Author Archives: Don Boylan

What Tier Is It?

July 3rd, 2017 | Posted by Don Boylan in Incident Management | Service Level Management - (0 Comments)

Wow, I can’t believe the amount of stir there is around this topic. Why is there so much confusion? Organizations try to put ridiculous rules, that are for the most part poorly defined and even more poorly enforced, around how critical their IT Services are to the operation of the organization. Does it affect customers’ …
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I Hate Swim Lanes

June 27th, 2017 | Posted by Don Boylan in Tools - (1 Comments)

As a Process Engineer, I spend a lot of time in Visio, and even though I have been formally trained in Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), I usually rely on just 5 symbols when creating my process flow diagrams. These can all be found in Visio’s Flowchart – Basic Flowchart Shapes palette: Although I have …
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Of the 26 ITIL v3 2011 processes, two have measurable returns on investment. The other 24 are very hard to sell to upper management because the value produced by those processes can be very hard to quantify in real-world dollars. Look at Change Management. Most organizations implement Change Management because they had some very disruptive …
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On Being a Trainer

March 15th, 2017 | Posted by Don Boylan in ITIL - (1 Comments)

Throughout my career I have always been a trainer. Regardless of my title, at some point in every job I’ve ever held, I have found myself in front of a group of people, with a PowerPoint presentation at my back, explaining how to do something new. And I love it. If the salary of a …
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I’ve been thinking a lot about Major Incidents (MIs) lately. I guess this is normal considering it is my week in rotation as the Incident Commander (IC) for a company that manages one of the largest networks of hospitals, care centers, and clinics in the United States. To say that it is a high pressure …
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Defining an Incident

August 6th, 2016 | Posted by Don Boylan in Incident Management | Service Desk - (4 Comments)

During most of my posts I take a shorthand method of talking about Incidents and equate them to a “Service Outage”, but truthfully, an Incident is defined more broadly than just when disruptions in Services that are noticed by end users. So what conditions should be logged as Incidents? There are four conditions that should …
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When teaching some of the intermediate ITIL courses, a fundamental realization came to me that is quite striking. The realization is that you cannot have true Incident Management without a mature Service Level Management process. Let’s say your organization has a tier one application that requires a high level of availability. One day a user …
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