All Posts Tagged With: "Cycle Time"
One of the strangest things about IT people is that they often miss the obvious until it is explained to them (sometimes with the aid of a hammer). We are all so used to following the rules and doing what everyone else does. This particularly applies to IT Operations, also known as the Command Centre [...]
Continue ReadingI bet that you came up with a big number? Some people I ask sit down and scratch their head and then start listing all of the products and services their companies offer. After a while most folks just give up, overwhelmed by the scale of the simple question I have asked. Try it for [...]
Continue ReadingMy colleague Christian Dalle Nogare lent me a book (embarrassingly many) months ago, The Toyota Way by Professor Jeffrey K. Liker and it has taken the extreme of lying by a pool in the Dominican Republic to get me to the point of reading it.
Like many educated and experienced business managers, I had thought that I [...]
I clearly remember as a wet-behind-the-ears youth complaining bitterly to my old boss, David Williams, that I was too busy and could never manage to complete everything that needed to be done. He laughed, collected a piece of that old fashioned green line-printer paper and sat down. He said:
“This is the most important lesson that you will [...]
Here is the acid test - our customers often know that there is a service problem before we do. When that happens, as far as our customers are concerned, we suck, we are incompetent and they are smarter than us. Our IT Operations team may be publishing loads of great Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that show improvements [...]
Continue ReadingSimultaneously the most powerful aspect of and the biggest problem with IT Systems are that they are flexible by design. They are so flexible that that many of our people want to show how smart they are by being helpful and adding value. Unfortunately, being helpful is one of these things that inevitably leads to unintended [...]
Continue ReadingInterview with Haroon Malik
Malik - Do you think that, as yet, many businesses have a sufficient understanding of the importance of the human aspect of IT within the data centre? ie writing policies, managing infrastructure, making mistakes etc…
O’Donnell - It may be a bit unkind to some of my colleagues but my experience shows that [...]


