It is easy to see what's wrong, with many things. Particularly if you approach them from the outside. Particularly if you're armed with the acquired wisdom of Best Practice.
One example is the old-fashioned idea of what a 'Change Advisory Board' (CAB) should be. That is a regular (daily, weekly, monthly) meeting, with lots of people, who look at a long list of changes, and discuss them, one by one, until they get through the list, or everybody in the room has lost the will to live.
It is a bad idea for many reasons - very good reasons. So we produce a list of benefits of a proper change management system, with standard changes taking the place of the trivial, repetitive, and similar ones that kept turning up at the old CAB, and do all the other good things.
Then, six months, or a year, later, we go back and find that the old CAB is back in all its horrible tediousness.
How can this happen?
Things are as they are for a reason - even if it is a bad one
I think, from the ABC, and human perspective, we need to understand one awkward truth.
Some people actually enjoy the long, repetitive, groundhog-day type meetings, sometimes, mistakenly, called 'CABs'.
Life is challenging, change is risky, we know 'IT Heroes' are a poor role model, but, perhaps, we ought to realise that there is something rational about the old-style 'CAB'. It is the tortoise, hermit crab, or ostrich solution.
If change, when ignored, disappeared, it would even work.
When things are dangerously out of control, a regular, very formal, authoritarian meeting can be like a night light in the nursery.Â
It doesn't keep the monsters at bay, but it enables you to feel relaxed enough about them to sleep.
What can we do?
If we want to make a change to an organisation, it isn't enough to be rational. Just saying why it is a good idea, and listing a lot of benefits, often sounds, to the organisation as.. 'just saying'.
You need to find out why things are as they are. Who does the current 'CAB' satisfy? Who is the person who sleeps happier in the false belief that it is protection? How did it come about? You might find that the person who first organised it is now quite senior, and is pleased with the solution he put together many years ago - if you don't convince him, he's not going to be happy if you kill his 'baby'.
Good, sound, excellent, even, as your ideas are, you have to accept they have one very big flaw. They were 'Not Invented Here' (NIH). You may see that as an advantage, and, rationally, it might be, but, if you actually want things to change, rather than just the pleasure of being right (which is just the other side of NIH, if you think about it), then you need to overcome this barrier, so that the right people want to RIH --- Reinvent It Here. Then it might work
The moral of the story
First find out why things are as they are. Then you'll understand what will keep them that way. That way you'll know who to persuade and what you need to use to persuade.
If you don't do this first, then you'll keep being surprised that organisations reject the obviously sane, rational, more effective and, even, more efficient solution, in favour of how they do it.

Peter Brooks
Education
- University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, BSc. 1979
- Major Subjects; Maths & Physics
Industry Qualifications
- ITIL V2 Manager’s Certificate in IT Service Management
- ITIL V3 ITIL Expert Certification
- ISO20000 Consultant’s Certificate Management
- Fellow in Service Management (FSM)® (prISM)
- Certified ISEB instructor for ITIL Foundations + Service Manager courses
- FISM - Fellow of the Institute of IT Service Management
- Marketing and Business Development Director itSMF International
- Marketing Director itSMF South Africa
- Member of itSMF South Africa Western Cape
Consulting Delivery
- Governance
- Policy Consulting - start up organisation
- Service Governance
- Business Analysis
- OpenView Network and System Management; design and implementation.
- Secure web implementation.
- HP Service Desk implementation.
- Application, System, and Network Consolidation.
- Business Disaster Recovery process consulting, implementation and testing.
- ITIL process management (practical consulting delivery):
Service Portfolio | Service Strategy | Service Desk |
Incident | Problem | Configuration |
Change | Release | Capacity |
Financial | Availability | Service level |
Specialties and interests
Specialties | |
---|---|
ASM | Adaptive Service Model |
Service Governance | Business Analysis |
CSF | Capacity |
Consulting | Demand |
FISM | ITSM |
Governance | HP OpenView |
ISO20000 | ITIL |
KPI | Metric Design and Implementation |
Metrics | Open Source |
Policy | Requirements |
SANS15000 | Security |
Service Desk | Teaching |
Training | Service Management |
Interests | |
Dialetheism | :Service governance |
Physics | :Philosophy |
Psychiatry | :Maths |
Ontology |
Travel
I have never been further | |||
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north | Helsinki 60°10′15″N 024°56′15″E | |
south | Dunedin 45°52′S 170°30′E | ||
west | Sausalito Coordinates: 37°51′33″N 122°29′07″W ] | ||
east | Rotorua 38°08′16″S 176°15′05″E | ||
... and higher than ![]() |
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... and ![]() |
Publications
Adopting Service Governance |
Collaborative Consulting |
---|---|
ISBN: 978-0113314652 | ISBN: 978-0113313914 |
Webinar: Adopting Service Governance: Governing portfolio value for sound corporate citizenship | Review in International Best Practice |
Issues in corporate governance and service governance as a solution | |
AXELOS interview with Peter Brooks | |
Service Governance in the Cloud |
Publications
Adopting Service Governance - Governing portfolio value for sound corporate citizenship - AXELOS 2015 ISBN: 978-0113314652 |
Collaborative Consulting – TSO 2013 ISBN: 978-0113313914 | |
Review - Ivor Macfarlane | |
An Integrated Requirements Process - Governing Cost & Risk in Business Analysis - itSMFsa 2013 ISBN: 978-1490489162 | |
Review - David Lowe | |
Review - Karen Ferris | |
Metrics for Service Management: Designing for ITIL – VHP 2012 ISBN-13: 978-9087536480 |
Metrics for IT Service Management – VHP 2006 ISBN-13: 978-9077212691
Definition of Service Governance
Service Governance describes the means of achieving effective corporate and portfolio governance, within the ‘comply or explain’ framework, by designing the service portfolio as the overarching management system that monitors & controls corporate financial performance & value delivery.
From '''Adopting Service Governance''' http://service-governance.org/index.php?title=Category:Best_Practice Service Governance - Best Practice