The Prague Principles p. 1

Publikováno: 24. 4. 2023

Fail fast but gracefully in IT service management

A summary of the Prague Dialogue, January 2023

part 1. Introduction

The Prague Principles is a set of guidelines that can be adopted to help govern behavior in IT service management (ITSM). It started with an idea to conduct a post-conference workshop at the seventeenth itSMF Czech Republic annual conference in January 2023. The intent was that the participants would summarize what they had learnt from the conference, share their practical concerns at work, and explore how conference learnings could be applied to make improvements. The assumption was that whatever the group came up with, might also be useful for other professionals. Particularly because they represented ITSM in real life, not as projected by many so-called experts who often live in the unevenly distributed future[1].

The half-day workshop was called the Prague Dialogue. “Dialogue” was chosen to emphasize the bi-directional nature of the workshop. Although it was facilitated by two conference speakers, it was not their intent to impose their opinions on the group but rather to help discover what the participants thought, felt, and wanted.

The workshop was conducted with eight participants from six organizations in four sectors: IT, Finance, Logistics, and Engineering. They contributed as individuals, not on behalf of their employers. The Prague Principles document was drafted by the facilitators and improved by the participants. Closing keynote speaker Paul Wilkinson added his expert commentary as additional considerations.

After the conference, conference attendee Michaela Ošmerová posted her thoughts on the conference on LinkedIn[2]. She kindly agreed to us using her comments as additional input. We incorporated the following principles:

  • Realize that frameworks and standards are just tools to do a business, not the main goal.
  • Measure the most important things and understand how to use the data. For example, measure the value that training provides to the organization.
  • Simplify ‘transformations’ by taking one small step at a time. For example, remove one small unused function from an application a month.

[1] “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed”. William Gibson, The Economist, December 4, 2003.

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7024770570474946561-m3Lq

continue to p. 2



Autor:: Martin Kubeš