The Prague Principles p. 3

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Publikováno: 24. 2. 2023

Fail fast but gracefully in IT service management

A summary of the Prague Dialogue, January 2023

part 3. Principles

The principles are listed in four groups:

• People
• Value
• Processes and change
• Tools.

3.1 People

Talk to real people

People in non-operational roles should talk with the people who actually do the work. This often referred to as Gemba, a Japanese word meaning “the actual place”. A fundamental part of Lean management philosophy is the Gemba walk – going to see the actual process, understand the work, ask questions to clarify their requirements, and learn.

Base decisions on the actual context

This is an extension of the principle “Talk to real people”. While decisions are partially based on imagining what could be, assessments of the present should be based on observations in the workplace. Be warned, however, that observations are always interpretations that are affected by our biases.

Best practices and guidelines are a good start, but tunnel-vision and a fixation on theory will make us lose our grasp on reality around us. Open your eyes and observe and study your environment at work.

“People often rely on guess work and ignore the context.” – Kaimar Karu

Know your stakeholders

Understand the other parties in the value network.

Communicate meaningful information

Make sure that information is relevant to the recipient. Avoid reports that are never read.

Again, this is about talking with the consumer of the information. What are their interests? Are they interested in what we’re trying to offer? Why? Why not? Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue. Communication, communication and even more communication.

Communicate effectively

Use techniques such as active listening, giving constructive feedback and learning from feedback.

“Without constructive feedback there is no transformation.” – Tereza Kretinska

Let people fail

Do not just fail fast but also fail safe: establish safeguards. Foster psychological safety so that people feel comfortable to exercise their professional judgment and take defensible risks in order to achieve organizational goals.

Don’t view failures as the end of an initiative. Everything is about continuous learning, not a one-time activity. This particularly applies to things like digital transformations such as ‘implementing’ ITIL, DevOps and Agile. A lot of people have a hard time grasping this and creating the environment for the people to actually fail and learn from the failures.

Dare to be vulnerable

Build relationships by showing vulnerability, for example by telling people about internal concerns. Assess how much transparency is appropriate and responsible. 

“Vulnerability is the cornerstone for courage building. Without vulnerability there is no innovation nor creativity.” – Tereza Kretinska

This is also related to the previous principle, let people fail.

Realize you are not alone

Oftentimes, other organizations suffer from the same issues that you experience. Be reassured that it is probably not your “fault”. Do not use this as an excuse, but as an invitation to explore what other organizations have done, and to use this as inspiration to discover what works for you.

Every company thinks that they are special, yet at the end of the day, the very similar problems occur. Best practices are best practices because they work for most of the companies if used correctly. It’s okay to try and experiment with what works for you, because if you don’t, you’ll never know what does and doesn’t work. You’re just paralyzed and not making progress. There is no evolution without movement. There is no growth without failure.

First seek to understand, then to be understood

This advice by Steven Covey is useful when trying to improve collaboration with other parties in the value chain. First show interest in what they do and the challenges they face. Then explain how their actions affect you.

Foster honesty

Foster an environment where people don’t fear for their position or reputation when sharing their opinions with their superiors. Admit your mistakes and show you are open to improve. Build trust.

Bossing people around, playing psychological games, and finger-pointing never got anyone anywhere.

Step out of your box

Engage with other organizational functions but speaking with them formally and informally. Visit where they work so that you gain a better understanding of who they are, what they do, and what concerns them. We often get trapped in our theories and stories about other people, which don’t reflect reality.

This is also related to some other principles, such as dare to be vulnerable. It is not only about climbing down from our ivory tower, but also about being brave and stepping out of the comfort zone. The manifests itself in different ways. For service management professionals, it might just be about talking to real people. For indecisive managers, it might just be about starting to take decisions. For the tech support worker who often works overtime due to lack of interest of their manager on how the workload is distributed in the team, it might just be to say enough is enough.

3.2 Value

Link everything to value

Understand how work contributes to the value of the IT products and services. This requires an understanding of how the work relates to products and services (lining all work items product aware), and how these are linked to business processes and business value streams that generate outcome. Measure the most important things and understand how to use the data. For example, measure the value that training provides to the organization.

Realize that value is subjective and we can only identify value in a dialogue with our potential service consumers.

The IT service should resolve a problem for the consumer and the benefits of using it should be clear to them. The delivery of the IT service should have value for the customer and it is important to understand the relationship between value and execution. If the execution of the service is great, the users will be satisfied, see the benefits and be more willing to pay.

• 

Show how we enable the business

Articulate the contribution of the IT function to business goals, in terms that business people understand. This extends the principle “Link everything to value”.

This, again, requires a solid portfolio of IT products and services linked to the business model (of how IT and business services interact). The value of these products and services should be reviewed regularly to understand whether they are useful for the service consumers.

3.3 Process and change

Stop doing stupid things

It is easier to identify stupid things and stop doing them, than to think of new things to do. Simplify ‘transformations’ by taking one small step at a time. For example, remove one small unused function from an application a month.

Engage actively with people in the various IT value streams to understand how they work and create value for and with the customer. This can be done by, for example, value stream mapping. 

There is another perspective. A lot of the times, identifying stupid things is hard. Stupid might be a very subjective word at the end of the day. We often not only struggle with this for our customers, but internally as well. Some things that might seem stupid from an internal perspective, are not stupid for the customers, and vice versa. Dialogue is needed to identify what „stupid“ actually means. It is difficult are rare to admit, especially to ourself,  „You know what, you’re right; this actually is a stupid idea.“ Many factors could determine why this does not happen more often. It might be someone’s ego. It might also be the inability to explain clearly why something is stupid. Let alone proposing a better solution, which is even rarer.

Learn from mistakes and failures

Make a point of reflecting on mistakes and failures and thinking about whether and how they could have been prevented.

Change the system and people will follow

Instead of trying to change people directly, change their environment so that they adapt to the new circumstances.

This needs to be supported by management and when management is unable to decide on radical decisions like changing the system, it’s pretty rough. Of course, non-managers need to be able to explain why the system needs to change in the first place, but there is a problem when the management doesn’t want to make big decisions, which is often the case.

“Forget transformations: focus on adaptability and resilience.” – Kaimar Karu

3.4 Tools

Look under corporate radar (initially “Realize Excel”)

Realize that organizations are full of permanent workarounds such as spreadsheets that were initially intended as a temporary solution to a problem. These often escape corporate radar and are poorly managed.

Use what you have

Before investing in new tools, investigate whether existing tools can be used.

Use frameworks as tools

Realize that frameworks and standards are just tools to do a business, not the main goal.

You do not need to adopt the whole framework but can adopt and adapt the parts that are valuable for your practices.

get back to p. 2 or continue to p. 4

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Autor:: Zuzana Kopuncová