Recently I co-hosted a webinar on value streams and end to end tool chains with Troy DuMoulin from Pink Elephant. Pink is an independent consultancy that is considered the premier ITIL shop for advice, training and certifications. They’re smart. Really smart. Now you probably know that we sell and support Atlassian especially Atlassian Jira Service Desk in this space. But a funny thing happened – ITIL v4! So Troy and I got talking, and I realized the implications.
Both Troy and I believe that best of breed point solutions are being selected at the expense of flow. We feel it’s just like the famous “T” model for HR, (a strong specialist with many other solid skills), rather than 10 separate apps (worse still if they are isolated on different clouds). It’s time to reconsider the issue from the vantage of the whole end-to-end story. Don’t get me wrong – Gartner’s quadrants offer choices but it’s the predilection to pick the best scoring answer that can lead to difficulties. Centers of excellence, in an odd way, can compound this problem too. If a center of excellence stays focused on its silo, building best practices and standalone tools you can just end up with harder borders across the value chain.
So if gluing all the pieces together is becoming a nightmare – this is a sure sign you have a bag of great apps that aren’t designed for flow. It’s worse still if no one is thinking about this at all.
Do you agree? No – ?
Take the challenge.
- How many integration points exist between your service desk and your development team? How do problems identified by customers end up in backlog?
- Are your teams and functions all working together in best of breed chat rooms like Slack or are you constrained by your decision to select a traditional desk top vendor? Do you have channels called “get the product out the door”?
- How many metrics are you measuring from idea to deployment?
- Is your actual tool chain so complicated you need a a complexity map to understand it? Does anyone in your organization understand it?
- Do you use documents rather than completely open wiki pages for shared collaboration?
Lets take a simple case study. I typically see a PPM (Portfolio and Project Management System) that looks like this in the table below. Now before you accuse me of bias – you’re right. But my point is simple – if you let every department select their own tools – what you will get is a high performing set of silos.
If a client said to me ; “Miles – we have decided to go with the following set of tools because of their ability to communicate with each other” – I would be happier for them than if they told me it’s Service Now because they have this one fairly obscure but useful use-case that Jira Service Desk doesn’t do, oh and yes, Gartner says this is the best of breed”.
|
Current |
Could be |
| A form-based intake process for projects | Jira Service Desk |
| Lots of Powerpoint | Confluence page |
| MS Project | Jira plus Big Picture |
| Requirements – Word and Sharepoint | Confluence Wiki |
| Developers – Jira | Good choice! |
| Portfolio Management Clarity or Planview | Jira and Apps like Budgets |
| Timesheets standalone feeding to ERP | Jira Tempo Timesheets |
Further Down the tool chain:
| Current | Could Be |
| Github/lab for Code Management | Atlassian Bitbucket |
| Jenkins for build/deployment | Atlassian Bamboo |
| Testing ALM | Any of three Jira Apps |
Really?
No wonder flow is the last thing on anyone’s minds in reality. In the above at various times – Gartner will have recognized the point solutions as top performers. Yet so many organizations struggle under the cost, load, integration demands and frankly, lack of flow.
So sign up for the webinar with Troy and myself. Troy speaks passionately about this set of disconnects and more; especially the need for end to end integration. If you don’t believe me – believe him! And if you want to understand how this integration is meant to work in reality, drop me a line.