Management | Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education

Evolving IT Change Management into an Enterprise Service

Dec 152011

In 2004, we began down the road of adopting the IT Infrastructure Library framework. We began implementing our ITIL processes with Incident Management and Service Desk. We quickly followed with creating a Service Catalogue. The next major process was Change Management. A group of key people were assigned to become our IT Change Advisory Board (CAB). The membership of the CAB was solely IT Services technical staff and managers at the start.

The IT Services CAB had representation from all our teams: Service Desk, Desktops, Satellite Campuses, Applications, Web Services, Servers, Storage and Network teams.

Over the years, we have worked to establish the credibility of the CAB and the value that it brings to our organization. I am the current Change Manager and take every opportunity to talk about our Change Management Process to stakeholders in our community.

We have slowly grown our IT CAB into an enterprise CAB. We now have membership from our Learning and Teaching Centre, our Library, our Facilities Management group and now from our Broadcast Engineers (from our School of Business – Broadcast programs). As more and more groups ask to join, we get better communication about enterprise wide and campus wide (we have 5 campuses) changes.

The end result of this maturing process is that we can better manage changes initiated by service departments. reduce risk and maintain highly available, quality services to our students and our stakeholder community.

Here are some links to information about our change management process:

IT Services Scheduled Downtime http://www.bcit.ca/its/services/downtime.shtml

IT Services Maintenance Announcements http://www.bcit.ca/its/services/maintenance/

Flexible Leadership – Self Knowledge, Guiding Principles and Flexible Approaches

leadership, management, personal No Responses »

Oct 182011

Leaders, who are self-aware, create personal guiding principles and are flexible in their leadership approaches, will have success navigating any situation. There are a set of leadership traits, behaviors and styles that support flexible leadership. Leaders need to develop self-awareness. Understanding what their strengths and weaknesses are and how they react to different situations is the foundation for a flexible leadership style. Next, the leader needs to create their guiding principles defining who they are and how they work. Finally, leaders need to provide structure and flexibility in their organizations.

Leadership traits are described by Trait Theory. The presumption of this theory is that “effective leaders possess a similar set of traits or characteristics.” (Williams, 2011, p. 236) Peter Drucker discounts Trait Theory by saying; “Nor are there any such things as ‘leadership qualities’ or a ‘leadership personality’.” (Drucker, The Essential Drucker, 2001, p. 269) Other writers disagree with Drucker and show that leaders’ traits make them stand out. Williams lists these traits as “drive, the desire to lead, honesty/integrity, self-confidence, emotional stability, cognitive ability and knowledge of the business.” (Williams, 2011, p. 263) Jim Collins supports this thinking with the concept of Level 5 Leadership. Collins writes that the two sides of Level 5 Leadership are Professional Will and Personal Humility. (Collins, Good to Great, 2001, p. 36)

Drucker wrote “Know your strengths and values” describing the need to be self-aware. Drucker advocates “feedback analysis” as one way to find out one’s strengths and weaknesses. (Drucker, The Essential Drucker, 2001, p. 218) Williams’ list of traits noted above also refer to attributes that are personally focused. Personally, I used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MTBI) analysis to get a clearer understanding of my strengths and weaknesses. There are four dichotomies that describe 16 personality types. (The Myers & Briggs Foundation, 2003) I wrote a blog post about understanding the personality types of Enterprise Architects called “Being a Teacher works for me …” (de Sousa, 2008)

Flexible leaders build on their self-awareness by creating a set of guiding principles. These guiding principles are applied daily by the leader to their work. Peter Drucker writes “Nothing better prepares the ground for such leadership than a spirit of management that confirms in the day-to-day practices of the organization strict principles of conduct, and responsibility, high standards of performance, and respect for the individual and his work.” (Drucker, The Practice of Management, 1954, p. 160) Jim Collins provides a set of principles for Level 5 leaders. “Clock Building not Time Telling” focuses on building a company that is built to last. The “Genius of AND” stresses personal humility and professional will. A “Core Ideology” of ambition for the company over ambition for self. Finally, Level 5 leaders are “relentless in stimulating progress toward tangible results and achievement, even if it means firing their brothers.” (Collins, Good to Great, 2001, p. 198) Read more...

Service Management Culture – Who’s job is it?

itsm, leadership, management 4 Responses »

Oct 022011

Failing to consider your followers may result in you being the only one charging out of the trench towards the enemy. (credit Stephen Lamb – @SEE_EYE_OH) If I am leading, I need my team with me to be successful. In the complex world of IT Service Management, working as a team is the only way we can be successful. Leading and managing my application development team has shown me that if we focus on what our work principles are, we can accomplish our goals together. Teamwork is the key to building a successful service management culture.

I had to change the one particular practice within of our team when I started as the manager. I particularly hate the phrase “That is not my job”. The people we serve don’t care that it is not our job; they want their problem resolved so they can carry on with their work day.

My team worked hard while having a narrow vision of what delivering a service end to end meant. If an application was not functioning due to an infrastructure problem, they would hand it off to the Infrastructure team to manage the problem. The result was that many of our application clients had to run the gauntlet of our internal IT Services departmental complexity. Those unfortunate clients were not able to work and became very unhappy by getting the run around by our team.

I introduced the concept that “We are the face of IT Services for the Application Services”. This means that “we own the problem end to end” and no longer hand off our problems. Instead, my team navigates our internal complexities, manages the issue for the client and ensures we get a resolution for our clients. Our clients interact with the person who took the issue and never have to figure out who else to talk to. I got initial resistance to this approach. It took about a year to instill this new principle into my team’s culture and work habits. This approach has turned around our clients’ impression of our team. We are now a team that everyone wants to work with because they know if we take on a problem, we will own it end to end.

Service management? It is all our jobs … together!