The main emotional drivers of organizations are fear and hope. Fear is kept under control through the management of risk. Hope is embodied and managed via a shared vision.☭ The vast majority of the management activities (as opposed to the manufacturing or service delivery activities) in any organization are derived from this dyad, although fear and hope are frequently more implicit than explicit underpinners of management strategies. [Read more…] about …in a vision once I saw
risk
The diversity of risk management
In another article, I spoke of vision management and risk management as the two pillars upon which organizations reside. As I have already spoken about vision, let’s take a minute to examine risk in the context of service management in a little more detail. [Read more…] about The diversity of risk management
What is a problem?
Although troubleshooting and the definitive elimination of faults has a long history, the particular innovation of ITIL® 2 was to recommend treating problems and incidents as two separate entities, each with its own life-cycle. This advice had led to a series of confusions and ambiguities, many of which have still not been resolved among the practitioners of service management and the creators of tools to support service management. [Read more…] about What is a problem?
The Automation of Risk Assessment
Pre-industrial risk assessment
Risk assessment remains a highly manual activity in all organizations I have ever seen. Some organizations have a structured approach to assessing, and then managing, risk. Others work largely with a seat of the pants approach. But in both cases, the activity of identifying risks and their magnitude and the creation and maintenance of a risk register is very frequently a work fashioned by hand, just as objects used to be crafted in the pre-industrial era. [Read more…] about The Automation of Risk Assessment
On the impacts and risks of changes
This text has grown out of an answer I provided in an on-line discussion group, posted on 16 November 2012. The issue I would like to address is the evident confusion in many minds between risk and impact. Often, you ask people for a list of risks and they provide, instead, a list of impacts, and vice versa. [Read more…] about On the impacts and risks of changes