The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Great myths of ITIL #1: "You can't manage what you can't measure". "

it's all Drucker's fault

skeptic — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 07:49:44 +0000

Yes it's all Drucker's fault. (Is that sacrilege?)

Verghis' book sounds interesting.

"You can't manage..."

Roy Atkinson — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:13:40 +0000

It's close to Peter Drucker: "You can only manage what you can measure."

I'd recommend Phil Verghis' recent work on "Metrics, Methods and Madness..." which warns strongly about putting goals on activities. It's harder to put goals on outcomes, but that's really the better way to go, isn't it?

So many measure activities (call/contact volume, for example) because they are easy. Good management is not easy.

regards,
Roy

Blind Isn't Really Blind...

kengon — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:40:13 +0000

When you're in a cloud, a window isn't of much use to you.

Flight by reference to instruments allow you to keep your orientation without having visual reference to the ground, understand where you are relative to where you want to be, and be in communication with others who are participating in the system (both ATC and other pilots/aircraft).

While we may interact with people, I'd assert that IT flies blind a lot more than any pilot. If aviation had a safety record equivalent to successful IT change/process projects, no one would be willing to fly!

kengon

So "operate, co-operate, communicate" then?

Visitor — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:07:20 +0000

I would propose the 3 ates of IT follow the standard IT management ates lest the lesser IT resources be downtrodden further:

lie-ate, kiss-ass-ate, claim-the-kudos-ate

Regards.

MasturB

original ates

JamesFinister — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:55:25 +0000

Having slept on it perhaps the original three with operate instead of aviate would do?

Incidentally the aviating bit does not have to mean looking out the window, it can be more reliable to use the key instruments that provide situational awareness, which on modern aircraft are located in the same "T" arrangment so you know where to find them.

What about ISO/IEC 38500 as the top level view? What measures would you use to measure ISO/IEC 38500 performance?

instruments and measurement

skeptic — Thu, 21 May 2009 10:00:38 +0000

Re flying by instruments, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle as usual. there's a reason pilots have all those instruments and there is a reason they still have cockpit windows as i think James mentioned recently. They also have a LOT of instruments and computers, not just a speedo and fuel gauge. No instuments is as bad as relying solely on instruments. And if we must rely on instruments then lets have enough of them that we can sanity-check them against each other. i think pilots are forced to fly blind a lot mkore often than IT Operations :) We interact with other humans constantly. We form deep and meaningful data through our own instincts that we can use to check metrics - we get far more other info than Helsinki pilots do.

Wholeheartedly agree with earlier point about measuring with somethign other than ITIL - it is a favourite point of mine. I think even ISO20000 or risk are too close to home. In my book Owning ITIL I propose measuring a service culture audit. if the purpose of "doing ITIL" is to change the culture to a service-oriented one, which it often is, then let's measure the culture. And if it is to reduce costs them let's measure costs. Stand back and neasure the big picture. THEN drill in.

...ate

skeptic — Thu, 21 May 2009 09:58:43 +0000

So "operate, co-operate, communicate" then?

no measurement

aroos — Thu, 21 May 2009 08:59:36 +0000

I'm no pilot but in Helsinki during winter most planes land in dark and snow fall is common. Staring at the snow cannot help much.

In my local market I have been studying the phenomena that according to surveys a majority of IT-units have implemented ITIL processes but do not have any measurements at all. Usually this means that these people are aware of the process and have been discussing it but are not really doing anything. It is quite possible that the managers who answer the surveys think that they have a process but usually the fact is that there is no process in place. I have been trying to send the message that there must be some measurement that at least show that the process is alive and kicking. In that sense I do not think this is a myth.

Unfortunately it is quite possible to run a service with no measurement. Many years ago I was working for a Finnish governement IT department. My job did not have any measurement so I did what I thought was useful. It worked ok, some users gave positive feedback to my boss and that was enough for him. After I left the job I heard that my successor complained that I had created too much work for him as the users were accustomed to ask for help. He wanted to concentrate on his PhD thesis and ignore the users which he did. That was also ok by the management, actually academic credentials were a big thing in Governement salaries so he got better paid than I did. I do not think that anybody was actually managing that IT service.

The clearness of measures is one the best things of running a small business. You know what you are achieving. In a big corporation it is far more difficult.

Aale

PS. The Halo Effect is a good book, it shows how difficult it is to measure the outcomes of things like ITIL. Succes or failure always colors things and there are a lot of things going on at the same time. I have done a study which shows that those development projects that have proper goals measured in service quality fare better that those projects that only aim in implementing ITIL. The succes was measured by ISO 20000 maturity. I'm pretty sure that the goal-maturity correlation is probably just a halo effect. Setting proper goals is part of generally better management practices and they tend to succeed better in all things they do.

Aale

Assessments

JamesFinister — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:46:50 +0000

There is an issue that has been worrying me about ITSM maturity assessments for sometime, essentially are we looking at the right dimensions?

Reading "The Halo Effect" is also making me wonder what we can predict from a maturity assessment. I did some work on a risk based approach assessment a few years ago that tried to home in on key predictors of both current and future performance, but I haven't re-visited it post v3

Like The Direction

kengon — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:30:55 +0000

James,

I think I got the intent of the original post. Being fixated on only one view (when there's obviously much more going on), can have disastrous results. I was actually elaborating on Aale's post.

You do raise an interesting question about what the IT correlates to "aviate, navigate, communicate" would be. I would propose that communicate stay in place. We need more communication, not less.

kengon

Dashboard

JamesFinister — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:24:27 +0000

I think the original comment though was meant to convey the danger of looking at dials that aren't central to the key tasks, whatever they are - and I was focusing on the "aviate" bit.

Interesting to consider what the IT "..ates" should be:

operate, co-operate, innovate?

No, not happy with that.

What Pilots Do...

kengon — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:44:29 +0000

Aale,

No, they don't. Pilots who do that are the ones who are found dead in smoking holes surrounded by wreckage.

The mantra is - aviate, navigate, communicate - in that order. The flight deck is designed to enable these activities and compensate for the lack of visual references.

The system is built to enable this type of activity. Under instrument flight rules, you can even lose the third and still have a successful outcome. This is something we train and build procedures for.

kengon

Read the right dials

JamesFinister — Wed, 20 May 2009 08:39:04 +0000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Airlines_Flight_401

First rule of flying, particularly when things are going wrong, is "fly the plane"

Don't get distracted by peripheral data

Isn't that what pilots do

aroos — Wed, 20 May 2009 06:06:18 +0000

Isn't that what pilots do in rain, fog etc.

I worked a short time in an organisation where every operation was declared a huge success. Very simple KPI's would have stopped the nonsense.

Aale

Very nice.

Visitor — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:42:58 +0000

Very nice.

driving with your face in the dashboard

skeptic — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:57:34 +0000

Majid Iqbal on Twitter said:

Managing solely by process performance is like driving with your face in the dashboard.

I've read that book too!

avallesalas — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:49:46 +0000

>Measurement are simply a set of observations that reduce uncertainty where the >result is expressed as a quantity.

Hey visitor!
I've read that book too, and it's really interesting! ;-)

Antonio Valle
G2, Gobierno y Gestión de TI
http://www.gedos.es

Measuring Humans

RoyRoebuck — Sun, 03 May 2009 14:17:58 +0000

We can measure the "recorded" and observed aspects of humans and life in general (that's social and biological science). See, comment, and vote on my ideas for Recovery.gov at http://tinyurl.com/ctgr6d. Deadline is end of 3 May. My theme is terminology.

map humans

skeptic — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:25:18 +0000

Agreed we can map humans - what they are saying. We can build a picture of their ideas. Not the same as measuring them though.

Modeling the dynamics of carbon-based life forms

RoyRoebuck — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:44:00 +0000

Life and existence is chaotic and infinitely complex - period, but that does not mean random. Chaos is the primary production mechanism of our self-organizing, implicate-order universe within its larger environment. Read about David Bohm, Ilya Progogine, and Bernard Haisch, e.g., on Wikipedia.com, for more detail.

But life can still be modeled (as a representation or architecture of the reality, not an absolute replica - the map is not the territory) without getting into the quantification of operations research, management science, simulations, business intelligence, and decision support. As a physicist and management analyst I've used all of these methods - and they are very limited, giving a constrained, closed-world view, without more modeling at the beginning of their use, and continuing during their use.

Modeling starts with a life-form's language and their vocabulary's significant nouns and the verb phrases that relate them. To see a model of a life-form's viewpoint, look at their writing. Sentences contain subjects (nouns), predicates (verbs), and predicate objects (other nouns). Writing anything is intended to record and share a viewpoint. The first level of modeling is to create lists of words used, identifying terms of single and compound words, defining the terms from individual/local/group/organization/global contexts, grouping the terms into broader and narrower meanings (as a taxonomy), and building a concept map of the nouns and their relationships.

Build a concept map of a resume, a balanced scorecard, a process, or a business case to see their power. Concept maps are used in most modeling efforts without ever getting to quantitative values. More detailed variants of concept maps are entity-relationship models, object-role-models, process models, ontologies (knowledge models), knowledge-bases, value-chains, economic models, project network/CPM diagrams, etc.

The term that broadly names the above viewpoint is "terminology", encompassing the various stages of organized "semantics". Terminology is also described quite well in Wikipedia.com. My own approach to building a terminology, so that governance methods (i.e., modeled, measured, managed) like ITIL and ITSM can be their most effective, efficient, and responsive to change, is documented at http://gem-ema.one-world-is.org.

The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Great myths of ITIL #1: &quot;You can&#039;t manage what you can&#039;t measure&quot;. "

it's all Drucker's fault

"You can't manage..."

Blind Isn't Really Blind...

So "operate, co-operate, communicate" then?

original ates

instruments and measurement

...ate

no measurement

Assessments

Like The Direction

Dashboard

What Pilots Do...

Read the right dials

Isn't that what pilots do

Very nice.

driving with your face in the dashboard

I've read that book too!

Measuring Humans

map humans

Modeling the dynamics of carbon-based life forms

The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Great myths of ITIL #1: "You can't manage what you can't measure". "