Being a leader sometimes means doing the hard stuff.  Helping people overcome their weaknesses, or weeding them out of the team if they cannot be helped, are some of the hard things we sometimes find ourselves having to do.

I’m sure there are more, but I hear over and over from my peers about five traits that suck the life out of their teams.  People with these characteristics destroy opportunities for efficiency improvements, revenue growth, and strategic alignment.  Worse yet, their poison finds often its way into the water supply and makes the whole team sick.

The Evil Empire
As a business unit, IT has been particularly susceptible to people’s building of their own empires.  Because of the specialized knowledge required for the job, it has been easy to convince the business that it cannot live without me, my skills, and my systems.

IT has been setting its own benchmarks for measuring success because no one in the business has understood what we do well enough to judge us.  The result of being its own judge is that the IT department can create self-fulfilling prophecies and before you know it, an empire is born.  As the empire grows in size, headcount, power, and most of all, real cost for the business, IT starts being thought of as the source of “that giant sucking sound” of money flowing out of the corporate coffers.  IT takes on a defensive posture to protect the empire.  Meanwhile, the business leadership feels held hostage by the ever more powerful empire.

Here is where I get to beat my drum again…  IT is just another business unit.  It should be judged by its effectiveness at helping the business be successful meeting business objectives.  If the business is not telling IT what the objectives are, IT should be asking!  Then the team should figure out the metrics that can be used to measure its business success.

This is not about the people in IT or their systems or the technical solutions they bring to bear.  What matters is success of the business!

Are there Empire Builders in your team?  I would love to hear your stories!

Next up…  Disengagement
I used to think disengaged employees were a result of a management problem (and no doubt, sometimes they are.) But experience has taught me that engagement has more to do with a worker’s character than most any other factor.

Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps, Visible Ops Security: Achieving Common Security And IT Operations Objectives in 4 Practical Steps, and the latest in the series; Visible Ops Private Cloud: From Virtualization To Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps, have received accolades from IT practitioners and luminaries from all over the globe.

Recent reviews include:
Visible Ops Handbook
“Nice concise approach to common sense IT process improvement.”
“This should be the very next book you should read! An IT Pro life changer! Short, intense, practical path to ITSM.”

Visible Ops Security
“Great book, easy to read, entirely practical. Get Visible Ops first, then read this one. It is all the ITIL any company needs. A must read for any IT Operations professional”

Visible Ops Private Cloud
“A must buy and a quick read. Great primer for the IT Executive looking at private cloud solutions.”

Find out what all the buzz is about, visit the ITPI Web store and buy your copies of the Visible Ops series. Buy all three books and get a discount!

The Institute has seen much confusion and misinformation in the market place most of which is not scientifically based information. This newly announced research project will seek to provide the quantitative scientific methodology by researching and benchmarking a large sample of organizations that practice DevOps methods in various forms and then we will apply our research methods to determine the correlations between the organizations that deliver efficient through-puts for both development and operations.

Please stay tuned as there will be more information released in the coming months. If you have an interest in either participating or sponsoring this new Research Project please contact us.

Scott Alldridge
President
IT Process Institute

About the IT Process Institute
The IT Process Institute is an independent research organization that provides information for IT decision makers that seek the highest levels of organizational performance. Our mission is to advance IT management science through independent research, benchmarking, and the development of prescriptive guidance. We enable data driven decision making which is grounded in the study of top performers and the practices that make them different. Our shared research model is a cost effective addition to best practice frameworks and analyst services.

Many of the DevOps movement’s founders come from the IT Ops world, and are asking the right question: What is important to the Business, and how do we, in IT Ops, align our efforts with what the Business cares about?

The Dev guys already figured this out, quite a while ago. The first principle of the Agile Manifesto, written more than a decado ago, is “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software”.

It’s about time Ops figured this out. There’s a reason that in so many companies Ops has a reputation for being the department of “No!” We serve our systems and processes and SLAs. But we have forgotten (or never knew) that our job is actually to serve the Business.

DevOps is largely Ops bridging the gap between who we have been, and who the Devs already are – teams who deliver value to the business.

It’s also about collaboration between the Dev and Ops silos. Teams are building expertise that crosses over between these disciplines. Responsibility for success or failure is being shared between Dev and Ops. (I’ve even heard of Devs carrying pagers and taking their turn in the on call rotation!)

The Bad

I have heard DevOps proponents tear down best practices methodologies like Problem, Incident and Change Management, for example. Some say these processes are never anything but red tape, getting in the way of delivering meaningful work for the business.

But there’s hard science showing appropriately implemented controls around processes like these increase MTBF and decrease MTTR. I think the operative word there is “appropriately” because I have also seen some of those implementations of “best practices” where the processes do, in fact, get in the way of productivity and effectiveness.

So… throwing the best practices “baby” out with the bathwater is Bad. Folks who can sort best practices out and apply them appropriately are Good.

The Ugly

I have been around a handful of Devs who have used Agile or DevOps to justify being granted the “keys” to the operational “kingdom.” At the same time, they won’t accept the responsibility that comes with that power. These people convince the business that availability problems and release delays are all about Ops and their arcane processes. I read here where the IT Skeptic called this kind of behavior SmashOps. When DevOps is used as a stick to beat up Ops, things get Ugly.

So then…  is DevOps really the next Great Thing in IT?

It’s too soon to tell how important DevOps will be. As it has been with ITIL or other best practices, no matter how brilliant a set of principles may be, when applied inappropriately, those principles will hinder productivity and business alignment.

Like any other movement, DevOps should be judged by how well the people following its approach use it to deliver business value. If the movement helps teams be more effective, efficient, and most importantly, strategic and revenue enhancing partners to their businesses, then DevOps may very well become the next Great Thing.

Lots of IT organizations implemented ITSM systems built around the ITIL framework… but the magical results many dreamed of are nowhere to be found.  Folks are still struggling to find the promised productivity and availability gains, and they are frustrated with the additional overhead the new processes introduced.

IT Departments struggle to deliver required availability levels, which erodes the perceived value of the IT Department.  IT projects are completed late and over budget (if they are finished at all), only adding fuel to the fire.

So, that means “ITIL is dead” (or dying) right?

Not so fast….  I do not believe ITIL is the problem.  There are plenty of mature IT organizations making great use of ITIL for improving availability and productivity, as well as any other metrics their Businesses care about.  I have worked regularly with an organization that studies high performing IT shops, the IT Process Institute.  ITPI studies show that effective IT organizations all have in common that they use ITIL or similar processes to manage the flow of work through their teams.

If ITIL is not the problem, what is?

I talk to a lot of business and IT leaders, and if their organizations are struggling to make use of ITIL it is inevitable that the conversation will include these problems.

Skepticism

Do you remember “The 6th Sense” and the famous phrase “I see dead people”?  Well, “I see dead people” who believe that ITIL cannot help them.  To these skeptics, the best that could be said of ITIL is that it is a bunch of meaningless busywork, time spent filling out paperwork instead of getting work done.  At its worst, the skeptic believes, ITIL is a way for management to show IT’s ineffectiveness and justify layoffs or the off-shoring of IT jobs.

Skeptics are so convinced of ITIL’s uselessness that they often actively sabotage the efforts of their organizations to improve by using ITIL.

Inappropriate and Ineffective Application of Processes

I cannot say I understand exactly how or why this has happened… but many people seem to believe ITIL is the complete, all-inclusive, prescriptive authority on how to manage IT.  When people see ITIL this way, it is very easy to create a web of ineffective processes.  IT workers can become so entangled in these processes that they accomplish less and less meaningful work.

This is easiest to describe by an example:  Not long ago, I helped a large IT organization with their ITIL implementation.  Their first attempt at Change Management got completely mired in bureaucracy.  A Change Request to any major system would get so bogged down that it could literally take six months to be approved.

For workers to get work done, they had to game the system.  To ensure they looked like they were following the process, people would write “token” Change Requests for trivial changes that would be likely to be approved with little scrutiny.  Then they would make the real (major) changes to critical systems without any formal plan or approval.

So, the result of this organization’s new Change Management process was that actual performance was reduced because people were avoiding meaningful planning and coordination of changes to avoid getting caught in the red tape.  …not to mention, the skeptics were dancing around gloating about how right they were about ITIL’s uselessness.

The Solution

Believers instead of Skeptics

We need to find the “dead people” people and bring them back to life.  If we have a vision for effective IT Management, we should be able to show skeptics how and why ITIL and other best practices will make them more productive and improve their quality of life.

Regretfully, when someone’s skepticism cannot be replaced by belief, they are toxic and must be removed from the organization so they do not get in the way of their teammates’ success.

Appropriate and Practical Processes

Implementing the right processes in the right order can yield profound results.  If one starts with the right processes, improvement should be nearly immediate.  I think it is also important to understand that every organization needs to create an appropriate ITIL based system for managing work.  You should be judging the success of your ITIL implementation by measurably increased throughput with less human caused downtime.  Anything less means your implementation (not ITIL) has come up short.

There’s also a new IT Management kid in town, the DevOps movement.  My assessment is that DevOps is another refinement of best practices, largely aimed at teams driven by the requirement to release applications from development to production rapidly and reliably.  DevOps, like Visible Ops, seems to be another practical approach to implementing a best practices framework.  Both systems seem very congruent with ITIL to me.

Where to learn more

If you are struggling to make sense of how to implement ITIL processes in an appropriate and Practical way, The Visible Ops Handbook is a great place to start, with its four practical and auditable steps for implementing ITIL.

If you want to learn more about DevOps, have a look at The Phoenix Project:  A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping YourBusiness Win.  I promise it will make you think about how work flows through your team in a way you never have before.

EUGENE, OR November 14, 2012 – The IT Process Institute (ITPI) today announced the results of a research study that identifies the greatest predictors of success for private and hybrid IaaS cloud projects.

More than $40 billion will be spent on cloud services in 2012, accounting for about a third of IT budgets, according to IDC, yet 37 percent of IT projects risk failure. ITPI’s independent, vendor-neutral study, Private and Hybrid Cloud IaaS Project Success Factors, helps IT decision makers learn from the success of more than 143 participating enterprise organizations that deployed a private cloud. In the study, ITPI cross-correlated factors that impact cloud project success.

“IT departments are racing to get in front of their users’ demand for quick, easy and low cost provisioning through cloud services,” said Kurt Milne, Managing Director of the ITPI. “The study reports on success factors that are unique to top performers. We were surprised to find that top performers don’t focus on cost reduction or operational efficiency, but on higher level concerns like agility and scalability.”

The study found that focusing on users before, during and after deployment was a strong predictor of success. IT departments need to solicit and build solutions around user requirements. Secondly, while IT departments want to leverage existing on-premise data centers, top performers were more likely to deploy a hybrid approach and start workloads externally and then bring them on premise for production. The “external first” strategy is an effective compromise between the need for business agility and the need for cloud security.

“IT departments aren’t accustomed to building products to compete with user-oriented services, such as Azure or Amazon Web Services,” said Milne. “The more successful cloud deployments build cloud services specific to user needs, even bringing in a product manager to help drive the effort.”

The report focuses on six attributes of cloud deployments including how enterprises typically measure the success of their cloud projects, the top challenges and where organizations should focus their proof of concept efforts.

Pricing and availability
Read this report learn about what’s working at top-performing IT organizations and improve your chances of cloud project success.

A free white paper that summarizes key study findings, “Private Cloud Secrets of Success”, is available for download. www.itpi.org/white-papers

The full research report is available for $395 at www.itpi.org.

About the IT Process Institute
The IT Process Institute is an independent research organization that provides information for IT decision makers that seek the highest levels of organizational performance. Our mission is to advance IT management science through independent research, benchmarking, and the development of prescriptive guidance. We enable data driven decision making which is grounded in the study of top performers and the practices that make them different. Our shared research model is a cost effective addition to best practice frameworks and analyst services.

However, I spoke with a CMO about this article. He lit up. His gripe? He can’t get data he needs about his customers out of ERP. He is trying to figure out where to apply resources to improve sales. He has “big data” from multiple sources. But its locked in a vault.

The core problem? The staff working to help him don’t understand the business they are part of. They didn’t know how to speak in business terms. He spent 20 minutes figuring out that when developer said “program” as in “We have data for each program” – what he meant was “customer” as in “We have data for each customer.” Who calls a customer a program?

Data labels are incomprehensible filled with dashes and underscores, so he can’t dump data into a spreadsheet and “pivot table” it to understand spend by customer. And the IT resource indicated that the his needs were 4th on his priority list. I’m not making this up.

So we have IT folks, who don’t understand the business, speaking tech, exposing database table labeled data, working directly with a business executive, telling him that his needs are low their list of priorities.

I can appreciate why a successful, assertive marketing executive want to take back IT budget. Not to own IT. But to control their own destiny. My contact was expert at funding initiatives that directly impact top line growth. He knows how much increased revenue to expect with an incremental dollar spent on a marketing campaign.  But he has no visibility into what he is getting in return for his IT spend.

Clearly, there are multiple IT issues to address with governance, service training, business resource prioritization etc. I told him he should talk to CIO and offer to spend some time sharing his needs and priorities. If the CIO isn’t interested, I suggest he take back control of IT budget and hire a business analyst.

Incidentally,  when I conducted a hard data study of IT business integration, the IT organizations with least control of their budget had the best alignment scores.   Interesting.

Are there people or organizations with Amazing Cloud Kung Fu?

The IT Process Institute is in the business of identifying and studying top-performing IT organizations. So asking what constitutes Amazing Cloud Kung Fu, and who has got it are both important questions for us.

The ITPI has partnered with CloudCamp and the Silicon Valley Cloud Center to uncover the secrets of private or hybrid IaaS success. We have launched a new survey to collect data from a wide range of organizations to answer questions like:

• What types of private/hybrid IaaS cloud projects are common?
• What improves chances of cloud project success?
• What are the key elements of a successful POC?
• What should be included solution scope to optimize benefits?
• What issues are most likely to cause problems?

We are having some fun with the Amazing Kung Fu idea. But this is serious community based research. There is a lot of hype and misdirection in the cloud market. And we want to cut through the clutter to find out what works.

If you have helped implement a private or hybrid cloud, and have moved past POC phase, find out if your organization has Amazing Cloud Kung Fu.

If you qualify and complete the survey before March 23^rd – you will get a complimentary pair of real Cloud Kung Fu shoes. (or $20 Starbucks or iTunes gift card) And you will get a free benchmark report that identifies Cloud Kung Fu Master Practices, and how your cloud skills and results compare with everyone else.

Complete the survey = get cool Cloud Kung Fu Shoes (or less weird gift card)

The independent, vendor-neutral effort will help those responsible for cloud strategy and project outcomes learn from the success of others.

“Many industry surveys quantify priorities or concerns, but stop short of identifying top-performers and what they did to drive their success” said Kurt Milne, Managing Director of the IT Process Institute. “ITPI studies use data from a wide range of companies to link practice to results in order to create actionable guidance for those responsible for strategic decisions.”

“Participating in this type of research effort is a great way to provide value to our community,” said David Nielsen, co-founder & Executive Director of CloudCamp. “We’ve conducted more than 265 CloudCamp events in 95 cities. Now CloudCampers can participate beyond their local event by contributing valuable research data that will help us all identify key success factors for cloud success.”

Survey participants can benchmark their efforts and results against other top-performing organizations that participate in the study.

More information http://www.cloudcamp.org/survey

Take survey http://www.cloudcamp.org/login

About the IT Process Institute
The IT Process Institute is an independent research organization that exists to support the membership of IT operations, security, and audit professionals. Our mission is to advance IT management science through independent research, benchmarking, and the development of prescriptive guidance. Our purpose is to identify and study top-performing IT organizations and identify proven practices to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the industry.

About Cloud Camp
CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. Developers, IT professionals, End Users and Vendors are all encouraged to participate.www.cloudcamp.org

IT organizations are moving beyond virtualization and pursuing private and hybrid cloud strategies because of cloud’s ability to improve business agility and increase IT operating efficiency. “The transition to cloud, however, takes time. More importantly, it requires a well-planned, step-by-step approach,” said Kurt Milne, Managing Director of the IT Process Institute.

The RedHat From Virtualization to Private Cloud white paper series builds on the concepts in Visible Ops Private Cloud: From virtualization to private cloud in 4 practical steps to help you launch a successful private cloud initiative. Each paper in the RedHat series presents one of the four Visible Ops steps:

1. Cut through the cloud clutter

2. Design cloud services, not systems

3. Optimize and automate IT in the cloud

4. Accelerate business results with your cloud

The webcasts and associated white papers are available at:

http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/resources/fromvirttocloud/

About the IT Process Institute
The IT Process Institute is an independent research organization that exists to support the membership of IT operations, security, and audit professionals. Our mission is to advance IT management science through independent research, benchmarking, and the development of prescriptive guidance. Our purpose is to identify and study top-performing IT organizations and identify proven practices to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the industry.