve." Denis Matte
"The more benchmarking companies do, the more they look alike." Harvard Business Review, "What is Strategy" by Michael Porter, Nov. 1996 http://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy/ar/1
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Charles Goodhart
"Managers who are obsessed with either change or stability are bound eventually to harm their organization." Henry Mintsberg, "Crafting Strategy" Harvard Business Review, July 1987
"If you want to make incremental improvements and minor changes, work on practices, behaviors or attitudes. But if you want to make significant, quantum improvement, work on paradigms... i.e., perceptions, assumptions, theories, frames of reference or lenses through which you view the world." Stephen Covey
"Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection" Mark Twain
"One step at a time is good walking." Chinese Proverb
"Improvement is best achieved by proactive strategies." Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
"You cannot improve a service if you do not understand the business." John Fuullilove #Pink14
"Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all." Peter Drucker
"Not all improvement ideas are good ones. Process and governance is needed to allow bad ideas to die and good ones to flourish." D. Matte
"Moving, being busy and doing something does not mean improving."
"If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got." Henry Ford
"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop." Confucius
"Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors." Jim Rohn
"Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly." Dr. Robert Schuller
"Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort." John Ruskin
"Change is inevitable. Progress is optional" Tony Robbins
"Spending time to improve your service will slow down your productivity now. However, its just a down payment to a brighter future."
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