Author Archives: Don Boylan

A funny thing happened many years ago when I was taking my first ITIL course. It was a v2 Foundation course that I attended in Phoenix as part of a Pink Elephant conference on implementing ITIL. The class was delivered by one of the best instructor’s I have ever had the opportunity to be in class …
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Business Disaster Recovery

March 31st, 2016 | Posted by Don Boylan in Disaster Recovery | ITIL - (0 Comments)

I’ve posted a few times before about Disaster Recovery (DR) as it relates to IT (ITIL calls this IT Service Continuity Management), but this post is more about Business DR. The business must be the driver for all DR projects. Without the business in in the forefront, it is hopeless to attempt developing an IT DR Plan. Truthfully, …
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Impact + Urgency = Priority

September 30th, 2015 | Posted by Don Boylan in Incident Management | ITIL | Problem Management - (7 Comments)

This may seem a little ITIL 101 for some of you, but I think there is value in covering some of ITIL’s basic concepts in detail. ITIL asserts that you Prioritize issues (Incidents, Problems, Changes, etc.), and work on the highest Priority issues first. You then work your way down the list of issues until you …
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Cornerstones of KPIs

September 2nd, 2015 | Posted by Don Boylan in Continual Service Improvement | ITIL - (2 Comments)

When I took my ITIL v2 Manager’s course with Pink Elephant, one of the most interesting sessions we had was about the four categories of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and how they must be balanced. The KPI categories are similar in concept to Kaplan and Nolan’s Balanced Scorecard. In the class we discussed the four competing quadrants of KPI …
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When All You Have is a Hammer, Everything is a Nail

May 14th, 2015 | Posted by Don Boylan in Tools - (2 Comments)

Have you ever heard the saying “If all you have is a hammer, then everything is a nail”? This saying is often applicable to corporate environments when you only have a few (or one) of the core ITIL processes in place. Since no company can simply let broken computers stay broken, they all have some …
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Strategic, Tactical, and Operational Roles

October 30th, 2014 | Posted by Don Boylan in ITIL - (0 Comments)

When discussing organizational management, a critical aspect is the balance between Strategic, Tactical, and Operational roles and duties.  Have you ever seen companies where the employees complained that:  The directors and upper level managers keep sticking their nose in the day-to-day operations and making a mess of things. Major processes keep getting re-defined and no …
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Process Engineering in a Nutshell

October 13th, 2014 | Posted by Don Boylan in Continual Service Improvement | Favorite | ITIL - (0 Comments)

A friend of mine manages a hosted ecommerce solution and was complaining to me the other day that people in his organization were putting unauthorized code onto production servers without going through the typical deployment process. His team would discover this when upgrading the customers’ ecommerce sites. During the upgrade, they would stumble across some …
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