Lesson 10: Guiding Principles

Let’s take a look at the seven guiding principles of ITIL…

00:06 – Okay. So, welcome back.
00:10 – We’ve talked through the heart of ITIL.
00:13 – We’ve talked through the Service Value System and the Service Value Chains, and the core importance of creating value.
00:22 – One of the elements in there was the Guiding Principles; some techniques to make us do the sensible things.
00:30 – I mentioned it as a mechanism for ensuring that we don’t forget to do the obvious.
00:38 – So, we’re going to look at those guiding principles.
00:43 – I’m going to describe the nature and the use of them and a little bit about their interaction, and why they make sense hopefully, but of course, first and foremost, I’m going to tell you what they are.
00:55 – When to use them is easy, all of the time.
01:00 – And what I want you to do, what I hope you do by the time I’ve been through these seven guiding principles, is for you to realize that you already knew them, but had perhaps not hung a name on them and not articulated them.
01:14 – So, the guiding principles, seven guiding principles.
01:19 – A guiding principle, any guiding principle, ITIL’s or anyone else’s, is just recommendations that guide you in all circumstances.
01:27 – It doesn’t matter what kind of goal, strategies, type of work, management structure or anything else, a true guiding principle is universal and enduring, which sounds so reassuring, doesn’t it?
01:40 – It means it works all the time and it keeps on working.
01:45 – They should support successful actions.
01:47 – If they’re used properly, they will make it much more likely that you’re successful, and it will be much more likely that your decisions are good decisions, and this applies at all levels of organizations.
01:58 – The guiding principles apply to simple decisions, about simple tasks on a short-term basis, and they apply just as much to major organization-changing decisions, company-changing decisions at the highest level.
02:14 – These guiding principles apply across the whole range, and if you remember one thing about this, please remember that these are not fancy business things, they’re not minor work things, they are both.
02:27 – They’re guiding principles because they always work, and if you’re going to do one thing in your organization to help you get better by using ITIL is write the guiding principles out and then pin them on the wall, pin them on every wall, and make sure people know why you’ve done it.
02:44 – So, let’s start with the first one. Focus on value.
02:49 – No surprise there. I’ve already talked about how important value is.
02:53 – How valuable value is in this context.
02:56 – You’re going to hear it a lot more yet, but everything an organization does has to link back to value.
03:05 – If you’re doing something that doesn’t fit in some kind of value structure, if any element that you do in work or at home doesn’t deliver value to somebody, then why are you doing it?
03:18 – It is wasting resources and time and money and your life. Don’t do it.
03:23 – Be sure you can link everything back to value.
03:27 – Value to service consumers, to customers, to stakeholders, and to yourself. You’re important too.
03:34 – So, it’s the first step, understand who’s being served and how they receive value.
03:40 – Understand what you’re doing. Focus all your plans and policies and attitudes and behavior on value.
03:47 – Remember it’s defined by the customer, by the recipient, and it changes.
03:53 – Things that are valuable at some times of the day, week, month, year or your life will not give value at other times.
04:03 – It’s achieved through a balance. It’s about achieving objectives, and it’s often about a compromise.
04:11 – Most of us would want a large portion of everything rather than one of something.
04:19 – It’s very hard in life to focus on a single entity because that’s not the way we are, and it should be the same at work. You want this compromise.
04:27 – Do you want it fast? Do you want it cheap? Do you want it effective?
04:34 – You can probably have any two if you give up on the third, but the real value comes from the right balance for the situation you’re in, and again like everything else we’ve talked about, it requires that shared understanding, shared relationship.
04:50 – Second guiding principle, start where you are.
04:56 – You, in your organization and in your life, are doing lots of things well.
05:03 – Don’t stop doing them well because you’ve had a new idea to do something else, or you’ve read a new book, be that an ITIL book or a COBIT book or a DevOps book or any other kind of book.
05:14 – Don’t stop doing what you’re doing well. Build on where you are.
05:21 – Always identify the things you’re doing that are delivering actual value before you start embarking on improvement initiatives.
05:30 – Understand where you are now, and that can mean going and finding out where you are now, and it’s important that you understand where you are now. So, go and look.
05:46 – That’s part of start where you are now. Go and find out where you are now, and observe things directly for yourself or your people to do them.
05:56 – Don’t just take presumptions. Observe and look.
05:59 – The third on is to progress iteratively with feedback.
06:04 – Fancy words again for break improvements down to the smallest size that will deliver something useful, and remember that sometimes you need to do things one after the other, but sometimes you can do things in parallel.
06:19 – You could have different groups working on different things.
06:22 – They may need to be aware of each other, but they don’t need to wait for one to finish before the other starts.
06:28 – Use Deming Cycles, Plan, Do, Check, Act or any other Kolb Cycle that you are familiar with and that you like in your company. Try things out, see if it’s better.
06:38 – If it’s better, incorporate it; if it’s not, go back to where you were.
06:42 – Don’t burn your bridges, don’t burn your boats. Test, try, fall back.
06:48 – Plan, Do, Check, Act is the traditional approach to that.
06:51 – I’ve used lots of other Kolb Cycles in my 40 years of doing improvements.
06:56 – Oh! Damn it! 45 years of doing improvements professionally.
07:01 – Progress iteratively. With feedback.
07:05 – Major nod here to DevOps, you know.
07:12 – Take things forward, get feedback quickly, react to feedback quickly.
07:19 – Don’t just get feedback and file it away; do something with it.
07:23 – It isn’t useful feedback if you don’t do something. So, progress iteratively, a small part at a time.
07:30 – Get somebody who’s competent and understands to establish whether that’s good or bad, and act on that result.
07:38 – So, progress iteratively with feedback and consequences of feedback.
07:43 – The next one, collaborate and promote visibility.
07:48 – You need genuine collaboration. That’s what initiatives like DevOps are built upon, an understanding that we work together.
07:59 – One of the key mechanisms for delivering this is the concept of a shared metric, a shared goal.
08:07 – Again, think of a football team. You’ve got 11 players in the team.
08:13 – You maybe have 8 good ones and 3 bad ones, but the team wins or the team loses.
08:19 – Single metric, single measurement. So, collaboration.
08:24 – Involving the right people in the right way at the right time is going to increase the probability of success.
08:32 – It’s going to make better decision-making. Trusting people to make decisions, getting them to collaborate.
08:37 – Promote that visibility, allow people to see what’s happening.
08:40 – Allow people to understand that they’ll be recognized because without collaboration, none of these frameworks will work properly.
08:48 – So, get people to trust each other. Easily said, hard to do, and it’s difficult for management to make people trust each other, and sometimes management gets in the way of trust. If you’ve got a team that works together, maybe you fall back and leave them; let them collaborate.
09:04 – Let other people see what’s happening. Share your knowledge and skills.
09:08 – So, initial collaboration ensures that things are aligned.
09:12 – Good communication between people makes it happen.
09:15 – So, the guiding principle, collaborate, promote visibility.
09:20 – Collaborate between teams, promote visibility of how teams work with each other, and let people see what progress has been made and reward each piece of progress. Make that visible too.
09:34 – So, get a sensible guiding principle that helps us move forward. Praise what’s done.
09:41 – Think, the next one, think and work holistically.
09:47 – Sometimes, specialist, expert knowledge is required, but those specialists need to see where they fit in the bigger picture.
09:58 – ITIL’s talked for a long time about People, Partners, Process, and Products and gluing things together, that all makes sense, but specialists need the coordination role.
10:09 – Again, if we allow ourselves a sports attitude here, a sports philosophy, football is a good example of it.
10:17 – Modern football built upon Johan Cruyff and Rinus Michels' concept of total football from the 1980s and ’90s transformed the way the best football teams played.
10:31 – It was not to throw away specializations, not to say that this is a great striker, this is a really good defender, this is a good midfield player.
10:40 – It was to make each of those aware of other peoples' roles sufficient that they could see the overlap in the communication, and then see the bigger picture in terms of how their specialism best serves that bigger picture.
10:54 – So, think and work holistically. Understand that whole picture.
10:58 – Understand we all win or we all lose. It doesn’t mean you don’t want a specialist.
11:02 – It doesn’t mean that you don’t put your striker near the opposition goal and try and get the ball to them when there’s a chance of scoring.
11:10 – It does mean that if you can’t get it to them, then someone else can have a good go at trying to score.
11:17 – It also means, and again if I allow the football analogy a little longer, it sometimes means that doing what you’re best at is not the best thing to do for your employer or your company or your team.
11:35 – Just because you are better at being a goalkeeper than you are at playing outfield, doesn’t mean that that’s the best thing to do.
11:46 – If the team happens to have somebody who’s even better at keeping a goal than you are, but you’re pretty good in other roles, then the best value you are to the team is out there doing what you’re second best at, and a good team player will know that and will perform whatever role they’re given to do by the manager because they have this holistic perception, thinking in that broad approach.
12:09 – That’s what we want in our teams. That’s what you want to encourage in the way you deal with things.
12:14 – Can I see the big picture? Can I see what I’m doing or my team is doing to contribute to that?
12:20 – And how do we best contribute?
12:23 – Not what do I like doing the most? That’s what I’m going to do.
12:27 – So, think and work holistically, think and work for the team, for that bigger entity, and remember, single metric, we should all be winning or all losing, and penultimate one, keep it simple and practical.
12:44 – Don’t get tangled up with fashion statements and ideas.
12:49 – All services and processes and things you do should assist in creating value as efficiently as possible.
12:56 – I always remember my math’s teacher at school. We were talking about three ways to prove a theorem, and I asked him, “What’s the best way?” and the answer was instant and assured. It’s the easiest way.
13:13 – A good mathematician is lazy, and that concept of good equals lazy is pervasive as far as I can see.
13:21 – The most efficient way, the easiest way to do it, all other things being equal, is the best way to do it. Don’t waste resources.
13:29 – So, we should keep it simple if we can. Do the simple thing if it delivers the goods.
13:35 – Don’t go for the complicated one unnecessarily.
13:38 – If you can walk somewhere, then don’t waste time sorting out which buses you should get and paying the fare; just walk there.
13:46 – Just do it the simple way. Do it the direct way.
13:50 – And don’t miss opportunities for simplifying things. Question everything you do.
13:57 – Keep it practical. Make sure that, on the other hand, that you don’t remove something because you don’t see the value it gives.
14:06 – There’s a story about somebody taking over a company and walked around the company and found four or five people that didn’t seem to deliver any value.
14:18 – Now, he was a good businessman, he didn’t fire them.
14:22 – He just kept his eye on them to find out what it is they did that delivered value because they seemed to be popular and useful and busy.
14:30 – And the example was that one of them actually worked out the social club and the social register and lots of glue, if you like, that made people function as a team, and although it wasn’t a direct issue that delivered what the manager saw as an identifiable value, it actually did deliver value to the team and it was the team that delivered value.
14:55 – So, keep that perspective. Keep it simple, keep it practical, but have a complete view of what is being done and why it’s being done.
15:02 – Don’t close your eyes to things and don’t close your mind to things that might be important to others, but aren’t important to you, and the last one, something that people in IT shouldn’t need telling.
15:16 – It’s always embarrassing to me that the years I’ve spent time on training courses with lecturer’s notes that tell you to stand up and tell this room full of IT people that automation is a good thing. Optimize and automate.
15:32 – Optimize means making something as effective and useful as it needs to be, and there’s a massive, massive lesson there.
15:42 – Don’t do something to a degree that isn’t required.
15:47 – Don’t deliver something to an accuracy that isn’t required.
15:51 – If you’re building a response in terms of numbers, don’t make it accurate to 1% if the input figures you’ve got, as business forecasts tend to be, are only accurate to 10%.
16:04 – Do it quicker and rougher and easier, and that’s going to give you a better answer.
16:10 – Automation typically refers to the use of technology without human intervention.
16:17 – It can sometimes be other things as well, but let’s limit it to that.
16:21 – That’s good enough for what we’re talking about. Can you automate things?
16:25 – Automation typically makes it faster, so be careful that you don’t automate something that you haven’t optimized and made simple, and particularly, don’t automate something that at the moment needs human intervention to keep it correct, but do automate where you can.
16:43 – Machines are better than people in some respects.
16:47 – They don’t stop for lunch, they’re consistent. They don’t have bad moods.
16:52 – They don’t get ill. Well, maybe they get ill sometimes, but automation has its advantages, it has its disadvantages.
17:01 – So, automate where it’s appropriate, but always consider, guiding principle remember, always relevant, always optimize. Do what you need to do, don’t what you need …
17:11 – don’t do what you don’t need to do, and always consider automation.
17:15 – How can we make this routine and automatic so that it’s right every time and it allows the people we have to think about the areas where we can’t automate.
17:26 – So, lots of guiding principles, seven of them. Think about all seven of them.
17:31 – Think about all seven of them at the same time because again we’re integrating these approaches, and apply them to every situation you’ve got, and honestly, seriously, write them on the wall, put them on the posters next to you. Every time you’ve got a task to do, ask yourself, “Am I applying all seven of these principles? Have I missed something?
17:55 – Is my boss missing something? Are my staff missing something?” Always applicable, universally applicable, should always be in your mind.
18:05 – Next we’re going to look at the four dimensions and, as I said before, build them, think about them holistically.
18:15 – So, this is about ensuring you build a rigid structure before you risk your life on it.

How many of the principles can you remember?

Don’t worry if you can’t remember them all.

Check the list of principles and try to explain what each of them means, and think about the way it applies to your work and life.

Lesson 10: Guiding Principles

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