Take your life back.: ITSM Weekly the Podcast (Week32) - Guest Speaker: Philip Neufeld & Matt Neigh

Service Management - a term that continues to allude people who are in the service industry. I'm not talking just IT, all be it probably we are the worst to embrace this. I'm talking about those who just don't get that if you are not fabricating a tangible (electronic or physical) product or good, then you are performing services for your job. Even if you make a product, say diamond plated dental instruments (something you would be surprised I have learned a lot about), you still are performing services. Turning shanks, dipping instruments, packaging, shipping, are all series of actions. So what's my point?

Service Management is not process. Processes are not Service Management. Yet both involve the same series of actions. You must perform a series of actions in a quality controlled form to produce a result that is consistent, expected, and predictable. This is where PROCESS kicks in. Processes help you to know which actions to take, when to take them, and what to track about it so you can measure, tune and report on those steps. SERVICE MANAGEMENT thus is all about the attitude, reflection, interaction, communication, and personalization that surrounds the people performing those actions. Thus a simple way to think about it in my mind is a PROCESS gets the job done, SERVICE MANAGEMENT satisfies a the requester. Thus if you spend too much time focusing on either one of these without the other, you will achieve an imbalance of not getting the job done and being a talking head to a requester, or being efficient but a royal pain to work with. Remember if it's just an action, a robot can do that. Humans desire a human element, and you must bring that human element to the table when perform actions for other humans.

Enjoy listening to this weeks episode where we speak with Special Guest: Philip Neufeld Director of Service Management, IT Services State of California and Matt Neigh from our Higher Education sponsor Cherwell Software

Thanks again to our sponsor Cherwell Software Higher Education and ITSM Software