Conference Coverage:- Day 2 - Going Really Well

Day 2 was another day full of great presenters with a lot to tell us - writes Mary Jozsi.

I started with the 7:30 Breakfast session Trends and Best Practices in Service Level management which gave us information about Service Agreements, including results on Oblicore’s latest SLM survey.

At a high level, the results indicate that a vast majority of companies have SLAs, a majority of those feel that the number of SLAs will increase next year, and over half of them claim to over deliver services to meet the SLAs. (hm, sounds familiar – I’ve seen it in practice a few times.)

Again today, I felt that I got something out of every session I attended, but I’ve got to tell you, I thought Stephanie Peterson’s session on Organizational Readiness and ITIL: how to Ensure your ITIL initiative will succeed was fantastic.

She is a dynamic presenter and kept the audience’s attention with what appeared to be no effort at all. We left with a list of questions that can be asked to assess where an organization is at. For determining if project goals are met, the recommendation is to have one measure of success that ties back directly to the business reason the project is being done.

I was able to attend both Keynote presentations today. Chip Bell was great to listen too and his lively presentation Partnering: The Secrets of Great Relationships was an excellent choice for the morning keynote.

I think we all know some of the elements of a great relationship, but his presenting the seven areas discussed today helped bring them all together and put it in reference of a business perspective. I can say that Mr. Bell’s books have been added to my must read list.

The afternoon keynote by D. Michael Abrashoff was also fabulous. His presentation was full of very clear examples of how he was able to make changes on the U.S.S. Benefold, with each example highlighting different areas that can be addressed. Some of it translates to one of my stronger opinioins, that if we hired people to do a job we should let them do it; but there was a lot more in the presentation as well.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who liked what Mr. Abrashoff said as the presentation ended with a standing ovation. Needless to say, his book, "It’s You’re Ship", is also being added to my must read list.

I approached the exhibition hall today with more purpose than yesterday, stopping by booths with specific questions to ask the various vendors regarding how they fit into the Service Management space, and how they fit into an organization.

I wanted to know how the tools get deployed and used, and how they fit in with all of the other tools in the organization. There are a lot of vendors with a lot of interesting products and services that implemented or used appropriately could offer much benefit to an organization. At first glance there seems to be quite a few vendors offering the same or similar products.

It really takes stopping by and asking the questions to figure out how the really fit into the overall picture.

I am certainly looking forward to tomorrow’s presentations.

Regards,

Mary C. Jozsi