Level Set of Terms

Before we dive into today's blog post, let's get familiar with these terms:

• DevOps: A mix of cultural and technology practices to improve the use of software and technology-servicing customers.
• Continuous Integration (CI): Traditionally, a developer spends their day coding, and at some point, they save (commit) their efforts within a development environment or an application branch. Think about a tree. Do you want one full of intertangled branches (loads of developers, all doing something, but getting in each other’s way), or do you want a well-balanced tree with a solid trunk? The same is true with coding, and CI allows for the integration of code to the trunk as fast as possible via agreed testing success. If the system fails (a diseased branch), then the feedback is fast enough that the code can be fixed and resubmitted. Note that the approval and commit steps are manual but the expectation is that they are performed daily at a minimum.
• Continuous Delivery (CD): Removes the manual step and introduces automated approval based on testing success to push software to the trunk. CD eliminated the authorization wait time found in CI, thereby decreasing the feedback time. Faster feedback equals faster fixes, which underpins the culture of “if no defect found, then proceed to the next step in the software value stream.”
• Continuous Deployment: I call this the ‘Trust My Developer’ process. Testing, packaging of code, release, and deployment (to the correct trunk or environment) are as automated as possible. We trust the process, the tools, and the quality of the code, and therefore we know that if there is an issue, we can also remove any code causing problems as quickly as possible. Feedback from the customer on the new applications or features is immediate.

How we created these practices: A bit of history

Software is what makes technology exciting, as it is often the software elements that make things happen, solve problems, or fulfill needs. It stands to reason then that the flow of software to a customer needs to be as fast as possible. Unfortunately, in many businesses today, that flow is a mixture of work, wait time, approval time, and probably rework. 

Does your software stream look like this?

• Receive the request for something to be changed (new, feature or fix)
• Wait
• Get it approved
• Wait
• Pass it to a team as something to do
• Wait
• The team at some point begins to work on it
• They finish their work and pass it to another team to add their code, or they give it to a test team
• Wait
• The test team schedules the environments for testing: code, security, performance, business continuity
• Wait
• After authorization, the code is deployed at the pre-set monthly or quarterly release
• Wait
• The code is released
• Pray that it works and that things have not changed so much since the original request

Do you recognize your lengthy cycle of innovation? It doesn’t have to be this way, thanks to the practices of DevOps: Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment.

Timewarp to today

What do your staff or customers want? Quality, fair cost, sustainability, resilience, and practicality. They want technology that helps them and, preferably, they want it now. Given the interconnectedness of the world, if a customer does not find satisfaction with you, then they go elsewhere within a mouse click. Your business peers can also do the same, hence this is how Shadow-IT (when peers circumvent formal IT processes) begins.

But what if:

• Requests are assessed within a short time of receipt?
• When the team began working on the request (either some aspect, if not the full request), was ready it for use within a sprint (two weeks to a month)?
• As much as possible, the culture is that if no defect is found, the request moves to another team or goes live?
• If the request can be improved, then how?

Jez Humble and Dave Farley best explained these practices in their book Continuous Delivery. Major software vendors such as Atlassian built their products based on these concepts (and have an excellent series of blog posts showing the why and how). It is becoming more and more difficult to find a business that does not depend on software, so why have processes that limit the use and improvement of your products or services? Sounds like nirvana (or a significant culture change).

Some of you by now are thinking that this can never happen where you work. I won’t quote how many times a day banks, Amazon, or even the latest start-ups that were born during the pandemic, deliver software to customers.

Tip: Look at sites from mature DevOps companies like Netflix and Amazon, and make that your goal so that you can work towards creating meaningful change within your organization. 

The CICDCD+ culture:

• No defect goes live
• No defect goes to the next environment
• Ideally have no more than three environments; two is even better
• Automate as and when we can
• Test multiple times, as often as we can
• Trust in the tools we use
• Trust in the people that use those tools
• Ability to roll back (uninstall code) as quickly as we can promote code
• Limit the amount of work performed at any given time
• Limit the size of our changes (make smaller changes?)
• Changes are independent of the application or data (yes this is hard)
• Every day is a new day during which we strive to improve the process

The Gap of Change: Are you ready?

CI implies that your organization wants to create and improve a pipeline of software to your customer. You also agree that management is going to allow the technology and governance processes to be available to develop, maintain, and improve the pipeline. CD also implies that you are satisfied with the flow of software, the timely feedback of information related to software value, and issues are resolved before working on other code. Automation is used to automate the approval of changes and the delivery to the appropriate environments or customers.

CD+ implies that you are content with both the culture and technology of software and how development and deployment have matured. You are ready to automate as much of the process as possible. Changes are small and independent enough that if there is an issue, they are quickly revoked. Minor changes also mean that customers get spoon-fed new software, one feature at a time. Documentation and recovery are both simplified, and the cost of software reduced.

Remember that there is no value in anything you do in technology until it is used to help someone fulfill a need or solve a problem. Until that time, everything you do or spend money on is a waste. Limit your waste by trying these practices. In the next blog, we will explore the metrics of CICDCD+, and the final blog of this series will provide tips from the leadership aspect.

If you have any questions in the meantime about any of the concepts discussed in this post, let us know

Growth Through Change 

"Organizations that do not or cannot evolve will not last." In the business world, change is constant and necessary, especially when it comes to meeting the dynamic needs of customers. ITIL, or Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a methodology that helps organizations effectively manage change while putting the customer at the center of the process. ITIL prescribes processes to ensure the customer's needs and requests are handled with ease – from acknowledgement of an issue through the application and evaluation of the solution. One of the greatest values of the ITIL methodology is that it embeds continual improvement into the process. The ITIL framework can be leveraged by anyone, including non-technical teams, to better manage change and serve customers. Atlassian's fastest growing product, Jira Service Desk, facilitates ITIL adoption in an organization by encouraging traceability, collaboration, and reporting. 

As business process experts certified in ITIL, we leverage the ITIL methodology in unison with Jira Service Desk to institute best practices for our clients. Here are 5 real-world examples of how Praecipio Consulting helped our clients implement lasting organizational change by embracing key ITIL concepts of automation, visibility, knowledge base, change management and evaluation, and continuous improvement. 

Automation

"Using service automation to streamline both simple and more complex workflows of course impacts the overall efficiency of the organization... it also allows for a much better end-user experience for everyone at the company." - ITIL beyond IT: What is Service Automation & Service Relationship Management?

Problem: A major utility company powering the U.S. Eastern seaboard was manually reporting security equipment issues and coordinating with external vendors to fix the issues. This manual process was prone to errors and didn't allow for tracking of service level agreements (SLAs), which would determine which vendors were breaching their contracts. The company was using spreadsheets to track these crucial assets and their maintenance. The spreadsheet system was inefficient and created duplicate versions – leading to confusion, frustration, and waste. Furthermore, the spreadsheets could not track SLAs for Acknowledgement or Resolution for vendors.

Solution: To reduce redundancy and enforce SLAs, our experts implemented Jira Service Desk for the major utility company. By replacing their spreadsheets with Jira Core and Jira Service Desk, we helped them add a level of automation to their workflow. This reduced waste of time and resources, allowed for better communication with third-party vendors, and created a clear path for escalation. The custom configuration we created for the company maintained their security, while also allowing vendors to be a part of of the conversation. Furthermore, reporting features from both Jira Core and Jira Service Desk allowed for a central point of truth. The utility company could check the status of service tickets and see how well vendors were adhering to their SLAs. Through the process of improving their security equipment reporting and vendor coordination, the company found other areas of improvement and have chosen to continue working with us to maximize those workflows. 

Visibility

"It can be very difficult to know the health of your service desk, run reports, and find way to improve your support if you don’t have the right data." - The ABCs of Jira Service Desk: measuring success

Problem: A major U.S. waste management company wanted to adopt a more structured reporting system, replace an old enterprise software application, and incorporate the ITIL framework into their organization. The company's goal was to standardize tools in order to improve communication and rally around a consistent project management methodology. The waste management company desired a suite of tools with the ability to integrate functions across IT service areas, leading to better service for the end customer.

Solution: In addition to implementing several other Atlassian products, our experts helped the company leverage Jira Service Desk to achieve their business goals. We helped them create a central application with the ability to distinguish request types through a structured workflow. This included a more robust user interface to better triage issues and send them to the appropriate teams. The ability to categorize requests and label them with levels of urgency allowed the company to have better reporting, leading to improved enforcements of SLAs. 

Knowledge Base

"[A knowledge base] gets [customers] the help they need at the speed they’ve become accustomed to – i.e., in the time it takes to swipe around on their phones – and it frees service desk agents from stressing out while anxious customers wait on hold or answering the same question over email for the 10th time this week." - 4 tips for getting started with knowledge management

Problem: A large, private U.S. university wanted to revamp an old software application and replace it with a more robust and dynamic knowledge base. The university's goal was to increase usability for both their students and faculty regarding technical and campus-related questions, deflecting tickets by providing requesters with FAQ's and other resources to help them self-serve to find their answers. 

Solution: Our experts helped the university leverage Jira Service Desk and Confluence to achieve their goal. Combining Jira Service Desk with Questions for Confluence (a Confluence add-on that provides a knowledge base inside the already powerful wiki tool) allowed the university to implement a centralized knowledge database. Jira Service Desk allowed for better help engagement using queues and other helpful functionalities. Questions for Confluence empowered external users to help themselves by accessing a database of pre-answered questions, without tying up service desk agents with redundant problems.

Change Management and Evaluation

"Listening to your customers is the single most important thing you can do for the health of your company." - 5 tips to transform your IT team from zero to superhero

Problem: The largest provider of support services to general and multi-specialty dental groups in the United States needed the ability to receive and respond to client feedback in addition to handling client issues. They did not have a clearly defined process for patients to interact with the organization and to raise issues. Their marketing team was searching for a new software tool that would manage feedback in a way that led to issue resolution and change management. The team's ideal tool would be able to enforce and report on multiple SLAs through issues submitted via the company's public website.

Solution: Our experts helped the dental corporation adopt Jira Core and Jira Service Desk to manage issue tracking and change management. With Jira Service Desk, the company was able to cleanly sort through client feedback and create a workflow to address issues that arose. Beyond managing client feedback, the dental corporation also used these tools for clinical tasks, billing, and other activities that needed life cycle tracking. In addition to tracking, the Atlassian tools helped the organization evaluate the effectiveness of their changes and quantified the improvements made – empowering all teams, not just marketing, to better serve their customers. 

Continuous Improvement

"With a single-product approach, configuring an SLA or modifying a workflow is easy, because they share core processes." How Jira Service Desk approaches ITSM 

Problem: A major U.S. insurance company was using three different software applications for code management, issue tracking, and service desk management – leading to inefficiencies and miscommunication. Their use of three separate applications resulted in duplicate tickets and the inability to enforce SLAs across the organization.The insurance company wanted to improve these processes and embrace ITIL's practice of continuous improvement. 

Solution: Our assessment encouraged the company to adopt a single application, Jira Service Desk, to provide a single source of truth. With Jira Service Desk, there was a common point of collaboration for issue management. This reduced duplicate tickets and saved valuable time and resources. Leveraging entities, workflows, and issue linking, we helped the insurance company align their processes to make reporting and enforcing SLAs easier, more efficient, and more effective. By strengthening their ability to track what changes are needed and to act upon those needs, we helped them develop a cycle for continuous improvement.  

ITIL for One, and ITIL for All 

"Just because one service desk streamlines the IT and service departments, it doesn’t mean that other teams can’t also benefit from them." - 5 tips to transform your IT team from zero to superhero

These real-world examples from our clients highlight how ITIL and Jira Service Desk can help organizations evolve and change – without the growing pains. ITIL concepts of automation, visibility, knowledge base, change management and evaluation, and continuous improvement aren't just for IT teams. These powerful ideas also provides immense value to other parts of any organization, technical and business teams alike. At Praecipio Consulting, we excel at leveraging the ITIL methodology and Jira Service Desk to help organizations do what they do better. Want more proof? Contact us to learn how we can help your organization evolve and do your best business. 

Jira’s an issue tracking application, but its core flexibility and strengths mean it can become much more than a tool limited to a development group. Jira’s incredibly adept at helping teams track and accomplish tasks. Jira also has a masterful ability to manage life cycles - and it’s found great success in numerous use cases.

Use Cases

The following use case guides are meant to explain a bit of the details related to using Jira for a specific use case. The info you’ll find in here highlights much of what we’ve learned from working with clients in a variety of different industries, as well as our internal expertise and use of Jira.

For each of these use cases, we’ll attempt to highlight:

• Particular Jira functionality specific to the use
• Related plugins we’re aware of
• Customization and tweaks
• …and sometimes a sample file to help get you started

Agile Software Development

• Agile Development Solution Tour
• Using Jira for Agile Development

Project Management

• Using Jira for Project Management
• Jira for Project Management sample file

HelpDesk / Support / Trouble Ticketing

• How to setup Jira for support
• Use case and sample file: Jira for Helpdesk/Support Sample File

Test Case Management

This can be done by using either of the following approaches:

• Use case and sample file: Integrate Jira With A Test Case Management Tool

Requirements Management

• Use case: Using Jira for Requirements Management

Change Management

• Use case: Using Jira for Change Management

by Ashley Furness

CRM Market Analyst, Software Advice
June 27, 2012

During our last Atlassian User Group meeting a few attendees asked us for pointers on how to convince their managers to implement or expand upon the Atlassian product suite as a Business Process Management Tool. To us the task seemed easy, especially since Process Optimization and Management are some of our founding principles.

After doing a bit of research we were a bit surprised by what we found. According to a study conducted by the Journal of Information & Management, 71% of executives had negative feelings concerning IT as a source of competitive advantage.

This is especially shocking since exploiting current capabilities while simultaneously developing new ones is a common theme among organizations. This idea serves as a baseline for strategic management and is crucial for adapting to changing environments. It’s through this delicate balance of business activities that the notion of Business Process Management (BPM) was born.

As BPM continues to be considered an important way for organizations to achieve a competitive advantage, senior management should be aware of IT’s ability to facilitate these processes. However, as the study pointed out, this isn’t always the case. In many organizations senior management’s reluctant to promote the strategic role of IT and instead, consider it just an automating tool.

This notion’s not only outdated but it also negates the entire philosophy of BPM, and the idea of developing new organizational capabilities.

So how can you overcome these seemingly insurmountable sentiments, standing in the way of cost-cutting, Business Process Optimization? According to the study, executives were most likely to be convinced of the almighty powers of IT when provided with substantial evidence of the following outcomes:

• Assurance in the success of process re-engineering
• Greater simplification in business process
• Increased efficiency by at least 50%

So whether you are attempting to convince a coworker, boss, or yourself, being well armed with relevant examples of the above will come in handy.

Looking for relevant examples? Try the following case studies:

• Why did SAFMT go Jira?

Seven weeks ago the world met Stash – a centralized solution to manage Git repositories behind the firewall. Stash 1.0 was a huge launch! Atlassian’s been deluged with great feedback and already have small agile teams and large enterprises adopting Stash for their Git development.

Atlassian’s just getting started, and today Stash’s future begins! Stash 1.1 is here with more features focused on making your behind the firewall Git development simple, secure and fast.

SSH Support

Developed from the ground up with enterprise level security as a #1 priority, Stash now supports SSH in addition to HTTPS. Use standard HTTPS authentication or set up your public keys and connect to Stash via SSH, it’s your choice. This resolves Stash’s #1 feature request focused on adding security options to support SSH.

For those of you who chose to go the SSH route there can be some benefits for your team (depending on your setup):

• Increased security
• Ease of configuring automated systems, such as build and deployment servers (e.g. Bamboo)
• Restricted access to pushing and pulling from Stash without compromising passwords

Developers are able to manage their own SSH keys. For those using multiple machines to work with their Git repositories or several automated systems pushing and pulling from Stash they can add as many keys as they see fit. And, have no fear Stash admins, you still have full control over SSH keys with the ability to grant or revoke the SSH keys of any user.

Do you understand your Git error messages? No matter what flavor of authentication you choose, Stash makes sure you know what’s going on when things go wrong. Unlike standard Git error messages, which can be confusing and contribute to the steep learning curve, Stash will provide you with user-friendly messages.

Lean thinking allows organizations to determine value, and organize their value creation processes in a specific sequence. This fundamental understanding of the value stream allows organizations to dived their work processes into:

• Value-adding activities
• Required non-value-adding activities
• Non-value-adding activities

It’s important to note that while organizations can specify an associated value with a process; value’s inherently determined by the consumer – your organization had better have a clear understanding of what that is.

Lean thinking also affects the flow of your production processes by emphasizing a continuous product flow, pulled through by customer demand – ensuring that nothing’s built until it’s needed, and what’s built is in fact needed by its end-user. As Lean thinking’s applied to your specific business model you’ll  inherently perfect your product through the constant process of identifying and removing waste.

Lean + Agile = Better Business Practices

We prefer to look at Agile as more than just a methodology, but also as a way businesses can reduce process – generated waste and non-value-adding activities.

Think of a value system instead of a process. Software development’s too difficult to waste time pouring over things that don’t matter, and it’s extremely inefficient for the organization at hand. From this viewpoint we can apply lean thinking to Agile development.

To effectively understand the meaningful roles these approaches can have, we must first examine their application. From this point of view, Lean represents a set of principles that help guide our ideas and insights about Agile. Lean thinking should be viewed as a set of value-maximizing principles that don’t change over time, and Agile development as an application of principles to a particular situation. Agile principles are specific to each environment and should change to fit the task at hand. Here it’s easy to see how Lean thinking concepts expand upon and improve the framework of Agile methodology.

The Agile school of software development’s currently one of the most accepted methodologies for improving productivity. Targeted mainly towards IT managers and CIOs, Agile methods promote an interactive approach which have the ability to help flatten your organization’s cost of change curve.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development was first introduced in 2001, and outlines the foundation of Agile in twelve principles:

1. Customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of useful software
2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development
3. Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
4. Working software is the principal measure of progress
5. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
6. Close, daily co-operation between business people and developers
7. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
8. Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
10. Simplicity- the art of maximizing the amount of work not done- is essential
11. Self-organizing teams
12. Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

Cost of Change Curve

First introduced by Barry Bohem in 1981, the cost of change curve represents the exponential increase in cost as it relates to making a change during the normal development phase of a product. This means that as your product moves farther down the developmental pipeline it becomes more costly to make changes and remedy errors.

That’s a good argument for Agile since it ensures you leave the current production phase with a product that’s as close to perfect as you can make it – particularly because Agile methodology calls for testing and up-front integration which translates to rapid production and minimal initial design. Since the test code’s written before functional code and automated test suites are built around the evolving code, developers are allowed to make rapid and aggressive changes.

The ability to make these changes is one of Agile’s key features and the result is a reduction in the amount of product errors late in the development phase, reducing the cost of change. Even if your organization enjoys a rather flat cost of change curve, Agile ideals can be applied to reduce the cost of change throughout the software life cycle.

Scrum

Scrum’s another widely accepted approach to implementing the Agile philosophy, which includes both managerial and development processes. This approach relies on a self-organizing, cross-functional team supported by a scrummaster and a product owner. Scrum makes your organization Agile by ensuring quick progress, continuously creating value, and by keeping projects on track. The most important concepts of Scrum are:

• Product backlog - A complete list of requirements that are not currently in the product release. Typical backlog items include bugs and usability/performance improvements.
• CI - Also known as continuous integration; allows for scrum teams to continuously integrate their work. This will often happen on a daily basis.
• User story – Describes problems that should be solved by the system being built.
• Scrummaster - The manager of the Scrum project.
• Burndown chart - The amount of work remaining within a sprint, i’s updated daily, and also tracks progress.
• Sprint backlog - A list of backlog items assigned to a sprint, but not yet completed

Kanban

Kanban means visual board – and that’s just what it is, a development process that revolves around a board to manage works in progress (WIP). A Kanban board includes “lanes,” each denoting different phases a project might take. It moves WIPs across the board and deploys them into production when they reach the done column. Since Kanban development practice revolves around WIP management each state of progress is limited to a set number of projects. Organizations able to leverage this high frequency of delivery typically enjoy a large financial benefit.  The most important concepts of Kanban are:

• Swim lanes - The horizontal lanes of a Kanban board represent the different states in which a WIP or task can exist.
• Backlog - A list of backlog items awaiting deployment, but not yet completed.
• Stories – A particular user need assigned to a development team.
  
  

 Here’s a video overview of Atlassian Bamboo’s integrations with Jira. Learn how these two powerful tools combine forces to improve efficiency, traceability, and coordination across your product team. Read more on Jira here, and discover more ways to achieve continuous integration Zen with Bamboo over here!

Editor’s note: Please note the total coolness of these Confluence 4.1 features, *in addition to what’s listed below*: pimping your images, autoconvert of content from the likes of YouTube, Google Maps, Vimeo, Flickr (paste a URL, Confluence will turn into content automagically), and find and replace. This is awesome stuff – so make sure you’re sitting down and holding onto something!

Who doesn’t like a big Christmas stocking packed with goodies? It’s the season of giving and, this week, you’ll be able to rip open Confluence 4.1 and get your paws on all the new features packed into this big release. Atlassian’s Ryan already peeled back the covers on Image Effects – in this post Atlassian gives you a sneak peek at 5 more improvements coming your way in Confluence 4.1. Like every Confluence release, there’s something for everyone.

1. Use Any Character in Page Titles

Satisfying many of your votes, Confluence 4.1 removes the restrictions on characters in page and blog titles. This allows more descriptive page names and generally removes restrictions when creating page titles and naming your content.

2. Set a Global PDF Stylesheet

Fulfilling 90 more of your votes, Confluence 4.1 let’s you set a custom PDF stylesheet at the global level, just like custom layouts. When a PDF Space export is requested, it will fall back to this global stylesheet if there is no specific individual Space stylesheet defined. This means users won’t have to re-apply the same stylesheet to all their individual spaces, if they primarily want one look and feel – perfect for enforcing company-wide styling guidelines.

3. Follow Your Network On the Dashboard

Think about how you work – usually you work closely with a handful of people everyday – people in your immediate team, direct reports, and stakeholders in other teams. Just like Twitter, you can follow these people in Confluence to build you own ‘Network‘. In Confluence 4.1 it’s easy to stay-up-to-date on what your Network’s been up to with a new tab on the Dashboard.

4. View and Filter Attached Files in a Space

When you want to display all the attachments of a Page on a Page, you can use the regular Attachments macro. A new Space Attachments macro in Confluence 4.1 lets you display all of the files attached to the Pages in a Space, in a table view and filter them by file type. Perhaps you have a bunch of training files attached to Pages in a Space. No you can list them all on one Page to aid discovery.

5. Translations Made Easier

For those customers working on translating the user interface, Confluence 4.1 has a new feature to make your job easier. After visiting the Confluence Dashboard, just add this text to the end of your Confluence URL and press ‘Enter’.

We do SharePoint. So do other companies. We develop custom software and web parts. So do other companies. If you walk outside, you may hear to the cacophony emitting from the rooftops: “Need SharePoint? Custom this? Custom that? Talk to us. Talk to US. TALK TO US!”

We participate in this because we have to. That’s how messages get heard. And now for a cliché marketing statement: we’re different from our competitors. But get past the cliché and consider our competitive advantage:

As a small firm, we’re able to execute our projects with more care and intentionality than most large firms. You’ll be acquainted with most of our team, including our Founder, throughout the course of the project effort – which creates a better sense of commitment and accountability in our relationship with you. Our small team has broad capabilities: whether you need SharePoint hosting, ITIL consulting, custom development, process improvement, …you’ll be working with the same group of people.

As social entrepreneurs, we leverage a unique type of capital in business. Market capitalism is built on such tangibles as land, labor, and financial capital, while social capitalism is built on creative, intellectual, and social capital – and a strong sense of community and involvement in the surrounding community. We strive to be engaged in what’s going on around us, using our resources to respond to the needs of our customers, community, and industry. As both businesses and individuals, we’re responsible for the collective well-being of our communities.

Praecipio Consulting is improving the community by enabling businesses to reduce their process-generated waste – making our environment more sustainable while reducing our clients’ costs. With competitive pricing, diverse capabilities, and a commitment to our services that isn’t based on numbers alone, we offer an experience that’s literally different than what you’ll find out there.

So, need SharePoint? Need custom development? Talk to us. We [also] want to help you.

This week we spotlight Christian Lane, our firm’s Founding Partner. The eight QA’s below enlighten readers by revealing who Christian Lane is and how Praecipio Consulting got started. Enjoy:

Brian: What’s your role at Praecipio Consulting?
Christian: “As Founding Partner, I set the strategic direction and pace of the business.”

Brian: Personally, what do you like about your position?
Christian: “The challenges. I tend to get bored easily; the diverse set of challenges we help our clients through (and work through ourselves) keeps me motivated. I’m in a position to help organizations reduce and eliminate inefficiencies and waste, improving their bottom line. That’s exciting to me.”

Brian: What spawned your idea to start Praecipio Consulting?
Christian: “I’ve spent a lot of time and energy in my career helping companies solve business problems and improve profit margins…I felt a consulting business model was one that I could grow. I hail from a long line of entrepreneurs and business owners – and since process and technology are my core capabilities, the consulting business seemed like a fit.”

Brian: What personal traits help you with your job?
Christian: “I’ve been told I excel in leadership – that’s where I’ve had a lot of success and recognition.”

Brian: You’ve said some things about efficiency at this point. What usually causes inefficiency in organizations?
Christian: “A lack of repeatable, well-defined processes within a good technology framework that facilitates good process. Also, politics and protecting of turf tend to keep businesses in silos of under-performance.”

Brian: What motivates you when you’re working client-side?
Christian: “To put this simply, I love solving problems and helping others. We can use our strengths to save companies money and improve their profit margins, enabling them to do what they do better. I love that, we love that…and over time, our clients love it too.”

Brian: You have a day off. What do you do?
Christian: “I enjoy tending to my vegetable garden – I get a lot of peace getting my hands dirty and participating in the lifecycle of plants and food. Part of my fascination with growing food and plants is experimentation with nature’s processes, transactions, and cycles. Ultimately, everything in life is subject to the same constraints and basic elements, and has a life cycle. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; gardening gives me a real sense and reminder of that.

Aside from gardening, I like to keep active. I enjoy wake boarding, fly fishing, whitewater kayaking, running, mountain biking – anything outdoors – as well as spending time with my lovely wife and two dogs.”

Brian: What is the airspeed velocity of an African swallow?
Christian: “That’s funny, are you searching for the Holy Grail? This question reminds me of a skit/presentation we did while I was at Tactica Technology Group eight or so years ago in Dallas. The skit was a spoof on Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail. We took the plot from the movie and applied it to a huge EDI project we completed for a major utility in Dallas in preparation for the deregulation of the Texas Electric Market – it was cheesy, but fun.

As for the actual answer, I’d have to look that one up; I don’t know a thing about African swallows. I don’t think I’ll register this one to memory either…as Einstein put it, ‘Never memorize what you can look up in books."

We recently heard a traffic analyst from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) speak about traffic analytics. Living in a city with the fourth-worst automobile traffic in the US, the topic was particularly engaging.

The analyst spoke about the need for data management in traffic analytics. Using traffic-counting devices placed strategically along Austin’s freeways, TxDOT collects data at fixed intervals each day. These data points can be programmed to collect relevant data – in this case, average vehicle speed and highway capacity – allowing the business to know more about their problems and facilitating more appropriate solutions. TxDOT’s data points help them analyze Austin traffic patterns and identify consistent problem spots. They can then, with clarity, allocate funding toward the most effective solutions.

On a smaller scale, we spoke with an insurance agent last week who mentioned the wealth of documents he stores online for his firm’s clients. The firm stores every piece of client information in a digital content management suite – which in the insurance practice equals a lot of documents. While the initial process of digitizing client forms and documents might have been tedious, the firm can now intelligently access (or allow their clients to securely access) client information almost instantly. Moreover, the digitization process was designed and tested at the beginning, making the regular digitization tasks repeatable, predictable, and fast – thereby making the business more intelligent.

Businesses have always found ways to make their processes more efficient to improve their bottom line. These examples show us how businesses are doing so with technology – and how footing the bill for it now can earn a healthy ROI later. Whether you’re a large enterprise (like TxDOT) or a small one-shop business (like the insurance agency), technology can help you save cash by saving you work. In the same way organizing your desk may help you be more productive, saving your employer money, organizing your business information may help your business be more productive, saving the business money. And in the same way TxDOT uses data points to identify problem spots, you can use data points to analyze problem spots in your own business.

Process management applies to the business at all ends. And the profit’s in the process. Good technology can improve process; good process can improve profit; good profit is just plain great. For the transportation firm, custom technology prevents them from having to mine through data every time a particular piece of traffic data is needed. For the insurance agency, a well-built content management system (CMS), or a software that holds and manages your business information, saves employees a wealth of time and money by merely making their information easier to find on the fly – in addition to making it available anywhere and reducing overhead.

Good technology, good process. Good process, good profit. We love improving business process – and since it’s relevant anywhere, it’s a little hard to keep our minds off it sometimes…

Want more? Contact us here.

Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography.

Richard Veryard’s thought-provoking powerpoint “Technologies for Organizational Intelligence” claims that intelligent organizations:

• recognize that business opportunities are complex
• respond to them coherently
• pay attention to weak and strong signs of inefficiencies for the purpose of collective learning and innovation

Veryard stresses later that intelligence is vital to a business’ survival. That idea should not sound revolutionary, but provokes one to question if businesses frequently consider how well they’re working to understand themselves and improve their knowledge and efficiency in order to grow.

This is highly relevant in the context of IT Service Management (ITSM) – an introspective, process-focused approach to managing IT systems. IT professionals who care about ITSM try to stay informed about technology advances, ways to improve customer experience, and align IT with business needs. It’s the duty of those in ITSM to maintain and promote a healthy, innovative IT environment that fuels the innovative capabilities of the business as a whole.

Those ambitions correlate closely with the actions Veryard attributes to intelligent organizations. He exalts a sort of “collective learning and innovation,” in which those in the business continually collaborate in order to learn more about how they do things. Fixing problems and developing innovative ideas are both natural products of this introspection. Each, in turn, impact the end product offered to customers.

While it may be difficult at times to devote attention to efficiency, it’s vital to the continued growth of a business. After all, those who fail to fix their problems and innovate aren’t the ones we talk about ten years down the road.

So, how does a business make sure they’re “intelligent”? Veryard lists quite a few ways, including:

• Understanding that business environments are complex
• Approaching problems with rational, collective solutions
• Employing people and technology that works well together

The third remedy is the primary concern of ITSM. IT can build a foundation for organizational intelligence by implementing an enterprise-level platforming technology that can facilitate collaboration within the organization – especially if the platform is adopted across the entire enterprise.

Without an effective, efficient technology that integrates well with a business’ existing software, the collective effort toward ITSM growth is kept on the ground. Frequently gathering information that paints an accurate picture of performance requires predictable, repeatable processes that can be technologically executed. Such a technology drives consistent progress toward efficiency and innovation – and serves as part of the backbone of an intelligent organization.

As Veryard said in his presentation, intelligence is vital to survival. As introspective folks with technological literacy, those in ITSM can have a profound impact on the progress of their organization by leveraging technology to build an intelligent business.

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If you’re a large enterprise, you may be using different applications and processes to support local, national, and global initiatives. On those different levels, separate applications may be needed to manage unique sales, marketing, or IT processes.

The difference in processes, methodologies, and application tools may lead to inefficiencies in management, such as:

1. Higher cost of managing multiple applications
2. Lack of consistent governing structure
3. Inconsistent or incomplete performance measurements

A typical enterprise cannot usually leverage one application for sales, marketing, and IT purposes. Using multiple applications to manage different internal and customer-related processes is in most cases necessary to ensure efficiency and quality customer service. The problem, therefore, is not that the enterprise has too many applications to manage – but that the enterprise cannot effectively manage all of them without some sort of centralized documentation of each application’s attributes and processes.

Without a central location for application-based data, data gets stored at seemingly random locations throughout the enterprise’s storage and resource structure. While process and metric information about an enterprise’s European sales resides on one server, information about their European customer support system may reside somewhere else. This stratification and distance between processes can cause a number of problems in terms of efficiency:

• Difficult to apply Change Management to all enterprise applications
• Difficult to access application information at any given point
• Difficult to measure the efficiency of each application to ensure quality performance
• Difficult to identify and diagnose problems in a timely manner
• Difficult to understand how different business processes affect one another

This explains the need for a Centralized Process Repository. As we noted in our previous post, a Centralized Process Repository (CPR) is critical to the success of the enterprise’s process strategy. It stores the following information about each of the enterprise’s applications at the process level:

1. Resources required (software, equipment, personnel)
2. Cost (direct and indirect)
3. Owners and stakeholders
4. Applications enabled by the process
5. Separate processes effected or supported by the process
6. Data points that measure the process’ value to the organization
7. Frequency of execution
8. Details regarding how the processes is carried out

The enterprise may not be able to consolidate their applications into one larger application. They may also be unable to devote time to improving each one individually. Adopting a CPR, however, establishes a consistent framework for governing each application by consolidating all process data into one accessible location – requiring any change to a process to be documented by a governing entity. This ensures the accurate measurement of process performance, since performance data points and change updates are stored in one reliable location.

The CPR improves an enterprise’s process performance by maintaining the information needed to measure, improve, and control business processes. We emphasize this to our clients to ensure their success as an efficient enterprise. In addition, the CPR promotes an understanding of the cross-functional nature of the enterprise’s processes – encouraging cross-departmental collaboration by focusing on the relationships between internal processes, end-to-end.

Thirsty for more? Contact us here.

Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography.

By nature, process automation involves taking away human tasks and executing them with technology. Naturally, people can be sensitive to automated processes. They may become insecure about their job if they think tasks will be taken away from them.

These sensitivities and insecurities, however, aren’t always legitimate. They can be lessened if everyone involved in adopting process automation understood its purpose and benefit to the business.

Here are 4 misconceptions of process automation:

1. Process automation will replace me with a machine.
In truth, very rarely do workflows replace an entire human position within an organization. As we also say in Workflows 101, workflows execute non-value-adding steps that don’t involve highly-complex decisions, which require human effort.

Non-value-adding steps usually include tasks like organizing, filing, labeling, etc. Value-adding steps include content generation, customer interaction, and service development.

Ideally, each person within an organization will use their skills to add value to company services, or deliver value to customers. The business needs to be productive and efficient to maintain profit, and wants to ensure that employee time is being used efficiently – toward value-adding steps.

2. Process automation will increase mistakes.
Surely a computer can’t make better decisions than a human, right?

Actually, the decisions a computer makes are determined by humans. Workflow decision criteria is developed by folks who’ve studied how the organization operates in detail and determined which business processes could be automated – in part or in whole. Any mistake a workflow makes results from a flaw in decision logic – or something the logic couldn’t account for.

To make sure workflows remain useful over time, they should be observed regularly to ensure their logic and performance are effective. Workflows usually require tweaking as processes change to maintain success.

3. Process automation can’t do this as well as I can.
Again, that’s not the point. Workflows don’t perform tasks that you could do “well” as opposed to others. They weed out tasks that can be executed electronically to make employee productivity more efficient – saving the business money.

4. The implementation of a process automation system is too expensive to consider.
Yes, the implementation may be expensive – and may require you to purchase a software platform that can facilitate workflow technology.

But the worry here isn’t about the up-front cost. It’s about the ROI. The goal of process automation is to save a business time and money as months go by. A successful workflow implementation can make profit soar over time due to the time and energy saved by workflows.

We hope this gives you a clear take on what process automation means for business. Take a look at Workflows 101 more information.

In order to remain competitive, a firm’s IT environment must be aligned with the firm’s business strategy – meaning IT should share responsibility in delivering value to the customer.

This is why Change Management is so important: changes to the IT environment must not disrupt the value delivered to the customer. IT must maintain stability even during change. ITIL’s Change Management methodology provides a clear framework (with defined roles, responsibilities, and processes) that can facilitate success.

Change Management should be considered a major undertaking. Determining where your firm stands in terms of ITIL maturity and developing a realistic project plan will improve your ITIL effectiveness.

Here are 5 Change Management tips to consider:

1. What’s a change, exactly?
Reality check: changes happen all the time. Nearly everything in IT involves some sort of frequent change. That being said, it’s important to figure out just what you consider to be a change. You can then determine when to apply ITIL Change Management principles.

Every change (even small installations and deletions) should be handled in terms of Change Management. The smallest of changes could cause major disruptions if no one knows about them.

2. What, specifically, will Change Management accomplish for my organization?
It’s no surprise that some firms have trouble defining ITIL in general. Since ITIL methodology isn’t something you can learn on a coffee break, most IT and non-IT folks alike don’t have the time to study ITIL for days.

Even if someone understands ITIL, they may not understand how it applies to efficiency. Someone might think implementing Change Management will fix issues related to Release or Incident Management. Pinpointing what Change Management will accomplish for your organization is therefore vital to understanding what it’s actually doing – managing the oversight and approval aspects of the change process in a unique organization-specific environment.

3. Articulate the benefits of Change Management to each level of the organization.
This goes right along with our last tip. Once you pinpoint the applicative benefits Change Management will have for your organization, advertise them. Getting buy-in at every level of the organization is critical to the success of your ITIL implementation.

There are multiple stakeholder groups within every organization – that is, folks personally and organizationally affected by the change. They’ll want to know “what’s in it for me?” in order to judge whether they’re on board with the change. Presenting accurate change information tailored for each stakeholder fosters better accountability from stakeholder groups – and improves buy-in.

4. Don’t Buy a Tool Until You’ve Determined What You Need.
While it may make sense to buy software to guide your Change Management implementation, doing so before laying out your process framework is counter-productive.

A more productive approach includes determining your needs before adopting a tool, so you can better evaluate which tools fit your needs instead of adjusting your needs to your tool.

5. Use Change Management Success to Promote Other ITIL Initiatives.
Folks are usually familiar with the Change Management component of ITIL – and oblivious of its other processes. If you track your Change Management successes and gather supportive data from Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you can use success stories to promote the benefits of other ITIL processes like Release Management, Incident Management, etc.

One final tip: It’s worth noting the incredible value and need for leadership/executive support in the Change Management process. It’s important for company leadership to sell and support the change despite resistance in the company to organizational and cultural change. Often times, Change Management implementations are resisted since they uncover underlying issues that some within the company don’t want to uncover. Ultimately, though, Change Management helps make everyone proactive and out of the reactive, fire-fighting mode.

Thirsty for more? Contact us here.

Image courtesy of Patrick Lane Photography.

[important note, as of 4 Sept 2010: Google Wave will not be available as an end-user application after 31 December 2010.]

People have the tendency to judge a software by its user interface (UI).

Think about it. Most users probably don’t care about your network protocols or what your server topology is. Those users will, however, think it’s awesome to drag and drop documents and pictures from location to location. Most folks are used to this since most of them interact with Facebook, Twitter, and all the like. They’ll probably think it’s cool.

Since we use SharePoint to execute most of our services, it has been brought to our attention many times that the current version of SharePoint lags heavily in UI from this perspective, unless you do a load of custom development work for the sole purpose of aesthetic improvement. SharePoint 2010 is promising a well-crafted UI improvement, in addition to a handful of Outlook revisions– but for now, SharePoint users may still gripe about the lack of 2.0 usability. They may venture to ask “how will SharePoint fare once Google Wave is released?”

Google Wave is not a competitor of SharePoint. It is not comparable to enterprise collaboration software. Wave will, as an open source development platform, bring great innovations that may be integrated into the SharePoint– but doesn’t have the scope of capabilities (process automation, workflow execution, data repository) SharePoint has to improve enterprise collaboration. Perhaps the employees griping about SharePoint’s “Windows 98-like interface” need to learn a bit more about what their software actually does.

If Wave should be compared to anything, it should be compared to Microsoft Outlook. It’s a collaborative space to exchange messages and files, and functions chiefly as an evolution of what we know as email.

Some of Wave’s key promises:

• Open source: Wave code will be open source, to, in Google’s words, “foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.”
• Wiki functionality: Anything written in a wave can be edited by an authorized person. You can correct information or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.
• “Embeddability:” Waves can be embedded into any blog or website.
• Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook application, developers can build their own apps within “waves.”
• “On-the-fly” translation: Google Wave can translate sentences into other languages as you type them. It can also correct your spelling as you write.
• Drag-and-drop file sharing: No attachments; just drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access.

Wave’s integration of feeds and UI capabilities are without a doubt impressive. Their innovative HTML 5 capabilities may very well be integrated into software like SharePoint down the road. But the purpose of Wave is not to compete in the enterprise collaboration market. Their purpose is to revolutionize the way people collaborate online through real-time, open-source technology.

But what about Basecamp? It’s an undeniably effective project management tool that we endorse for pure project management purposes. But how does it fare against Wave and SharePoint?

It doesn’t. At least not in the way most think it does. All three of these tools can facilitate project management. All three, however, are ultimately very different.

• Basecamp is a superb project management tool if you’re looking for an easy-to-use tool that integrates well with social networking and mobile phones, offers online storage of documents for collaboration, and connects those working on a project in an organized way. These capabilities are remarkably value for project efficiency; Basecamp’s built a great tool. If you’re looking for anything outside of these capabilities, though, you’re looking in the wrong place.
• Wave, as we’ve said, is an evolution of email. It’s open-source nature and real-time abilities offer superb capabilities that can be used inside Wave or dropped into other sites. Wave isn’t as project management-focused as Basecamp, however, and doesn’t compare to SharePoint either.
• SharePoint, borrowing Microsoft’s words, “helps improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.” SharePoint is a content management server that allows for the custom development of workflows for process automation. It’s an enterprise collaboration and IT platform. It’s not Basecamp or Google Wave.

So: Wave, Basecamp, or SharePoint? Our answer is… yes.

Thirsty for more? Contact us here.

Photo by Brian Nunnery, Praecipio Consulting.

Atlassian’s Jira has proven itself a leader in the issue tracking market in the last five years.

With 12,000 customers in over 100 countries, Jira allows enterprises to record and monitor every issue a user identifies until the issue is resolved from an innovative, customizable interface. It allows users to track issues through a wide variety of contextual filters. It makes issue tracking easy and efficient.

But considering Jira a collaborative software? Surely you can’t be serious.

Consider Jira’s project management capabilities. The Jira user can browse projects and measure progress by viewing:

• Recent changes to issue status
• Charts and reports articulating recently changed statuses, recently viewed issues, etc
• Planning/task boards for project management via GreenHopper.

GreenHopper allows the Jira user to keep up with tasks (issues, requirements, user stories, and virtually anything you want) by representing each task as a color-coded on-screen index card. Each card estimates and describes the effort required to complete each task, and can be dragged around the screen for customized organization.

Jira’s GreenHopper also offers users the Sprint Planning Board and Charting Progress to keep employees on the same page.

Employees using Jira can constantly update the progress of a variety of tasks. That kind of clarity– always having a go-to, updated project status– is worth its weight in gold in the scope of Business Process Management (BPM) due to its efficiency. It’s accomplished with collaboration through Jira software.

Jira’s collaborative abilities only raise the appeal it’s built on its issue tracking capabilities. While it’s not a SharePoint/document sharing-type tool, we consider it a valuable tool for enterprise collaboration in issue tracking.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

The Cost of Quality (COQ) business model describes a method of increasing profits without increasing revenues.

Here’s how it works: COQ increases profit by shrinking business costs. If your business has a 5% profit margin, for example – and you decrease costs by 5% – you’ve doubled your profits. That’s simple enough, but how do you decrease costs?

COQ identifies the importance of shrinking costs without taking the usual cost-cutting measures like not buying everyone’s favorite pens or not stocking refreshments in the break room — the “let’s avoid morale buzz-kills to save a few bucks” approach to increasing profit. Instead, COQ promotes lessening mistakes and increasing business process efficiency.

Companies adopt and tweak COQ to reflect their business goals and in turn their profitability. The model applies to not-for-profit businesses too: budgets are tight; grants, revenues, or contributions may not increase, but the same valuable services need to be delivered with less and less money, right?

COQ is made up of three elements: conformance costs, non-conformance costs, and opportunity costs. We’ll explain these before we explain the rest of what the graphic illustrates:

Conformance Costs

Non-Conformance Costs

Opportunity Costs

Notice these three cost categories are not associated with the cost of producing the output. Materials needed to assemble a product (labor, supplies, etc) are not included. The three elements merely reflect the costs associated with the business process. As we always say, “the profit’s in the process.” The efficiency of your business processes determines your efficiency as a business. If you’re going to maximize your efficiency and profitability, you need a sound understanding of the cost of quality.

Think about it: process is where value is added and where profit is made. Consumers don’t squeeze oranges to make juice anymore. Okay, maybe on rare occasion, but who cuts down trees and processes timber as a raw material to make paper?

The cost of quality is associated with the cost incurred to ensure process outputs (products and services) meet customer requirements. For example, let’s say Company A manufactures pens, a process that takes ten steps to complete. About half of the time, the process works effectively, and high-quality pens are made. The other half of the time, however, is plagued by faulty manufacturing— lackluster execution in the assembly process. As a result, Company A has to keep half of its pens in its shop for a bit longer for fixing/repairing, incurring non-conformance costs. This leads to a lack of consistency. Ultimately, this waste is passed onto the customer with an increased price per unit and/or inferior product— making it more and more difficult to compete.

That’s why COQ’s biggest cost adjustment occurs in reducing non-conformance costs— tightening the process and ensuring customer requirements are met. This may require spending extra money to do some work over again.

Now, to run through the graphic:

• Conformance costs are important and help ensure a business’ success and stability. when optimizing your business, conformance costs should stay the same or in many cases increase.
• Non-conformance costs, as we’ve mentioned, need to drop significantly— though you can never expect to be without them, strive to get rid of them.
• Opportunity cost is the value of the next best choice. It’s the “what could have been.” If a business is suffering from non-conformance costs, the “what could have been,” is higher in the left portion of the graphic, where non-conformance costs are much higher. If a business is succeeding financially, there is little “what could have been,” therefore reducing the opportunity cost.
• Operating costs are constant. They’re the costs of a business’ building, utilities, licenses, etc— which fluctuate, but not enough to factor into this model.
• Profit looks like this: $$$. Reducing non-conformance generates more $$$.

So, how do you reduce non-conformance? Remember: the $$$’s are in the process.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

Monitoring, analyzing, and planning ahead are key principles of Business Process Management (BPM), and logically so. Businesses are responsible for their success, and every step of every process they conduct should ideally provide value to both the business and its customers. To assess this, a business must be concerned with Process Value Analysis—a qualitative analysis procedure allowing a business to apply questions to specific process steps to measure their success.

It is best to consider the term “value” in this context as referring to the value a customer expects and is willing to pay for. That value originates from the steps and processes a business performs to create the value—what some call a value chain, meaning every step within a process adds some amount of value to the final product or service.

Again, each step of a process should ideally provide value to both the business and its customers—this is what Process Value Analysis is meant to measure. Obviously this is not always clear-cut, since some steps don’t directly add value to a service but rather facilitate the adding of value. Those steps, though, are considered value-enabling steps—and still, though indirectly, give value to the final product. Non-value-adding steps are steps that have been incorporated into a process for some reason or another, but no longer add any value to the final product by any means. It is these non-value-adding (and money-eating) steps that should be eliminated.

Process Value Analysis is all about asking questions—after all, tough questions typically reveal the most accurate answers. These three categories and accompanying questions are useful for describing the types of value a specific process step may have:

Value added to customers: steps that directly impact customer satisfaction

• Do customers recognize the value of the process step?
• Does the step specifically impact the service requirements of its customers?
• Is the step necessary to meet the timelines and expectations of those served?
• Are customers willing to pay for this step?

Value added to operations: steps that support the ability to deliver services to the people served

• Does the step meet legal, health, safety, or environmental regulatory criteria?
• Is this process step being performed efficiently, or can it be refined?
• Could this process step be eliminated if a preceding step were performed differently?
• Could a technology application eliminate or automate this step?
• Does this process step fulfill an external regulatory requirement?
• Most importantly, would eliminating this step impact the quality of the service positively or negatively?

Non-value-added: steps that could be eliminated or changed without harming service levels or the organization

• What specific direct or indirect value does this step have for customers or operations?

Praecipio Consulting collaboratively assesses clients’ needs, priorities, and budget to improve clients’ processes and business operations. A huge part of our service is analyzing our clients’ process value and developing consistent, efficient task-flows to monitor the success of specific process steps. We believe Process Value Analysis is essential for maintaining a competitive advantage in business and dedicate our expertise to enabling our clients to get the greatest value out of their operations.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

Just what is a Configuration Management Database (CMDB)?

For starters, it’s not a database—or, rather, not merely a database. A CMDB is a virtual warehouse holding information from every nook and cranny of an information system. CMDBs show which system components are needed to create efficient business processes. It can be seen as both an encyclopedia of IT services and a DNA map of a business’ IT environment. It’s a decision support tool.

ITIL v2 defined a CMDB as “a database that contains all relevant details of each CI (configuration item) and details of the important relationships between CIs.” ITIL v3 now defines a CMDB as “a database used to store Configuration Records throughout their lifecycle. The Configuration Management System maintains one or more CMDBs, and each CMDB stores attributes of CIs, and relationships with other CIs.”

A product of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), CMDBs are important because they align technology with business process. An example of this? It’s common sense that without timely information, bad decisions can be made by the business unintentionally. ITIL-based CMDBs control workflows, and use a workflow to manage and collect process metrics and present them logically and accurately.

While there are many variations of CMDB workflows, five common high-level steps include:

• Identification: To put it simply, “identifying” IT components and their inclusion in the CMDB.
• Status: Recording of the status of all CIs in the CMDB, and keeping them updated.
• Control: The management of CIs, indicating who is authorized to ‘change’ each one.
• Status: Recording of the status of all CIs in the CMDB, and keeping them updated.
• Verification: Reviewing data to make sure the CMDB is accurate and timely.

A properly implemented CMDB system can save an enterprise quite a bit of cash. There are, however, some direct overhead costs associated with the data capture process itself. The CMDB’s ROI will depend on the quality and reusability of the data it monitors, company size, and business strategy.

The CMDB bottom line: the more automated and consistent asset management methodologies become, the higher the ROI will climb. CMDBs allow businesses to become more efficient internally and more effective in their market.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a comprehensive documentation of best practices in IT Service Management; the library consists of a compilation of texts providing guidance for the successful delivery of IT services. ITIL was developed due to business organization’s growing dependency on IT.

This dependency comes as organizations are implementing the use of innovative information technologies to simplify and speed-up business processes ultimately lowering costs—dramatically increasing the need for high-quality IT services. We provide a well-designed implementation framework for the delivery of operations improvements and initiatives based on ITIL best practices. We’ll help you go from ITIL theory to the practice of implementing an IT Service Management Solution.

Our steps:

• Assessment – Define and prioritize
• IT Management Strategy – Determine current and future needs
• Service portfolio definition – Catalog and understand services
• Solution design – Ensure integrated approach solves problems
• Solution deployment – Deliver, transfer and transition

Your results:

• IT-Business Alignment
• Cost savings
• Operational Excellence and Maturity
• Maximized ROI on Business’ Investments in IT
• Predictability

We love helping others—especially with IT.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

Business process management (BPM) promotes effectiveness and efficiency within a business. BPM applies to any practical process within a business.

An important BPM principle: good processes bring efficient workflow and increased revenue; bad processes bring inefficient and decreased revenue. If you put garbage into a process, you can expect to get garbage out of it. Garbage in, garbage out. If you put quality in, however…you get the idea. So, how do you ensure your processes are successful? Predictability and repeatability are great qualities to shoot for. We’ll explain them in a bit.

Monitoring the effectiveness of your business processes regularly is important. It improves your business value and reduces costs. Identifying potential or actual bottlenecks in a process’ human-to-human, human-to-system, or system-to-system workflows can save your business money by keeping costs down!

A huge contributing factor to good BPM is a process’ integration with technology—a tactic the team at Praecipio Consulting is well-versed in developing and implementing. We are capable and experienced in adopting appropriate software as well as developing new, custom software that enables our clients’ business processes to be directly executed in an efficient, organized manner.

Software can improve business process. That’s not a new fact to anyone. We develop intuitive software that uses services in connected applications to consolidate and perform business operations including issue tracking (e.g. tracking orders/deliveries, pending invoices, service requests, etc.) with ease—streamlining our clients’ BPM and improving their connections with their customers.

When working with our clients, Praecipio Consulting takes into strong consideration two important factors in BPM technology:  repeatability and predictability.

• Predictability. The business environment is rarely predictable, so it is important to make sure the processes your business does have control over are as predictable and reliable as possible. Now, market conditions can vary widely, so it is also important to ensure these processes are flexible enough to adjust to inevitable market variables.

• Repeatability. Business processes generally include tasks in production, collaboration, administration, and miscellaneous activities. Production and administration are very valuable to a business, and also very repeatable. Collaboration is also very valuable, but is not always repeatable. Miscellaneous activities are usually not valuable to a business, and are rarely consistent enough to be repeatable.

We consider ourselves successful only when we develop a BPM system capable of managing both repeatable and non-repeatable processes—an organized, financially feasible system to manage both high-value and low-value processes. Such innovation puts us and our clients on the cutting-edge of success in business process.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.

Microsoft SharePoint is debatably the best business information and document management platform on the market—that is, if it is used correctly.

Microsoft’s goal for SharePoint was to provide a simple, familiar, consistent user experience, integrating a variety of applications (email, document storage, data sheets, etc).  Supporting embedded process management modules and the ability to host web sites that access shared workspaces, SharePoint’s management platform can potentially save businesses money by:

• reducing man hours, increasing the use of electronic forms and allowing faster locating of information
• reducing printing, paper and associated costs by increasing the use of electronic forms
• reducing response times and problems associated with lags by allowing employees to have instant access to shared, well-organized data
• reducing IT support and training costs by offering such a versatile and inclusive platform.

Praecipio Consulting has taken full advantage of SharePoint’s capabilities; for this reason, it has proved remarkably valuable to our business operations. We have deliverable reference, technical, and white paper documents stored for easy, simple open-source access. We also boost our employee productivity by simplifying everyday tasks like reporting common business activities and issue tracking. We even base our accounting operations in SharePoint by allowing our employees to log hourly time and company expenses, governing these operations by making use of SharePoint’s ability to specifically restrict the privileges of individual employees. These restrictions can also be imposed on the editing of important business documents—SharePoint allows authors to create and submit content for approval and scheduled deployment to the Internet. We can therefore effectively manage and re-purpose our content to gain increased business value. Our mindful leverage of SharePoint’s abilities and applications has helped us benefit practically and financially as a business. We value our learned expertise and best practices, and hope to assist other businesses in benefiting from SharePoint in the ways appropriate for them. However, again, SharePoint will likely prove useful to a business if they use it to its full capacity.

SharePoint can be an expensive investment when purchased through Microsoft. Server license prices increase incrementally depending on the size of your business; pricing can steep dramatically with larger companies. In addition to setup and purchase costs, of course, one must consider the cost of training employees to use it and the cost of support from Microsoft (given its clout, Microsoft is able to demand a high price for its support services, which is otherwise unheard of).

In order to save our clients money, however, Praecipio Consulting offers SharePoint hosting servcies. In the past we have driven our clients’ Microsoft Exchange costs down to an affordable monthly price and now offer our clients affordable SharePoint/Microsoft Exchange services. Finding an intelligent, affordable, professional SharePoint hosting provider can be difficult and nerve-wracking, but Praecipio Consulting’s new service provides our clients with a convenient, cost-efficient hosting of their SharePoint instances.

Now, another concern businesses considering SharePoint may have:  SharePoint works best with the Microsoft family; it was meant to integrate the Windows OS, MS Office, Internet Explorer, etc. If a business is looking to collaborate with traveling teams, clients, and partners, they must keep their fingers crossed in hope that such cross-platform interaction will work smoothly. Microsoft obviously desires and nearly induces a full commitment from its customers, and logically has no reason to design its services to run quickly and smoothly in non-Microsoft environments. Fortunately for our clients, we have the ability to implement other frameworks into our SharePoint platform in the event a client operates in a non-Microsoft environment—a huge asset that sets us apart from other SharePoint hosting providers.

If your business plans to take full advantage of SharePoint’s advanced abilities—SharePoint can become a valuable asset to your business and its ability to collaborate with open-source technology.

Would you like more from us? Contact us here.