text:
Rob England
Thursday, December 04, 2014
Here is a sample itinerary I came up with for PINK15
With over 160 sessions to choose from, there's something for everyone at the Pink Elephant 2015 International ITSM Conference. If you're not sure which sessions to attend, Pink provide a number of sample itineraries. Some are customized to specific roles and focus areas, and some are chosen by individuals. Never short of an opinion, here are my choices.
It is always hard to decide with so many concurrent streams: an embarrassment of riches! And of course it is dependent on where you are on your ITSM journey right now, so I thought it would be useful to publish a rationale behind the choices. I hope you will find this an interesting discussion to help you in making your decisions.
The challenge with a content-rich conference like the Pink Elephant IT Service Management Conference is that there will always be conflicts: multiple options you really want to see which are on at the same time. One strategy is to bring several workmates and ensure you get coverage between you, then allocate a day when you get back for mutual sharing. For the rest of us, we just have to make the hard calls. (You can download the presentations and recordings of those you miss. We all have the best intentions of going over these later - you just might achieve it for the really important ones you missed!). Some will resonate with you because of the particular problems your organisation is wrestling with at the moment. If so, go. Bringing back tangible actionable value is one way to ensure you get to go to the conference again next year.
For the timeslots where a session doesn't fit your personal ITSM journey right now, these are my top choices in each time-slot, and what tough choices they were.
Sunday, February 15, 2015
4:00pm – 5:00pm: Conference Optimizers
Last year I picked Troy DuMoulin on cementing behavioural change, which is is what ITSM is all about. This year I'm picking Brian Newcomb discussing What IT Managers Need To Know About Lean Management, if you don't know what Lean is about. The Lean concepts are proving themselves over and over in improving IT. The Lean principles are important for the standardised "half" of your activities. Manufacturing-derived optimisation techniques work better for repeatable standardised transactions. The other side of IT is all the variable unpredictable stuff we deal with, where such techniques are less valuable. I explore this dichotomy more in Standard+Case. I presented a workshop on it at PINK14, and I wrote a book on it. I discussed it on Pink's Practitioner Radio episode 44.
Monday, February 16, 2015
7:15am – 8:15am: Breakfast Clubs
ITIL will dominate the ITSM landscape for some time to come, but COBIT is more important and more valuable. It is my primary reference framework, as I explained in my Showdown Of The Methodologies at PINK12. Everyone in IT needs to be familiar with COBIT. I've been picking it as a sleeper about to take off… but I've been picking it for years now. I still think it is going to be big. So go to Jennifer Wels' session What IT Managers Need To Know About COBIT if you aren't familiar with COBIT.
...unless you are about to change to a new ITSM tool, in which case please go hear David Mainville's wise words in Seven Steps To A Successful ITSM Tool Implementation. As an ex-vendor I can vouch for the fact that the tools mostly work and the vast majority of failures are due to the implementation (with plenty of blame to go around both customers and suppliers)
8:30am – 10:10am:
Don't miss the keynotes. I've missed a few over the years and always regretted it.
10:30am – 11:30am:
Now it gets even harder, with so many "coal face" sessions from real practitioners to choose from.
Two Kiwi's in the first session! Rebecca Wilson is a dazzling speaker and Inland Revenue are doing some interesting stuff (a client of mine). But I'd have to go for Alison Holt talking about Governance – Las Vegas Style: IT governance is one of the biggest challenges facing IT now and into the future. That's why we made it the topic of our second Pink Think Tank at PINK15. It makes up Track 9 of the Schedule.
11:30am – 3:35pm: Exhibition Showcase Open
Come and see me in the Exhibit Hall. I have a sofa – a treat after hours walking and standing on those concrete floors.
11:30am – 2:00pm: Lunch/Concurrent Breakout Sessions
You can eat when you get home. If you are American, you probably eat too much anyway (said the guy carrying 15 extra kilos). Go to the sessions.
11:45am – 12:45pm:
Arrggh I really can't pick from all four sessions. You can't seriously consider having lunch.
Id go for Debbie Lew, because IT Governance is the most important thing right now: COBIT 5 – Can It Really Help Accelerate Your IT Governance?
...or any of the others.
1:00pm – 2:00pm:
Hopefully we will come up with something really interesting when some of the best minds in ITSM (and me) get together in that Pink Think Tank before the conference. We have set ourselves the objective of delivering actionable advice on dealing with IT Governance. We'll be presenting the results in the Pink Think Tank Summary session.
But I have to recommend you go to Kathy Jo Miller Taylor, on Enterprise Change Management In An Agile, Fast Moving World. I was at the DevOps Enterprise conference in San Francisco in August and I can tell you that this stuff is the future and Nordstrom are surfing the wave.
This is really important, so grab a bite of lunch some other time.
2:15pm – 3:15pm:
I watched David Ratcliffe developing The 5 Most Valuable Leadership Characteristics For IT Leaders and I really want to go. And I've always wanted to hear Ken Gonzalez, who's a great writer. If you fancy yourself as an "ITSM philosopher", consider the deeply thoughtful Malcolm Ryder. Elaine Lauritzen won Pink's ITIL Practitioner of the Year a few years ago. But in another tough call, its Dr George Westerman's The Real Business Of IT: How CIOs Create & Communicate Value.
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
7:15am – 8:15am: Breakfast Clubs
If you have any interest in IT leadership, go to IT Leadership Roundtable Discussions – How To Successfully Lead Change. Or Kurt Weisler is always energising - just the thing to start the day.
8:30am – 10:00am:
Keep going to the keynotes!
10:30am – 11:30am:
Dana Swanstrom's UnITy team won Pink's Project of the Year award last year. I saw Dean Meyer at PinkForum (a must-attend event for anyone in IT leadership or aspiring to it) speaking on ITIL Financials: Component Processes & Tools, & How They Fit Together and I learned some great concepts.
If you are a manager then it has to be Managing Oneself with David Ratcliffe.
I'll have already spent all Saturday at the Think Tank debating IT Governance – Myths Vs. Reality with Troy DuMoulin, but you should really go to this one (did I mention IT Governance is the most important thing right now?).
11:45am – 12:45pm:
Of course you will go to Pink Think Tank Power Session if you have questions about the findings from the Think Tank, but I'd be going to Why Outsourced Service Desks Fail: The Scorecard Is Green But The Service Is Awful! just because so many of my clients have that problem.
1:00pm – 2:00pm:
Get along to Greasing The Organizational Skids Through Governance & Management unless like me you are a philosopher of ITSM: I'll be at Christian Nissen's Taking Service Forward – The Adaptive Service Model, an important development in ITSM thinking.
2:15pm – 3:15pm:
Cindy Trudeau's Are Your CSI Initiatives In Sync With Your Business Strategic Initiatives? is right in my interest zone. Building Manufacturing Methods Into ITSM is another pointer to the future. I will be presenting Supplier Engagement Models: A Better, Faster & Stronger Connection which is a cool new idea of mine, but if I were you I'd go to Redefining Operational Excellence: New Strategies For Maximizing Performance & Profits Across The Organization.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
7:15am – 8:15am: Breakfast Clubs
If you aren't familiar with Leading Change: Kotter's 8-Step Model then everyone should have that in their kitbag. Else go to How To Use Business Simulations To Create REAL Customer-Focused Behavior with Paul Wilkinson - simulations are a really useful tool.
10:30am – 11:30am:
I'll be presenting What IT Governance Isn't but if you went to earlier Governance sessions I'm thinking most of you will know this, so go to Jack Probst's The CIO As Service Broker, Crippled Without Supplier Management. Supplier management and the complex value stream was the topic of last year's Think Tank which tells you we thought it was a very important issue.
1:00pm – 3:45pm: Half–Day Workshops
Personally I'd go to The ITSM Leadership MasterClass from David Ratcliffe, who ought to know. Unless you have yet to be sold on COBIT in which case come to my Why COBIT Is "Must-Have" Knowledge For IT Leaders
Remember: go to what resonates with your own reality right now. And have fun! See you there.
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Tuesday, September 02, 2014
Reflections on PinkForum14
Pink Elephant's Third Annual IT Service Management Leadership Forum ("PinkForum14") took place recently in Scottsdale, Arizona. I was there for my first time. This is not a review of the conference, it is a personal reflection on what I saw there.
Pink Elephant CEO Fatima Cabral
(and me)
When I'm helping with a conference I don't actually get to that many of the sessions. I'm often preparing a session, planning with Pinkers, or - best of all - talking to conference attendees. But I get a clear read of the vibe, of the attendee reaction. And in the case of the PinkForum, Pink Elephant are clearly onto something. It rocked.
The theme is leadership. This is not a CIO event: many of the attendees are CIOs, but a significant proportion are leaders in other roles, at all levels in the organisation. Some are there because they lead and some because they are building their leadership skills. For years now, David Ratcliffe, Pink President, has been calling out the importance of leadership to IT transformation. But there were few (no?) opportunities for studying and building that capability… until PinkForum.
PinkForum follows a similar pattern to Pink's annual ITSM conference in Las Vegas every February, in that there are inspirational keynotes interspersed with multiple concurrent streams of sessions from practitioners and Pinkers, but there the similarity ends. The atmosphere is lot more intimate and laid back than the buzz of Vegas. It's about an eighth the size, and held in a more secluded venue where folks stay around, so everyone gets to know each other more readily. It's collegial: it feels like a small exclusive college campus. With better food: the conference food was so good I stopped the chef when he was crossing one of the many courtyards of the venue, and complemented him.
As I said, I don't get to enough sessions at conferences. But I want to call out two presenters:
Stephen Wrenn, Global VP, Application Services, Johnson & Johnson. I reckon Steve Wrenn is the Jack Welch of IT: sharp, energetic, insightful, tough, pragmatic, wise. He hit us with an hour of down-to-earth common sense about the business of delivering quality applications. Steve isn't messing about: J&J have an IT budget of $6billion! Steve focused on quality: he's a SixSigma blackbelt if i recall correctly. My favourite quotes
"If you don't have time to do it right, where are you going to find time to do it over? "
but… "Don't be perfectionist: Microsoft have trained people to be used to a few defects"
I tweeted that when Steve Wrenn reads The Phoenix Project, he's going to think "heck we do most of this at J&J already". The Phoenix Project? It's a must-read book about new directions in IT. I reviewed it here (and provided an antidote to the Koolaid in the book). After you read that, you might like to also read Charles Araujo's Quantum Age of IT - after those two books you'll be well equipped for IT's future.
Malcolm Ryder, Principal, Archestra Research. Malcolm's session was the opposite of Steve's: laid-back, contemplative, cerebral, abstract. Malcolm took us through an excellent model of IT innovation. I especially found the description of the relationship between CIO and CTO helpful. For we philosophers of IT (Troy DuMoulin was there too) it was a real treat.
The other group who enjoyed the conference was the vendors. Because of the small numbers of attendees and vendors, we intermingle: the vendor stands are right there, in the midst of things. There was lots of interaction, to the benefit of all parties.
Then there's the venue. When I first saw the faux-Spanish-mission architecture, I thought "oh dear". The lines between reality and illusion blur in the USA: sometimes it feels like one big theme park. But the Montelucia Spa is just done so well that it works. And it is really pleasant, with three pools, multiple bars and eateries, big cool suites, low rise buildings, lots of fountains and shady courtyards, and a great view of Camelback Mountain.
And of course the Pinkers are a great bunch of people
So all in all it was an excellent conference. I'm fervently hoping I get the chance to go again. If you are keen to attend, here's an inside tip: the word is that Pink want to keep the event small, so rather than grow it they may run more events in other locations. Where do you think there is a demand for an ITSM Leadership Forum?
Finally, have you spotted PinkNORTH14? Pink Elephant are running a northern "regional" version of the ITSM conference for those who can't or don't want to get to Las Vegas. This is another excellent idea. I wonder if it will grow to the same size? Perhaps we'll see Pink16North and Pink16South?
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Thursday, April 24, 2014
An interview with the 2013 winners of Project of the Year: the EMC UnITy initiative
As many readers know, each year Pink Elephant presents a set of awards at their IT Service Management Conference in Las Vegas in February. The Project Of The Year award recognizes an organization that has demonstrated significant commitment to best practice frameworks including ITIL®, ISO, COBIT®, Lean IT, and Six Sigma. This year the 2013 Project Of The Year award went to EMC's "UnITy" ITSM implementation initiative. We talked to Dana Swanstrom, the UnITy Program Lead, about the project.
For those who weren't at the ceremony at PINK14, please tell us a little about your winning UnITy project.
EMC Corporation's IT organization (EMC IT) led a major initiative – dubbed UnITy – to deliver the service management foundation and capabilities needed to continually improve its services. The program took a culture entrenched in old technology and habits, and introduced it to a new way of doing business.
The UnITy program addressed four key points within EMC IT:
- Enhanced the customer experience by evolving IT's perspective from a technology-focus to a service-focus, allowing the customer experience to drive prioritization and responsiveness
- Enabled IT to operate as a business by optimizing processes and improving transparency through service metrics and better service quality
- Aligned IT's resources with customer expectations and improved capabilities such as self-service and the availability of better decision-making data
- Optimized IT support to eventually realize millions in annual savings by reducing the use of in-house production support and managed service providers, the decommissioning of redundant IT systems, and the use of self-service to reduce calls to the service desk
The program is uniting IT to enhance the customer experience and was a critical component of EMC IT's overall ITaaS transformational journey.
How did you drive the cultural change towards a service culture?
The UnITy program's transformation workstream drove culture change through a comprehensive plan that:
- Conducted workshops with IT leadership gain buy-in on problem definition and end state vision
- Collaborated with IT organizations to gain buy in on IT's core problems and solutions
- Educated thousands of users on the new platform and processes
- Communicated changes across IT and EMC
On the communications side, UnITy engaged in a multi-channel campaign to provide information in a number of accessible and understandable ways to EMC IT and the 60,000 EMC employees. Communication resources included:
- An interactive intranet site where IT could find information about the program and ask questions
- A regularly published email newsletter
- Routinely scheduled global town hall meetings
- A user engagement network that met weekly, championed the program, and provided feedback
- A series of videos that featured IT and program leaders delivering key messages
- Team members attended staff meetings of IT leaders to evangelize and educate the IT organization
Tell us more about your self-service capabilities.
A self-service portal was launched for EMC users to browse and order IT services, learn about solutions to common problems through self-help and knowledge articles, and request support for issues. Prior to launching the portal, 95 percent of customer interactions started with the IT Service Desk, but since the launch EMC IT is trending closer towards 20 percent via self-service. There is massive opportunity to drive more customer interaction to the portal, translating to lower cost and higher customer satisfaction.
What are you doing to expose your knowledge base to users?
We made it easy to request the creation of knowledge from incident forms and the UnITy service catalog. The general knowledge base (KB) is accessible to all of EMC IT users and contains all EMC IT knowledge articles.
We are working hand-in-hand with all our knowledge owners and the service desk to support an effort we're calling 'Shift to Left.' The idea is built around empowering our customers to help themselves and we've exposed knowledge articles to them through our self-help portal so they can find solutions to IT issues themselves. By doing so, we alleviate some of the pressure on the service desk to know it all.
Further, we will be building a capability which will allow our customers to request knowledge, thus adding to the KB goldmine. We also have support communities on internal social media sites, so we can crowd source solutions to common problems.
How are virtualization and cloud technologies impacting your IT service management?
Cloud and virtualization technologies not only drove EMC IT's transformation, but they also presented a challenge and opportunity for the program's efforts. From a business driver perspective, IT is competing with public cloud and platform offerings as our business looks to take advantage of their agility and lower costs. Therefore, EMC IT needed to put in place services with those same characteristics to be more competitive.
The on-demand nature of cloud and virtualization technologies presented a challenge and required the UnITy team to ensure IT's processes and platform were aligned with the real-time provisioning and orchestration technologies that are inherent. As a result, the process and platform needed to be tightly integrated with other technologies to ensure data quality.
These were challenges that in the end were turned into opportunities, allowing the UnITy program to become more efficient and drive more value into the service EMC IT is delivering.
[A personal area of interest for me:] To what extent are you able to standardize incident and request responses? Do you manage the non-standard stuff differently?
From an incident perspective, we are leveraging incident templates to standardize the way in which like incidents are handled. From a request perspective, we have established service requests to standardize the way in which our most common requests are handled. For incidents or requests that do not have established incident templates or service requests, the service desk agents are required to log tickets manually, using established configuration items to ensure the work gets assigned correctly. Moving forward, the program will look to standardize more requests.
Do you feel that ITIL-process-by-process is the ideal structure for approaching a transformation like this? You grouped incident/request/knowledge in one phase, then problem/change/config in another. Was this a natural division? Did work cross over between the phases?
A process-by-process roadmap is logical and worked well for EMC IT, but the roadmap and timing of the process roll out was of great discussion. Several factors influenced our approach. First, the risk associated with a few burning platforms and our need to decommission them helped drive our plan. More specifically Knowledge, Incident, and Request resided on the highest risk platform, while Change, SACM, and our CMDB were on a lower risk platform.
Another item we considered was the learning curve we faced as we moved to a new platform. We wanted to reach a certain level of sophistication before taking on the more complex and ever important CMDB. For those reasons, we first implemented Request Fulfillment, Incident Management and Knowledge and tackled Problem, Change and Configuration Management in the second phase.
What would you do differently if you did this again?
Taking on a project like UnITy is usually a once-in-a-career opportunity, so it's not very often that you can implement lessons learned, but we're doing that by taking our service management capabilities to other parts of the enterprise. So, what would we change? First, we'd make communications and education efforts more applicable to people's work by helping them understand how the new processes and platform will allow them to be more productive and enhance our customer experience. Second, we'd spend more energy improving data quality across the program. Lastly, we'd make it more fun for everyone. We had a blast making the humorous video for the Pink Elephant award ceremony and received a great deal of positive feedback within IT. We plan on using humor more to capture our audience's attention and help make our messages resonate.
What have been the consequences or impact of winning this award?
Winning the award recognizes the team's hard work and provides industry validation that the program's accomplishments are significant, which builds even more credibility for the UnITy program within EMC IT. We'll leverage the credibility and recognition to both market our initiatives to drive results and career opportunities within the program.
Lori Krikorian, Dana Swanstrom, and Sally Shane of EMC
What's next for your transformation initiatives?
We aren't done with our IT transformation. Phase III lies ahead where we plan to continue to improve the ITSM processes we've already instituted and introduce a few more processes. On top of adding more Standard Requests and Incidents, we'll be solving the employee on-boarding challenge, automating the process so that new EMC employees and contractors can hit the ground running.
We'll also add the Availability ITIL process, while enabling real-time integrations between our CMDB and Systems of Record to keep up with the speed of the cloud. We'll be to formalizing the Continual Service Improvement process and we're going to double down on service management education by enhancing it to include more specific use cases and examples of how it can be leveraged to improve EMC IT's services. We plan to update training on a yearly basis to keep up with challenges and industry trends. In addition, EMC IT is being asked to offer service management capabilities to other parts of the enterprise, like our product development labs.
So there you go: a fascinating and innovative initiative from EMC. Do you work for or know an organisation doing something equally exciting? Nominate them for the 2014 awards, to be presented next February at PINK15.
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Friday, January 17, 2014
Choosing my PINK14 Sample Itinerary
With over 160 sessions to choose from, there's something for everyone at the Pink Elephant 2014 International ITSM Conference. If you're not sure which sessions to attend, Pink provide a number of sample itineraries. Some are customized to specific roles and focus areas and some are chosen by individuals. My offering is here (pdf).
It was hard work making these choices, and some are dependent on where you are on your ITSM journey right now, so i thought it would be useful to publish a rationale behind the choices. I hope you will find this an interesting discussion to help you in making your decisions.
The challenge with a content-rich conference like the Pink Elephant IT Service Management Conference is that there will always be conflicts: multiple options you really want to see which are on at the same time. One strategy is to bring several workmates and ensure you get coverage between you, then allocate a day when you get back for mutual sharing. For most of us, we just have to make the hard calls. So these are my top choices in each time-slot, and what tough choices they were.
Sunday, February 16, 2014
4:00pm – 5:00pm: Conference Optimizers
Go hear Troy DuMoulin. Not only do I love Troy's mental models, but cementing behavioural change is what ITSM is all about. We've banged away at "IT as technology" for a decade, then "IT as processes" for a decade. Finally we have come to the understanding that everything we do to improve is about people, and specifically about changing behaviour (I prefer "changing behaviour" to the more common term "change culture". You can change the behaviours long before you can get the culture to shift.) I forget what year I presented He Tangata: IT Is The People at the Pink conference, I think 2010. Finally it is becoming commonly understood, and Troy's session will be foundational.
This means you will miss Jack Probst reviewing the book The Phoenix Project. Read the book and read my review of it … or go to the session repeated at breakfast on Wednesday morning.
Monday, February 17, 2014
7:15am – 8:15am: Breakfast Clubs
The Lean principles are important … for the standardised "half" of your activities. Manufacturing-derived optimisation techniques only work for repeatable standardised transactions. The other side of IT is all the variable unpredictable stuff we deal with, where such techniques are less valuable. I explore this dichotomy more in Standard+Case. I'm presenting a workshop on it at PINK14, and I wrote a book on it. I discussed it on Pink's Practitioner Radio episode 44.
But not as important as COBIT. ITIL will dominate the ITSM landscape for some time to come, but COBIT is more important and more valuable. It is my primary reference framework, as I explained in my Showdown Of The Methodologies at PINK12. Everyone in IT needs to be familiar with COBIT. I've been picking it as a sleeper about to take off… but I've been picking it for years now. I still think it is going to be big.
So go to Jennifer Wels' session if you aren't familiar with COBIT and go to the Lean session if you are.
Unless you are highly technical, in which case go to the SDDC session. This is one of the pillars of DevOps and DevOps is going to rock our world (though not as soon nor as thoroughly as pundits and The Phoenix Project would have you believe).
8:30am – 9:00am:
Don't miss the keynotes. I've missed a few over the years and always regretted it.
10:30am – 11:30am:
Now it gets even harder, with so many "coal face" sessions from real practitioners to choose from. Some will resonate with you because of the particular problems your organisation is wrestling with right now. If so, go. Bringing back tangible actionable value is one way to ensure you get to go to the conference again next year.
The generational issues discussed by George Spalding are important. As I said already, IT is about people. You can't shy away from the "wetware" issues. I know I struggle with coming to grips with the new generations.
And Agile is another of those fundamental techniques like Lean that can be applied to ITSM to great effect. I've used it myself, e.g. in my Tipu public-domain CSI method which I presented some years ago at this conference. I'm a vocal critic of Agile as a software development technique, so if you share my prejudices don't be put off. Agile introduces volatility, unpredictability and – frankly – looseness into software that gives me the willies in a production environment. There are only two states in software: working correctly, or catastrophically wrong. But people and process are different. Humans are adaptable and self-adjusting: we work around broken bits, we leap gaps, we correct mistakes. Agile techniques are far more acceptable for developing practices than they are for software.
But I'd have to go for James Finister talking about Service Integration ("SIAM") and Multi-Sourcing. Jim is of course a lot more evangelical than I am on this topic, but it is nevertheless one of the biggest challenges facing IT now and into the future. That's why we made it the topic of our inaugural Pink Think Tank at PINK14.
Track 9 – Pink Think Tank
IT Service Management is at a cross-roads. The pace of change of the IT sector is accelerating. We are moving into a brave new world where we lose control of most IT assets; data is hosted, systems are outsourced, users are empowered to self-provision. It is a generally held belief that in future, the role of ITSM will be to govern, integrate, manage, monitor and improve IT operated by external parties. With ITSM being called on to change and change quickly, Pink Elephant is proud to move this discussion forward by bringing together some of the world's leading ITSM thinkers to form the Pink Think Tank. The Pink Think Tank will gather prior to Pink14 to consider some of the toughest questions in ITSM. They will present their results to you at the Pink14 conference, as well as contributing their expertise with sessions of their own choice in a Luminary Stream.
Never before has there been such a gathering of ITSM minds to work together. Pink Elephant is proud to facilitate this contribution to the advancement of ITSM.
11:30am – 3:35pm: Exhibition Showcase Open
Come and see me in the Exhibit Hall. I have a sofa – a treat after hours walking and standing on those concrete floors.
11:30am – 2:00pm: Lunch/Concurrent Breakout Sessions
You can eat when you get home. If you are American, you probably eat too much anyway (said the guy carrying 15 extra kilos). Go to the sessions.
11:45am – 12:45pm:
I really like Pink Elephant's organisational maturity model which Jack Probst is presenting, though the part linking it to the ITSM work required at each level veers a bit close to "ITIL processes as units of work" which I disagree with.
But I'd pick Douglas Smith talking about The Human Factor as it sounds like actionable stuff I can apply now to behavioural change, and all new ideas are welcome right now.
1:00pm – 2:00pm:
If you have too many IT projects, and/or you can't meet the organisation's demand for IT services and changes fast enough, go to my session on Meet In The Middle: Slow IT & Fast IT. That will apply to all of you. Every year I come out with one Big Idea that I think is really, really important. This is it for Pink14.
2:15pm – 3:15pm:
Tough choice again. I've worked recently helping a government department think of service management beyond IT. That helps you show the value of IT and extract more ROI from ITSM investments. So Service Management At CERN – Not Just For IT Anymore is interesting.
But I'm going for Plan, Build, Operate – The MetLife Way. Because it combines discussion of applications-centric operations – close to DevOps concepts – and managing IT suppliers.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
7:15am – 8:15am: Breakfast Clubs
If you have any interest in IT leadership, go to IT Leadership Roundtable Discussions – How To Successfully Lead Change. If you have an interest in the ITIL body of knowledge go to The ITIL Roadmap: Driving ITIL Forward from AXELOS - the new owners of ITIL. Otherwise, Chris Dancy is always mind bending: It's Not Self-Service If It Actually Empowers People.
10:30am – 11:30am:
Arrrggg! For those involved in IT leadership, come to my session Raising IT: Don't Let IT Fall Victim To Bad Parenting. If you are coming to my workshop on Standard+Case, go see The Rebirth Of The IT Artist as important background. Otherwise I'd go to On Time, Every Time, Within Budget & With Zero Defects – That's The Nationwide Way for more glimpses of the future of ITSM.
11:45am – 12:45pm:
If you fancy yourself as an "ITSM philosopher", its Charles Betz hands down: Semantics Matter: How Mental Models Determine The Possible. And Gary Case is talking about those people and culture issues again with The Biggest Challenges Of Implementing Major Change & How To Overcome Them. But I'd go to Troy DuMoulin on Dev&Ops: A Tale Of Two Tribes Under One Flag because trying to find the common ground between DevOps and ITSM has been a particular interest of mine over the past year. I started the Kamu initiative to get people talking about it.
1:00pm – 2:00pm:
Hopefully we will come up with something really interesting when some of the best minds in ITSM (and me) get together in that Pink Think Tank before the conference. We have set ourselves the objective of delivering actionable advice on dealing with (multiple) service providers. We'll be presenting the results in the Pink Think Tank Summary session. But I would understand if you went to Karen Ferris on Balanced Diversity – A Portfolio Approach To Organizational Change. I consider this to be part of the future of ITSM: a framework for changing people.
2:15pm – 3:15pm:
If you aren't familiar with Kotter's 8-Step Model, go hear it from Gary Case. If you are in an IT leadership role, go to The Power Of The Pyramid In Leadership. Troy is looking at more cultural change issues. But I always want to hear David Cannon, one of the most respected thinkers in ITIL, so I'd go to Surviving The Business Apocalypse.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
7:15am – 8:15am: Breakfast Clubs
Another chance to hear about The Phoenix Project book, but I'd go to the IT Support & Service Desk Forum. After all these theories and high-performing practitioners, it's good to get back to coal-face service support now and then, back to the coalface. It keeps us grounded.
10:30am – 11:30am:
If you want to know more and ask questions about the output of the Pink Think Tank, come to our Power Session for a panel discussion. My pick isn't a pick: I can't choose between Rodrigo Flores whose aaS Is On The Line and Mark Smalley who suspects You're Seeing Someone Else, Aren't You?, both of whom are talking about a similar thing from different perspectives. Mark will be entertaining and challenging, and Rodrigo will be a voice from the dark side. You pick.
1:00pm – 3:45pm: Half–Day Workshops
Personally I'd go to The ITSM Leadership MasterClass from David Ratcliffe, who ought to know. Unless you run a team of responders (e.g. a service desk), in which case come to my workshop on Standard+Case to see service response in a whole new light.
Remember: go to what resonates with your own reality right now. And have fun! See you there.
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Applying ITIL, Lean, and Six Sigma to achieve your goals
At Pink13 in Las Vegas this past February, Martha Wenc, Process Development Manager at Jazz Aviation LP presented her four year ITSM journey in the session "Using Complementary Methodologies For Your ITSM Flight – A Jazz Aviation Success Story". Operating scheduled passenger services on behalf of Air Canada, Wenc's team was tasked with developing and strengthening the service management process within their Information & Communication Services Group. In her session, Wenc successfully demonstrated how drawing upon her experiences as a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, Myers-Briggs facilitator, and Lean Instructor kick-started the IT department's adoption of successful ITSM practices.
The audience loved it. The presentation won Case Study Of The Year, which recognises the individual with the highest overall rating for a case study presentation delivered at the conference.
So it seemed to me a good idea to find out more about it. I interviewed Martha recently.
Tell us about Jazz Aviation
Jazz Aviation is a regional airline which flies over 800 flights each day to over 80 destinations throughout North America – from Northern Canada as far south as Texas and spanning the breadth of North America from coast to coast. We operate a capacity purchase agreement with Air Canada to feed their network. Jazz provides service to and from many smaller communities in Canada and the United States under the brand name Air Canada Express. We also operate to larger centres at off-peak times as a complement to Air Canada's schedule.
The Capacity Purchase Agreement (CPA) with Air Canada is the core of our business. Air Canada purchases substantially all of Jazz's seat capacity based on predetermined rates. In reality, we are a contract carrier for Air Canada and operate our flights on their behalf. The CPA provides commercial flexibility and connecting network traffic to Air Canada, while significantly reducing Jazz's financial and business risks. We also operate additional charter services.
You have a diverse range of skills: Six Sigma, Myers-Briggs, Lean. Tell us about your IT journey
I was initially assigned to work with the IT department as a Black Belt in 2007. Within our Six Sigma team we had been encouraged to use whatever tool was appropriate to get the job done, whether it be an analytical tool from Six Sigma, Lean, or Meyers Briggs. I did not know anything about IT, however I had done some work with the IT Director on a Customer Satisfaction survey. There was some curiosity about ITIL amongst the group; so a small team was sent to an ITIL Foundations course in 2007. We returned from this training very excited about the possibilities and immediately started making changes to improve our Incident Management process – our first ITIL alignment project.
Aligning our processes with ITIL best practices became a key part of our corporate strategy for 2008 and it then became my full-time job. It helped a lot that we had Management support going into the training, and that Senior Managers supported our efforts to train all IT employees. Initially everyone was given a quick high-level overview and over the next few years a concerted effort was made to gradually send people to ITL training. By 2012 all of our IT employees had attended foundation-level training, approximately 60 employees. We also had a core team of individuals trained at higher levels. Training everyone was important to ensure everyone understands where we are headed with ITIL both to build engagement and to demonstrate corporate support for the initiative and changes which continue to come. We operate with a lean team of one employee focused on ITIL day-to-day (me) with a small group of others who are interested in making change – however the changes are applicable to everyone. It has been interesting to see the shift in focus within the ITIL community away from data and analytics to focusing on people and cultural change. It may be that change is more easily achieved in a smaller organisation like ours as we have the flexibility to be nimble and continue to push change at the pace that the organisation and the people are able to adapt.
Please tell us about what you achieved at Jazz, for those who weren't there for your presentation at Pink13
ITIL was sought out to address low employee satisfaction levels and because it fit well with the work our Six Sigma team was doing. From the very beginning our goal has been to improve customer satisfaction. Our customers are all Jazz employees, so we are focused on meeting employee needs. ITIL and Six Sigma are both very customer-focused in their approach but Six Sigma provides the analytical tools to be able to measure progress. Our approach has been to focus on making improvements in whatever area is causing the greatest pain. Prior to focusing on ITIL, 36% of our employees were dissatisfied with the service they received from us. By 2010, after 3 years of effort, we were able to decrease this to 18%. At the same time, the number of Very dissatisfied employees dropped by more than half and the number who reported being Very Satisfied increased from 9 to 17%. I look forward to another survey to validate that our trend is still on track.
It makes a change to hear a case study of somebody using a diverse range of complementary methodologies to approach the change in people and practices which is an ITSM improvement. Explain for listeners how they work together to produce a result
Six Sigma is an important part of what I do, I think of ITIL as providing the goals and Six Sigma as a toolkit which provides the means to get there. ITIL lays out a direction for improvement although there may not always be a clear path to follow to get there. We tend to run multiple projects simultaneously and use the tools which relate to the goal—Six Sigma for reducing errors, Lean for waste reduction, Meyers Briggs for understanding team or change management issues caused by different personality types. Six Sigma is great when you have a clear goal to measure and develop a baseline for long-term improvement, however Lean can be faster and more engaging for a team.
Is it essential to bring in such formalised methodologies or skillsets to facilitate change?
I don't believe so, the key point is to focus on our goals and discuss the process with the people who are closest to it, while keeping the customer in mind. We do a lot of Voice of the Customer work, to ensure that our goals remain aligned with the customer's needs.
How was it winning the Case Study Award at Pink13?
It was a shock! Pink brings together such a vast range of people who share an impressive knowledge and range of experience related to Service Management. It is really amazing to be recognised amongst such a brilliant and accomplished group.
What has happened since winning?
Back to work! The Pink conference is a great rejuvenator that provides us with fresh ideas for where to improve next. We are always viewing the conference through the lens of whatever is on our plate for the coming year. This year is project and alignment focused, so for me, that was top of mind. We do meet afterward to compare notes and ensure that the good ideas are not lost, some are acted upon immediately while others will be incorporated into next year's plan.
What is your current or next initiative? What are you working on?
We are currently working on a program to improve our project lifecycle flow by combining a variety of methodologies that we use at Jazz. We are calling it Idea to Operate as it follows the lifecycle of an idea from the conceptual stage all the way through to being used within the operational environment. The Idea to Operate program merges the various internal processes that we have in place at Jazz to ensure that new initiatives handled consistently. It also helps us to move service management beyond IT as it is a valuable discipline throughout the organisation. This way, we can route all corporate projects through a consistent process, pull in the appropriate talent and the right time, and have cross-disciplinary teams of IT Managers, Project Managers, Continuous Improvement Specialists, Finance, Procurement… everyone speaking the same language and functioning with the same flow. The goal is to improve our project success rate.
Congratulations to Martha Wenc, and to Jazz Aviation, for the recognition of their achievements so far!
Martha will be back at Pink14 to present "Cleared For Take-Off – How To Implement An ITIL-Centric Service Lifecycle Approach", so don't miss it!
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Monday, April 22, 2013
Final thoughts on Pink13
George Spalding, our ebullient Master of Ceremonies and one of the driving forces behind organising the whole event, gives us his parting thoughts on Pink13. He and the team are already hard at work on Pink14. Will I see you there?
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Pink13: another great ITSM Conference
Pink13 is done and dusted. All would agree it was a great conference ... again. The Pink Elephant team do it year after year. I'm looking forward to the next one - I'll be at Pink14 next year. See you there!!
Here is a retrospective I put together of Pink13 for those who missed it, or those who just want to reminisce for a moment.
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Looking back at the ITSM Extreme Makeover
Pink Elephant Principal Consultant Jack Probst was the Pink Elephant lead on the ITSM Extreme Makeover, a project we have blogged about before, where several vendors donates resources to the University of Texas Health Sciences Center to "make over" their IT practices.
- ITSM can contribute to the community
- ITSM Extreme Makeover – Have you been following?
- Get a Feel For the ITSM Extreme Makeover
- Jack writes about the 4Ps
- An interview with the UTHSCSA CIO, Jerry York.
Coming up to Pink13, and with almost a year gone since the project wrapped up, it is time to look back and reflect on what went down and what we can take away.
Here are some pictures from the Christmas party Jack referred to:
You can see Jack at Pink13 and ask him more about the ITSM Extreme Makeover.
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Astro Pinky!
Some of us get a lot more excited than we should about the latest Pink Elephant conference mascot. Me for example. Every year I wait with bated breath, and pester David Ratcliffe for hints. So here is he is for PINK13: Astro Pinky
Astro Pinky has his own Twitter account where you can follow all the news about this years conference, live, real-time, right through the conference. So this is an essential account for all you twitterati to follow. And of course, keep watching the hashtag #Pink13.
The 'astro-connection'? Why, one of the keynote speakers is Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson!
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Some ITSM Christmas Carols
To celebrate Christmas the ITSM way, here are some suggested carols and Christmas songs:
- O Come All Ye Faithful
An ITSM conference
- Silent Night
The peace that only a silent phone can bring
- Hark the Herald iPhones Sing
The opposite of Silent Night
See also It Came Upon The Midnight Clear
- O Come, O Come, a Manual
The last resort of technical support
- We Three Kings of Orient Are
HTC, Huawei and Samsung
- How much is that iPad in the window?
The joys of BYOD
- Root Cause the Red Faced Vendor
Blame the vendor, that's what they are for.
- While Shepherds Watched
The night shift operators
- Christmas is Coming
A real project milestone
- Go Tell It on the Mountain
Management reporting
- The Little Drummer Boy
How ITSM consultants feel sometimes
- Let It SNOW
The cries of one particular service desk vendor
- The 12 Days of Christmas
We already did that one
Happy Holidays everyone!
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Monday, October 22, 2012
Self-Empowered Leadership
One of the primary messages in recent times from David Ratcliffe, President of Pink Elephant, has been Seff-Empowered Leadership. He spoke about it at PINK12, at the Pink conferences in Mexico and Asia, at the ITSM Leadership Forum, and in his blog earlier this year.
The first ITSM Leadership Forum was an event run by Pink Elephant in Scottsdale, Arizona in August this year, and equally it is a community discussion, right now, online. The event and the discussions intersect on the session descriptions. Read that sessions page: it is structured as a set of key questions for ITSM leadership.
The theme of leadership can be expected to re-emerge just as strongly for PINK13, so I took an opportunity to talk to David about ITSM Leadership.
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Friday, September 28, 2012
Evolution in IT Management
IT Management doesn't stand still. If tracking the current directions in IT Management is part or all of your mission at PINK13, here are some sessions to attend.
Over the three or four decades of the IT sector, we have matured as an industry and a profession. We have had some step changes and some evolution.
Service Management was a very influential concept which took decades to take hold in IT. It brought exciting concepts from the service industries.
Quality management ideas like Deming, Six Sigma and Lean come from the manufacturing sector and also slowly took hold.
We've also hatched a few ideas of our own in the IT sector, such as Corporate Governance of IT (ISO/IEC 38500), Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and Knowledge Centered Support (KCS). The first of those - Governance - is having a huge influence on IT Management at the moment as we come to better understand the political and organisational requirements to realise value from IT
And of course we have developed our own bodies of knowledge such as ITIL and COBIT, which now become world leaders and offer value back to the other business sectors.
The other great area of growth in our sector has been our maturing of understanding of "People Process Technology". We started as a tech-obsessed industry sector, then ITSM led us to understand the importance of process as well. Finally - FINALLY! - in recent years we have grasped that IT is all about people. In this decade the people message is coming through strongly in many areas, e.g.:
- Karen Ferris wrote the seminal book Balanced Diversity which pretty much nailed the practice of cultural change in IT for me.
- David Ratcliffe, the Pink Prez, talks of Self-Empowered leadership.
- BYOD and social media aren't technical issues or process issues.
So Governance and People are the huge tectonic shifts in IT Management at the moment as we continue to grow as a sector. Look for a number of sessions on these topics at PINK13, including:
- Leadership: Helping Others To Succeed :- Bernardo Tirado, CEO and Founder, The Project Box, LLC, Six Sigma Black Belt
- ...in fact the whole of Track 1 – Leadership & The ABCs Of ITSM
- The LOE Index: A Quantitative Tool For Measuring The Individual Response To Organizational Change – An Overview :- Dr. Victoria M. Grady, PhD, Assistant Professorial Lecturer, Department of Organizational Science, Columbian School of Arts & Sciences, George Washington University
- Business & IT Alignment: What It Really Means :- Paul Wilkinson, Director, GamingWorksBV
- Tips For Cementing Organizational Change :- Troy DuMoulin, Vice President, Professional Services, Pink Elephant
- Align IT – For Free! :- Niel Nickolaisen, CIO, Western Governors University
- Linking Company Strategy To Portfolio Management :- Marc van der Heijden, Vice President Global IT – Competency Center Sales, Adidas-Group
- Organization Change & ITIL Service Improvement Initiatives: A Look At 3 Models :- Rae Garrett, Principal Consultant, Pink Elephant
- The Neuroscience Of Leading Change :- Samad Aidane, Founder, Guerrilla Project Management
- Using Myers-Briggs To Manage Your IT Project Team :- Bernardo Tirado, CEO and Founder, The Project Box, LLC, Six Sigma Black Belt
- ITSM Parenting: Raising Empowered & Self-Sufficient IT Staff :- Andy White, Principle Solutions Marketing, BMC Software
- Mavens, Connectors, Salesmen – What Every ITSM Leader Needs To Know About Them :- Jack Probst, Principal Consultant, Pink Elephant
- Navigating The Cultural Silos Of The IT Value Stream :- Troy DuMoulin, Vice President, Professional Services, Pink Elephant
- What IT Governance Isn't :- Rob England, The IT Skeptic
...and many more. These are presentation topics we would seldom have seen five years ago, related to People or Governance. In 2013 there are too many to list.
In addition to these really big shifts, there are some smaller "quakes' going on, lesser step changes in IT Management, such as
- The Service Management Office 2.0 :- Troy DuMoulin, Vice President, Professional Services, Pink Elephant
- ...and my own humble contribution to ITSM step-change, which I am really really excited about: Applying Adaptive Case Management To ITSM: The Standard+Case Approach
Please indulge me while I rant about that last one, as it is my own personal passion. Not many things get The IT Skeptic all fizzy and enthused, but this does. I think it is a really important change to the way we think about ITSM. Standard+Case is about applying a body of knowledge called Adaptive Case Management to ITSM, synthesising it with your existing process approach. Standard+Case (S+C) applies to anything that requires a human response: there's either a standard response or there isn't. If you only look at one new idea this year, look at this one. It is an ITSM game-changer.
If you want to keep tabs on the current evolution of IT, these are all sessions to attend at PINK13.
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Interviewing Brian Newcomb, Pink Elephant Practitioner of the Year
A year ago I interviewed Brian Newcomb, on behalf of Ohio State University who won the Pink Elephant ITIL Project of the Year last year. Now Brian's back in another interview, but this time because he personally won Pink Elephant ITIL Practitioner of the Year this year. Which is great, because we get a second snapshot of where OSU and Brian are at on their ITSM journey.
My favourite quote from the interview: "Fundamental questions, and when you ask them you get the crickets".
You can hear more about Brian's work at OSU at the 17th (SEVENTEENTH!) Annual ITSM Conference and Exhibition next year, where Brian is presenting on Balancing Continual Improvement At Ohio State University:
So, you've implemented Incident, Problem and Change management. OK, you're done! Right? Well, wait a minute…not so fast! IT Service Management initiatives are not about being "done" but about what's next? Not satisfied to rest on the laurels of their 2010 Project of the Year win, OSU embraced a Balanced Scorecard as a means to measure process performance, and maintain momentum to implement additional processes and drive continual improvement; not an easy task when you are one of the largest US universities with over 100,000 users. Join Brian, the 2011 Practitioner Of the Year as he shares practical and proven tips on how OSU maintains the passion to drive its ITSM initiative.
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Talking with Cathy Kirch about her award-winning ITSM work at AllState
Congratulations to Cathy Kirch of Allstate Insurance Company for winning Case Study of the Year at the 2011 Pink Elephant ITSM Conference. The award was for Cathy's presentation Application Management As Part Of The Overall Service Management Lifecycle: how Allstate Insurance tackled Application Management under the ITIL framework while avoiding the creation of redundant support silos and new processes to what are already in place on the Infrastructure side.
Since Cathy has won a couple of awards at the ITSM Conference now, I thought it was time we learned more about her and what she is up to:
What is your role at Allstate and background?
My role is as an internal consultant for Allstate Insurance with a focus on Information Technology Service Management (ITSM). My position is mapped to a job family called Service Manager. My key responsibilities currently include Service Transitions focusing on Release and Change Management integration and moving the process adoption and improvement forward. I am also the coordinator and subject matter expert for IT Service Management training. Along with my primary roles, I provide consulting services for the various leaders in our organizations, this is how I got involved with Application Management. Two years ago an organization was forming to support various applications. The leader reached out to me to ensure that they aligned with best practices. We conducted a workshop and were able to draw out the scope of their organization by aligning it to Application Management. Since then additional organizations have been created and align to do the support in a centralized way for many applications in our various business verticals.
My Background- I have 35 years experience in different areas of Information Technology and have served in almost every aspect defined in IT Service Management. My earlier years were spent in application development in areas of Claims Reserve systems, branch office accounting, and a Technology component inventory system. I did both development and systems design work in those years and then moved into Technical support providing support for transaction management, database design, implementation and support. Then, I began focusing on the Data Warehouse implementation to provide program and project management services bringing server, database and storage together with the warehouse analysts and developers.
In 2004, we formalized our approach to IT Service Management leveraging ITIL, CobiT and PMBOK. I have played various roles in this space and am currently titled an ITSM Consultant. Our roles in ITSM have evolved as the journey has moved forward and ITSM has become a way life in the technology area with a focus on how to support the broader Allstate Insurance Corporation.
For me personally, I am currently active in the industry in roles such as Chair for priSM America's; and president of itSMF Chicago LIG. I have also been a previous examiner for APMG. And, I was the Pink Elephant ITSM Practitioner of the year in 2007. I just recently was awarded the Case Study of the year in 2012, I will be joining Pink Elephant at the PINK ASIA Conference this summer.
What was the scope of Application Management? In particular, how much did you bridge that traditional divide between Solutions/Development and Operations/Production?
Application Management teams have evolved and been created as a result of applying efficiencies. This was not started as a form of a project or organizational direction which made this journey even better to watch! As I mentioned earlier, one group realized the tie to the ITIL Framework and leveraged what was written around Application Management. Being able to tie those concepts with the design and direction of the ITSM processes made it clear on how to construct the new organization.
Today the groups who are performing Application Management roles sit with the functional or application organization verticals. They have become the conduit to almost every touch point of IT Service Management with the exception of Release Management. The organizations followed the same path as ITSM implementation. For example, in the beginning, some focused on Incidents, then Change impact, then Problem Management followed that and now pretty much the entire lifecycle.
How good was ITIL as a reference for Application Management?
The ITIL reference was just that – a reference. There is a lot more that could be written in this space for startup, scope, activities, efficiency and approach to maturation. For us, we created a workshop with an external partner to walk the first group through the understanding of the general ITIL framework and understand what their goals and objectives were. After that the outputs from various ITSM processes were understood and how an Application Management area can provide value by being the one stop shop for the various applications that support our services. Finally, it was about expectation setting and managing everything from application mapping, environment design, operational readiness, disaster recovery, procurement, deployment and change evaluation.
How did you avoid having redundant Infrastructure and Application Management processes, policies and support?
At the beginning of the ITSM launch, one of our Sr. Vice Presidents had a sign in his office that said, "Enterprise spoken here" and that has been a cornerstone of delivery ever since. We have had to reinforce and ensure that the ITSM processes were built for both Infrastructure and Application. This was not an easy task as the two areas have been separated since the 80s. We have had to ensure everyone executes one process and does not build their own version so that we avoided redundant processes. Since the processes started in Infrastructure a keen eye had to be understood on how it impacted the Application areas. We always start by identifying roles, then the activities and lastly the tasks for a given process. From there it was our leaders on the Application Management side that realized the value of consolidating into an Application Management group to ensure proper support with clear accountability.
Tell us about the holistic across-the enterprise strategies for all Application Teams.
Our Application Management teams have formed their own council to synergize and ensure alignment for the applications they support and the overall enterprise view. With so much middleware today and integrated applications, even application management cannot work in a silo. The Application Management teams then live into the mandates and standards of ITSM processes but also keep an eye on the business needs and perceptions.
Are there any new developments since the conference, and where to from here with Application Management?
Each of our Application Management organizations have been aligned to have direct line of site to the business. This establishes accountability and creates a better partnership with the business. The division organization now owns both solutions /development as well as application management. This construct allows the application management organization a seat at the table and positions us to be more proactive with input in the Service Strategy and Design lifecycles. For example, during the Software Delivery Lifecycle SDLC phase, input is provided around operational readiness requirements which has the advantage of past lessons learned to be input to future success.
What is your next challenge?
I am not sure we have any real identified challenges in front of us. However, there will always be a positive challenge to keep everyone focused on the journey we have started. I am excited to share that there is work going on to bring Release and Change together as well as expand Change into more of a management process. Each step of the way we will continue the ITSM journey, looking for improvements based on metrics, business needs and enabling solutions in the most cost effective way possible. There is excitement throughout the organization as we embrace service management as a way of doing our business and cope with the natural challenges of organizational and human change. Stay tuned as we advance the organization and share our lessons learned as we move forward.
Cathy will be back at Pink13 with two sessions:
priSM – What Is It & Why You Should Care (as mentioned above, Cathy is the Chair of priSM America)
An ITSM Journey – 10 Years Later, where Cathy will profile her organization's Service Management journey, and how they have kept the momentum going into their 10th year and integrated the processes beyond Service Operation and Service Transition.
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Talking with Jerry York of UTHSCSA about the ITSM Extreme Makeover
Recently we took the opportunity to talk to Jerry York, the VP and CIO of the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio. The Health Sciences Center were the organization chosen for the ITSM Extreme Makeover. I'm assuming that most listeners to this interview will be familiar with the ITSM Extreme Makeover. Briefly, it was a collaboration between Pink Elephant, Hornbill, GamingWorks, LCS, HDI & TSO to do an extreme makeover in a very short period of time to help an organization improve their service management.
Embarrassingly, I never quite got to interview Jerry throughout the process, even though he was the guy on top of the whole thing, answerable for the results. Recently I moved to rectify this oversight, since by the time you read this Jerry will have retired (said I wistfully). Fortunately Jerry will still be part of our community now and then, nevertheless it was high time I interviewed him for this blog.
So here is a conversation with Jerry about the experience of ITSM Extreme Makeover, with some great insights into what it took and what the effects were.
Interview With Jerry York, UTHSC by Pink Elephant Inc.
Conferences • Rob England • Permalink


text:
Member Patriot Special
10%-25% adoption fee discount, depending upon pet
About HALO Animal Rescue
HALO Animal Rescue offers dog and cat adoptions to veterans in Phoenix through its partnership with Pets for Patriots, and will help them find their new best friends. The "no-kill" animal rescue is dedicated to rescuing, rehabilitating and finding new homes for homeless dogs and cats. HALO, which stands for Helping Animals Live On, found new homes for more than 7,000 animals in 2013.
As part of its commitment to reduce animal overpopulation and abandonment, HALO Animal Rescue works closely with the Maricopa County Animal Care & Control, which handles all veterinary services, including spay/neuter. In addition, the rescue educates the public on the importance of spay/neuter, and provides information on various no-/low-cost spay/neuter services.
HALO Animal Rescue welcomes monetary donations, as well as in-kind contributions of pet food, cat litter, pet collars, and other animal, kennel and office supplies; see their complete wish list for details. For a more hands on experience, become one of their valued volunteers.
Adoption Fees Include:
Current vaccinations
Microchip for permanent identification
Flea/tick treatment
Contact Info
- 2500 S. 27th Ave., Phoenix, Arizona 85009
- (602)971-9222
- www.halorescue.org
Hours of Operation
- Monday: 11am–5pm
- Tuesday: 11am–5pm
- Wednesday: Closed
- Thursday: 11am–7pm
- Friday: 11am–7pm
- Saturday: 11am–5pm
- Sunday: 11am–5pm

subset: commoncrawl


text: On Sat, 20 May 2000, Charles Mangin wrote: > i'm attempting to install the mac68k port of netbsd 1.4.2 onto my > 68030-based LCii, and have run into a scsi problem. all the > documentation tells me to switch from the generic kernel to the one > installed via kern_sbc.tgz in this situation > > however, there is no kern_sbc.tgz in the 1.4.2 distribution, only in > earlier versions. > > am i looking in the wrong place, or should i not attempt 1.4.2 at > all, and instead, use an earlier set of installation files? Please try <ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.4.2/mac68k/binary/kernel/netbsd.GENERICSBC.gz> Note that this kernel is gzipped, but not tarred. The Installer can't install it the same way it installs the sets, but you can boot from it directly, without unzipping, either by setting the Booter to boot from a MacOS file, or by using "cpin" in the Installer's minishell to copy it into the NetBSD filesystem.


text:
Atmospheric Sciences Professor
Teach university students about atmospheric sciences.
What does an Atmospheric Sciences Professor do?
There are many ways that professionals can study the atmosphere. For example, they may study its chemical makeup, its mathematical properties, or its changes over time. Most students specialize in one form of atmospheric studies, but before they can become specialists, they must first have a firm grounding in the fundamentals of the atmospheric sciences. These are the courses taught by Atmospheric Sciences Professors.
If you're an Atmospheric Sciences Professor, your students are probably new to the atmospheric sciences, so you do what you can to make the courses interesting and entertaining. Because you have many years of experience as a Teacher, you know just how to teach students difficult concepts, and you have many Earth jokes to sprinkle into your lectures.
Students must prove to you that they're absorbing what you're teaching, so you give them tests. You then grade these tests, and you provide each student with a final grade at the end of the course. Sometimes, you have an advanced student help you with these tasks, and you let that student teach a course every now and then so they can hone their teaching skills.
Between classes, you attend meetings for your department. If your department is adding new staff, for example, you may sit in on job interviews.
While you teach general courses, you may have a special passion for a particular aspect of the atmospheric sciences. You focus on this area in your own research, and you work to publish books and papers that describe your research and your results. Sometimes, you attend conferences with other Atmospheric Sciences Professors, and you may even be asked to speak before the attendees and describe your theories.


text:
Discussion in 'Green Room' started by muzikool, Jul 28, 2005.
Full Story
I was reading about this earlier at work, its just frickin creepy!
Now that is creepy. And yet perverted at the same time.
Now that's just enough time for the perverted horny geek.
If your player won't play it, change the extension to .mpeg. I had to change the extension to get around the board not letting mpeg through.
This video makes it no less disturbing. A promising future for androids, yes, but disturbing at the moment.
autoeroti....err, uhm animatronic
yeah that's it.
hah hah, jurassic park. heh heh, that dumb shiit attorney.
I'd like to see this thing with deep blue installed sitting at a chess tournament.
I'd put her in a wheel chair so she wouldn't have to walk and I'd program her a scripted dialogue to help feed the situation
I bet she''d fool people for more then ten minutes, she'd win the tournament too
The Japanese and their fetishes. I'm not surprised. lol. Nothing against Japanese ... some of my best friends were Japanese throughout high school when I went to an International School.
Yeah but do those 31 actuators move any of the good parts? BTW The hands look ugly.
This guy needs to hook up with these people:
Very freaky. Wonder if it can make a cup of tea?
I was reading some news website poll about what you would want a robot most for. "Housekeeping" ran away with 69% of the vote. I wonder how well it housekeeping would have done if they had included "tactile stimulation"...
or a ham sammich
I had a sammich in my head!
Sammich and tea... now we're talking.
saw it on mtv - very freaky indeed!
Yes saw it somewhere looks dodgy
I-Robot maybe


text:
I've deployed a couple major web projects recently, and one of the biggest pains has been cross-browser testing. Most developers, including me, use Chrome or Firefox for development. They're both very fast browsers with excellent development tools, and are on the leading edge of web standards support. But then there is always our special-needs friend, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and version 8 in particular. We've spent a hell of a lot of time trying to get some beautifully designed sites to play nicely with the abomination that is Internet Explorer 8.
After one of the larger sites went live, I had a chance to check out the Google Analytics data for the site and review the user agents hitting the site. I was curious if the effort we put in to making the site play nicely with Internet Explorer 8 was worth the effort. We also spent a lot of time creating a responsive design, so that was another set of clients I was curious about. I ended up being pretty surprised by the data.
This site is not a technology site, and your mileage may vary, but the visitor traffic is probably pretty representative of an average American adult population. I anticipated Internet Explorer to account for around 50% of the user agents. The actual number was much lower.
Internet Explorer effectively held the majority among the minorities. The really interesting one was Safari. If we combine the in-app and regular version, Safari was actually the winner. This probably comes from the fact 30% of the site traffic came from mobile sources.
Since Internet Explorer has a major problem with users clinging to outdated versions, I was also very interested to see the breakdown of versions in use:
On the bright side, a strong majority are on IE9, which can almost pass as a modern browser. But nearly 30% were still clinging to IE8, a horrible, abomination of a browser that Microsoft should still be embarrassed about. In spite of the "millions of copies" Microsoft has shipped of Windows 8, only a tiny percentage of the users were on IE10. In fact, IE10 only beat IE7 by one percent.
So here are some insights from these stats:
- The days of Internet Explorer owning the show are over. Test for it, but don't pander to it.
- IE10 doesn't matter (yet?). This is going to be a huge problem for Microsoft, but no one outside the wild-eyed cult of .NET developers gives a damn about IE10 right now. For today, test for IE9 and you're fine, unless you are specifically targeting some IE10 touch features.
- IE8 is the new IE6. The browser is an eon behind anything else out there and will be the bane of web developers for years to come. It, alone, is enough to drive someone to an iPad or Android tablet.
- You must embrace responsive design. From a pleasing-your-users standpoint, a responsive design that renders correctly on a phone or tablet is even more important than being IE8 friendly.


text:
ELEANOR HALL: Australian consumers and businesses are already dealing with higher prices for natural gas, but the bills are set to increase further.
Local wholesale gas prices are set to more than double by 2016 as the national gas market is opened up to the higher priced Asian market.
Now the Australian Industry Group is floating the idea of the Federal Government providing subsidies to manufacturers to compensate for the increase.
AIG Executive Director Innes Willox has been explaining the plan to Alison Caldwell.
INNES WILLOX: We're seeing the expectation that gas prices will almost triple in the years ahead. And that's going to put a significant dent in Australia's competitive advantage. It's going to increase costs for businesses, particularly those businesses that are reliant on gas as a feedstock. And it's going to be harder for them to do business here.
So there's a whole range of solutions that are possible to this problem which is caused both by price and supply and by environmental concerns and distrust between the many different players. And we need to find a solution to all of these problems, just not part of the problems, or else industry in the years ahead as we face this price hump, will find it very difficult to compete. And many will quite sadly and quite frankly, go out of business.
ALISON CALDWELL: Now one of the reasons why these prices will go up is because the Federal and State Governments basically decided to approve Queensland's three liquid natural gas export facilities which connect Australia to the global gas market. That's part of the problem, isn't it, that we'll have to pay overseas prices?
INNES WILLOX: Well it is part of the problem and there's nothing wrong with exporting our gas. Let's be upfront about that. There is nothing wrong with that. We support that in principle because it's a good export market for Australia.
The unintended consequence of that has been to push up the prices here in Australia. And it's Australian industry which has for a very long time had a competitive advantage when it comes to energy prices, now having to pay global prices for a resource that we own here in Australia.
So we get no advantage out of having the resource in Australia. And it's making it very tough for business to make projections around their growth and their investment needs going forward. If they don't have energy to make things, then industries will find it very difficult to stay in Australia. And that's the cold hard reality that we face.
ALISON CALDWELL: As I understand it, one of your suggestions is that maybe perhaps governments might have to pay handouts to manufacturers?
INNES WILLOX: This would be a very last resort and it's not something that we're advocating. Far from it. But if this issue is not resolved and there are a couple of different solutions around there, setting aside acreage is one suggestion that's been put forward for domestic use. The establishment of a national interest test to establish where our gas should go, local or domestic.
There are a couple of different options, there's use it or lose it provisions for gas producers who are sitting on fields at the moment. There's a whole range of issues that can be worked through.
The subsidy issue is the very last resort. But if this issue isn't resolved, government's - both state and federal - will find industry unfortunately not wanting to but having to come to them asking for temporary and targeted support to help them get through this price hump.
ALISON CALDWELL: Now as it is we have a Coalition Federal Government, all those states - Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland are all Coalition states - they are very, very reluctant to provide subsidies to anyone.
INNES WILLOX: And that's completely understandable. And nobody would want it to come to that, let's be clear about that. But unless things are done to improve both our gas supply and to take some price pressure off local business over the time ahead, to build relationships between communities so you have wide differences between some part of the agricultural community and industry over this, to build trust between those different groups and to get some balance into the debate, that's what we'll come to. That's what it will come to. We'll face some catastrophic consequences for Australian industry unless we resolve this issue.
ELEANOR HALL: That's the Chief Executive of the Australian Industry Group, Innes Willox. He was speaking to Alison Caldwell.
The full story...
East coast gas crunch sparks call for government subsidies
Alison Caldwell reported this story on Tuesday, October 22, 2013 12:42:00
ELEANOR HALL: Australian consumers and businesses are already dealing with higher prices for natural gas, but the bills are set to increase further.


text:
simple differentiation ! upma is not sticky and kichadi is sticky and semi solid. All veggies makes it special !
Rava or sooji – 1 cup {Roasted}
hot water – 4 cup
Onion – 1 no
tomato – 1 no
green peas – 100gm
Cashew – 4 nos
green chilly – 2 no
ginger – 1 tsp {grated}
carrot – 1 no
beans – 1 no
cabbage – 4 tbsp {finely chopped}
ghee – 1tbsp
salt – as required
mustard – 1 tsp
channa dal – 1 tsp
urad dal – 1 tsp
curry leaves – 6 to 7 leaves
oil – 2 tbsp
Heat the kadai and add the ghee once heat add the cashew and mustard once cracked add the ginger, green chilly, curry leaves and dal , once it changes it colour add the onion and tomato saute for a minute. then add rest of the veggies and saute for 5 minutes . Then add the roasted rava and required amt of salt and saute for 2 minutes.
now open the pan and mix well and add the 2 tbsp of oil and keep for 2 more minutes 🙂 now u can see the sooji or rava wont stick to the pan. time to serve !
Enjoy with tiffin sambhar or chutney Some times it wll well go with Pickle!.
- If the rava is not roasted , you have to roast it before you add 🙂 roast it in the ghee for 2 minutes. i got the roasted rava so did not do that.
- 1 cup rava need 4 cup hot water 🙂 so plan the water properly heating 4 cup water may reduce to 3 to 3 1/2 cup !
- not to compromise on ghee part 🙂 it gives the flavour.
- you can add any veggies like potato ,capsicum. !


text: Joseph Migliorese, WWII Coast Guard Vet., beloved husband of 58 years to Carmella "Millie", nee DePasquale; loving father of Joseph Jr. (Rita) Migliorese, Ronald (Carol) Migliorese and Linda (Charles) Colander; dearest grandfather of Brian (Donna), Michael (Heather) and Gina Migliorese; dear greatgrandfather of Gianna, Ava and Coby; devoted son of the late Carmelo and Concetta Migliorese. Visitation Monday 3 to 9 p.m. Funeral Tuesday 9:15 a.m. from Lawn Funeral Home, 7732 W. 159th St., Orland Park, to St. Elizabeth Seton Church. Mass 10 a.m. Entombment Queen of Heaven Cemetery. Member of S.O.S. Queen of the Universe Seniors, Tarkington Park Seniors, DESA of Joliet and the Oak Lawn V.F.W. Post #5220. Funeral info, 708-429-3200


text:
CSI: NY sets a new standard for grotesqueness on network TV: it doesn't offer the typical spate of just-off-camera-style gore, but prolonged shots of lingering explorations of mutilated, dead people - on a lab table, excavated from a mine, unfolded from a box, unwrapped from plastic, or fished from a river (to name but a few atrocities). All of this, with the forensics team hovering about the body (or bodies), noting detail after gruesome detail with blood-splattered intensity is what CSI: NY is all about.
It's about how things work. More specifically, how things work at the crime scene and in the lab. Effiencey is key. Little things matter. Specs of dust, split toenails, skin rashes, hair, paint chips, and whatever's left in the refrigerator. If they could bottle the air around a victim, they'd take it back to the lab for analysis. Everything matters, nothing is insignificant. If the process is what you dig, CSI:NY is a 17-hour payoff.
For this incarnation of the original CSI, Gary Sinise, as detective Mac Taylor, is the man in the middle. He holds down the fort, and he's darn good. He's quickly impressionable. You don't doubt he's not the best forensics detective. And I swear, every time he talks there's edge to the delivery. ("Want to see a show? Go see Rent," he says to officers amused by a decapitated corpse.) However, over the first six episodes, we were given very little for which identify him as a well-rounded character.
He has an underlying story, but if you missed the last few minutes of Episode 2, you'd have no idea what drives him to do what he does. You see, his wife died on September 11th in the World Trace Center. That's just about all we have to go by. Later we find out he an ex-Marine. He's searching for something&#Array; whatever. Anyway, the way it comes off is: let's take it for granted that Mac's personal life is the last thing he wants to thing about.
One of the things that gets me about this show, as it is with all of the CSI shows, is the cold, clinical efficiency with which the characters approach their jobs. It's heartless, because it has to be, and it's a coping mechanism. How else could anyone stand to be exposed to the gruesome things they see on a daily basis? But when a recently drowned girl, with bluish skin, lies on an examination table, the filmmakers have to go and enhance the queasiness of the scene, (as they often do in the series) by upping the sound effects when a tech removes a nail fragment from her mouth.
Surely these guys must, at some point in their career, get grossed out. I'll tell you, viewing CSI: NY requires a strong stomach. Just the thought of what water does to a body. Ugh! shake the thought.
Sinise's co-stars do a terrific job. Melina Kanakaredes, Eddie Cahill, Carmine Giovnazzo and Vanessa Ferlito - super-fine. Here's why. They're wonderful actors, but it's the casting that makes their chemistry effective. These guys are New Yorkers. So, what you get is that Brooklyn/Bronx attitude. It's pushy, "You gotta problem with that?" arrogance. And yet, even if they're arguing about nothing, you know they still respect each other. It's a New York thing, I guess.
Eddie Cahill, as detective Flack, takes the cake. He's all bad-ass-"You killed him! admit it!" When he says that, and you believe everything about his character. He doesn't take s***, he dishes it. He's Mac's man on the police side, and that's a good thing. Check out episode 17, The Fall. It's his character piece.
Mac's first assistant, Stella (Kanakaredes), has a darkness about her that makes her kind of interesting. I get feeling she's watching over Mac, making sure he's okay - that includes psychologically. That's what a great teammate does, they cover you when you need help, even when you didn't know you needed it. She's got the biaatch in her, too. That train hits the station in a couple episodes - among them Officer Blue and Til Death Do we Part - when she disagrees with Mac about his assessment of evidence.
Let me expound for a moment about my favorite episode, number 7, The Outside Man. To me, this one was the most disturbing. It's the one where even the hard-nosed investigator gets shaken. The murders that begin the episode are terribly tragic. Really, every murder in every episode is. But here, the suddenness of it all is jarring. You don't need to konw the how and the why, that's for you to see. But the larger meaning comes through when Mac's assistant, Danny (Giovnazzo), takes stock of all he's learned from the investigation. Looking at the crime-scene photos of employees killed at a restaurant, he says, "I can't wrap my head around it, Mac. You get up, you go to work. You see the people that you know. You talk. You laugh. You're living your life. Then suddenly, boom. It's just over. Just like that. And you never even saw it comin'."
This is without a doubt a well-produced show. It has the Bruckheimer snazziness. Every episode gets an electric kick-off with The Who's "Baba O'Riley." It's quickly edited. The cinematography is stupendous, particularly the establishing shots - everything glitters. The production design of the forensics lab simply shines (unlike real life); test tubes racks, computers, imaging equipment. And the show should get an award for Best Insert Shots. I might add: the CGI cutaways of human anatomy, and how, say, a bone might heel, can be a little unnerving. And of course, every little thing has a sound effect. The premiere sound effect is the camera click. If these guys were paid a nickel for every click of the shutter, they wouldn't be working in a forensics lab.
Score: 10 out of 10
The Video
If anything, the producers of this set cared to make it look great. The video presentation is spotless. And I mean, through and through spotless.
That said, there is detectable graininess, to my eyes anyway, but appears in the scenes filmed at night or in low light - for example, a tunnel, miles beneath the city. Blame it on the film stock.
Score: 10 out of 10
The Audio presentation
It only offers English 5.1 Surround, but it does surround you. For a TV show, it's darn good. Then again, the effectiveness of this show is, in part, due to the sound. The bass is deep, and for more than a few club scenes, the house will shake. A Spanish language track is also offered.
Score: 3 out of 10
Bonus Materials and Packaging
This 7-disc set has a fair amount of extras. There are audio commentaries for 7 episodes, including the first episode, MIA/NYC Non-Stop - the CSI: Miami/CSI: NY crossover episode. The option to listen to the commentaries is presented prior to the start of those episodes.
Disc 7 alone offers the behind-the-scenes featurettes. There are 5 of them, totaling a running time of around 50-minutes. They are: The Science Behind the Scene, The Cast Examines The Characters, World's Largest Crime Scene, CSI: NY - Set Tour and The Zoo Year - highlighting this season's focus on examining dead (and not dead, but carrying a bullet) animals.
The set comes in a sturdy slipcase. Removed, it opens like a book, with a wrap-around cover outlining its content, and the proceeding discs in separate, purple plastic trays. The are 4 episodes to discs 1 - 6. An insert-flyer offers a $20.00 rebate for the purchases of CSI: NY Season One, CSI: Miami Season Three, and CSI Season Five. Under the original shrink-wrap, the set is wrapped in bright yellow, strap (which slides off): "Crime Scene: Do Not Cross"
Score: 6 out of 10


text:
Archive for the 'Keyfinder' Category
My new notebook needs the windows key – not sent to me !!
October 18, 2013 Leave a comment
One downside I've found is the windows key is missing I can't find it anywhere and with windows 8.1 update available or even a reinstall you need it so a quick google search, this guys has the answer HERE
I used magical jelly bean keyfinder – downloaded HERE open it and finds the key nothing else to do easy life.
print screen on the asus s300 you need to hit the button and then enter paint and cntl + v to paste the image (key pic saved and ready to go)
Categories: Keyfinder, Print screen, Tips & Hints, Windows 8


text:
Loyola at a Glance
Subscribe to our Newsroom RSS feed | What is RSS?
Follow Loyola University New Orleans on Twitter
Loyola's Templet named GCAC Baseball Player of the Week
March 26, 2010
Freshman third baseman Caleb Templet was named Gulf Coast Athletic Conference Player of the Week for baseball for the week ending March 21.
Templet, a native of Sorrento, La., hit .412 (7 of 17) in Loyola's four contests, including three multi-hit games. For the week, he scored seven runs, had two doubles, and finished with five RBI.
On the season, Templet is batting .337 which is 17th in the GCAC. He currently has an 11-game hitting streak, dating back to March 6.
The Wolfpack will be back in action on March 30, when they head on the road for a two-game series at Birmingham Southern. Tuesday's game will start at 7 p.m. with the Wednesday finale set for a 3 p.m. start.
Helpful links:
Subscribe to all the latest Wolfpack news at:
Become a fan of Wolfpack Athletics on Facebook at:
For the latest updates about Loyola University New Orleans, follow us on Twitter @LoyolaNOLANews or become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/loyno.
Loyola at a Glance is written and distributed for the faculty, staff, students and friends of Loyola University New Orleans. It is published by the Office of Public Affairs, Greenville Hall, Box 909, 7214 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70118. (504) 861-5888.
Information to be included in Loyola at a Glance must be received 2-3 weeks in advance of the publication date. Send us your news here.


text:
In the last section, we discussed how to make a fast and easy Tombstone cake. Now we are going to look at how to create one or more attractive pumpkin cakes to add to your holiday buffet spread or potluck.
Your round pans will be perfect for making a pumpkin face. You can then use the wedges left over from the tombstone cake to make stems for two pumpkin cakes by frosting them green and positioning them over the round cakes. (If you have not made a tombstone cake already, not to worry. We will tell you what to do when it comes time to decorate and assemble the cake.)
For the pumpkin faces, once your round layer cakes are completely cool, you will be ready to frost. First dye your white frosting orange, or use ready-made orange frosting. (We recommend trying to make your own natural food colorings rather than buying commercial products. There are many recipes online that can help.)
If you need to create a stem, cut off about an inch of one side of the cake and then cut it in half or into a stem shape and position it on top of the cake. Frost it green and set aside until it is time to assemble the cake.
Frost the whole cake 'face' with your orange frosting, and then decide how you wish to create the features of the pumpkin face.
There are a number of options for creating the faces. Again, if you are a green mom, you might want to create these as naturally as possible. If you are calorie or sugar conscious, this will also help you select the right choice for your whole family and any guests you might be serving cake.
You can draw eyes, nose and mouth with frosting gel or make some very dark black frosting with red and blue drops of color and create triangles for the eyes and nose and some jagged 'teeth' for the mouth.
You can also make the facial features using a number of pieces of candy corn. Make two triangles pointing downwards for the eyes and one triangle pointing upwards for the nose by positioning the candy corn as needed. The mouth can be as jagged and snaggle-toothed as you like, positioned in the center of the cake under the nose.
You can add the lines of the pumpkin down the cake in slightly curved lines parallel to each other like parentheses, starting on either side of the face, with the left-hand-side lines curving out to the left, and the right-hand side line curving out towards the right like this: ((*^*))
You can also use icing gel, sprinkles and so on to fill in the features. Don't forget to color green the stems of the 'pumpkins' (your leftover cake wedges from the tombstone cake) using some green frosting or green sprinkles or colored green sugar.
These are quick and easy cake ideas that will feed a large number of people for gathering at a school, church hall or other community group . An attractive cake also works very well as the centerpiece for a Halloween buffet table. Best of all, you can use any recipe you like, so you can be sure of how wholesome the ingredients are. You can even make your own buttercream frosting or a festive-colored cake glaze using natural ingredients, without a lot of fat and sugar or food coloring, in order to avoid gaining weight or feeding your family and friends too many unhealthy items.
If you are really in a hurry, you can resort to boxed mixes, pre-prepared frosting, and food color, but remember that one drop of color can go a long way and use it sparingly.
If you make a mistake frosting your cake, just scoop it off and start again. If the worst comes to the worst, you can even cut off one part of the cake and start again or use it for cake pops and bake another one.
And no matter what it looks like, there is no such thing as a bad cake as long as you follow instructions for the recipe you are using or the mix you are making. Don't burn your cake/s, time everything carefully, and test it for doneness according to the package instructions.
Note to beginner bakers:
Your oven may vary in terms of temperature, so always check for doneness about 5 minutes before the lowest recommended time. For example, if it says Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, check its progress at the end of 25 minutes. Our oven is so good that if it says 350 for 30 minutes, it will be done to perfection in 30 minutes. 35 would be overdone.
We once had an oven that was 100 degrees cooler than it should have been and one that was 75 degrees hotter than it should have been. If you want to save a lot of money and calories by learning to make and decorate cakes yourself, it is a fun hobby the whole family will love, but you might want to invest in an inexpensive oven thermometer just to check your oven so all your cakes will come out great.
Further Reading:
Halloween Magic Even on a Budget: Halloween Activities, Costumes, Crafts and Recipes
Fast, Fun and Frugal Halloween: A Guide to Great Halloween Costumes, Recipes, Activities and Decorations
How to Save Money This Holiday Season
How to Create Great Holiday Decorations for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween and More
How To Create A Loving Thanksgiving Celebration for the Whole Family
Planning for and Preparing a Stress-Free Thanksgiving At Home
Planning For and Preparing a Stress-Free Christmas At Home
Fast and Fun Christmas Recipes
How to Create a Loving Christmas Celebration for the Whole Family