Installable culture and experience?

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast" (Peter Drucker).

This famous quote suggests to us that good work culture is pretty-much the be-all. Ordinarily though, it's not easy to achieve.

Consultants who have worked in ITSM for a long time will tell you that it takes a great deal of focused effort to achieve desirable team behaviours and culture. They will tell you that learning a framework such as ITIL is not enough because the framework's principles need to be contextualised in real-world practice. It's an endeavour that might need to be continuously nurtured.

The outstanding work around this is the "ABC of ICT" (Attitudes, Behaviours, Culture) and practice simulation workshops run by GamingWorks (https://www.gamingworks.nl/) that cover organisational change in all walks of IT and project management. They are the work of Paul Wilkinson, one of the sector's most respected experts who has been involved with the ITIL framework since its early days.

ABC makes as much sense for IT support as it does in other areas. If you work in IT support, you'll recognise how busy things usually are. Many competing demands mean that we naturally tend to focus only on the "here and how", distracting us from other important things that would deliver value to a business. We sail an independent flotilla in choppy waters without a reliable compass, something that's inevitibly detrimental to morale, employee experience and customer experience, particularly when our ships start sinking (think open ticket backlog, escalations and complaints).

So, good practice principles need to be absorbed, so we remind ourselves of the approach we should be taking. In other words, to be mindful of intangible considerations that cannot easily be encapsulated in standardised procedures.

By contrast however, standardised procedures are very specific, established, repeatable and therefore more reliable, especially the ultimate kind, automation. They can also be optimised. Procedural methodology clearly trumps nurtured ABC, particularly when it is configured in tools.

So question is, can configured methodology form ABC rather than it needing to be nurtured?

Of course, the answer is yes.

As to how, it's a matter of intricately designed processes and use of insightful supporting metrics which together provide the guidance teams need in everything they do.

Aligned with current framework thinking, "intangibles" that require nurtured ABC are primarily two-fold: collaboration/ teamwork and focus on value. There are others including performance, knowledge improvement, procedural improvement, expectations management and thorough journaling.

The Take OFF methodology is a holistic set of processes that encapsulate all of these aspects, together with employee support, duty-of-care and value stream management. Everything teams should be doing becomes tangible - guided and measured.

With a reliable compass for every work situation, teams are able to do their job extremely well, naturally producing great culture and experiences for service desk employees and their customers, fully aligned with ITIL's guiding principles.

In service tools that support the Take OFF methodology, exceptional culture and experience is installed.