Serview Best Practice Kongress

Serview organized the ‘Best Practice congress 2012’ in Bad Neuenahr. Training, Workshops and speaker sessions focusing on ITIL, Prince2, M_o_R,  MSP and P30 best practice frameworks. The congress offered delegates the chance to share experiences & learn from each other as well as gaining a broader perspective on ITSM capabilities rather than simply ITIL.

Paul Wilkinson presented his theme of ‘Clever training’ at the congress explaining three key themes, all three critical success factors for making the frameworks a success. The first theme was a best practice approach for ensuring that a training investment delivers real sustainable value, based upon the 8-field model. The second theme was the benefits and value of ‘experiential learning’, helping to translate theory into practice and empowering people to change their OWN ways of working.  The third theme was to ‘embed the learning’ into daily activities immediately, in team meetings, evaluating projects, evaluating changes, post incident review, at the coffee machine. Embedding the concept of CSI into line responsibilities straight away. ‘Improving your work IS your work’. These are 3 critical success factors to address the fact that 70-80% of organizations do not get the value they hoped for from applying frameworks, despite the fact that world-wide there are literally millions of certified professionals.

During the congress delegates also had the chance to participate in the Grab@Pizza business and IT alignment simulation as well as the Apollo 13 – An ITSM case experience simulation. Both sessions allowed delegates to apply the theory they had learnt in a simulated environment. Learning to translate theory into Practice.

What were some of the experiences from the simulations?

Grab@Pizza:  ‘A great way of bringing Business and IT together to better understand each other and learn to define and agree decision making responsibilities. A great way of building trust and working together to solve real life issues of aligning Business and IT’.

‘This forces IT to think in terms of business priority and impact and demonstrate that their processes are able to deliver value and at the same time reduce costs and risks.’

Apollo: This really brought home the need for clearly defining, agreeing and understanding tasks, roles, responsibilities and the need for end-to-end communication between the roles. We had a great process flow on paper at the start, but getting it embedded in the organization and working was something we discovered as the game progressed’.

Richard Pharro in his keynote closing speech said he ‘does not believe that generic Best Practice is a differentiator for quality organisations. It provides the foundation on which truly Best Practice organisations adapt and apply Best Practice and through this application generate competitive advantage. Getting there is not easy and requires a systematic change process through which new ways of working can be embedded for lasting benefit and real competitive advantage.