Customer Reviews

Achieving IT Service Quality: The Opposite of Luck

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Introduction:
There has been a lot of press recently on IT Service Management (ITSM) and its focus on the customer's perspective of IT service delivery. In addition, frameworks like ITIL, Six Sigma and TQM have been espoused as ways to improve the quality of IT services. However, there's a large gap between reading (and understanding) any framework and implementing it's philosophies. This gap is what this book nicely addresses. The title "The Opposite of Luck" is a catchy reference to (the perception of) what is unfortunately common in some shops today.

For anyone that works in IT and is responsible for the quality of systems that the organization delivers, this book is a great handbook on service delivery. It's an easy read, provides many real-world examples, and steps the reader through incremental improvements -- starting with Crisis Management and culminating in Perpetual Motion.
Along the way the authors offer many scenarios that will be familiar to IT practitioners along with analogies in non-IT fields that help the reader relate. There is also pragmatic advice against trying to "do it all", and a noteworthy chapter on how to address the "people" issues that are so often overlooked. In short, a concise, helpful, and practical guide to IT Service Management.

How I came upon the book:
I actually met one of the authors, Christophe DeMoss, at the SIMposium conference earlier this year and was sharing with him some of the difficulties I was facing finding any actionable information related to improving IT service delivery. That's when he showed me a copy of the book. I was hooked when one of the first examples in the book hit close to home because we had just been through the scenario: how a glitch with a WAN compression device caused a service interruption.

What I liked about the book:
Those of us who have had systems in production are all familiar with system outages that impact business operation.
The resulting all-hands-on-deck response and SWAT team mentality not only engenders the "culture of Heroism", but, often what we see is that after the initial problem is resolved, often the team disengages, and, because of limited resources, are soon knee-deep in other projects.

What the book does well is help guide the IT practitioner on how to break the cycle of fire-fighting and be part of world-class Service Delivery Organization. One key component the authors propose is having the right metrics around D-R-E-S: Downtime, Response Time, Error Rate, and Scalability.

I very much enjoyed the analogies used in to equate the contents of the chapter with non-IT fields. Ex. Crisis Management = Fire Departments; Problem Solving = CSI investigations; Prevention = Health Practitioners.
The organization of the book is stellar: in-chapter table of contents at the start and summary checklists at the end of each chapter helped me navigate through the book and retain key learnings.

There are also numerous examples throughout the book: an incident log template, an entire chapter devoted to presenting data (Power of pictures) and a useful appendix with still more sample documents.
Many recognizable topics are also interspersed in the material including SMART goals; the Five Why's and, the ever-present, "It's the Network's Fault."

Summary:
The authors provide a framework for achieving excellent IT Service Quality.
Their own Production Maturity Model (PMM) is similar to the CMM 5 levels; their MPIP - (measure, prevent, improve, publish) is analogous to the Six-Sigma DMAIC process. What I found was a simplified synthesis of industry best-practices, coupled with authors' experiences, resulting in a well-organized, and palatable, handbook for IT professionals.

It's not an easy path to help your organization through all the levels. As someone once said, "Buying the book is not going to help you lose weight. You actually have to GO on the diet to lose weight". Similarly, following up and actually taking the steps to improve the maturity of your organization is going to take some work. At the same time, one has to pace oneself through the entire process.

Suggestions:
1) I think that having an index - in an otherwise very well laid out book - would aid tremendously when using the book as a reference guide.
2) The Business Impact Index could have used a little more exploration. Given that the thrust of ITSM is centered around the business' view of IT, it would behoove us to learn how to better to translate IT terms into business terms. Granted, those translations are going to vary based on the business, but more insight from the authors' would have helped solidify that concept.

Well the book was a very easy and enjoyable read. I found it to be very entertaining (I very much like working in Information Technology) and very exciting (did I mention I like IT). I have been in the IT business for a long-long time, spending time in some small mom and pop IT shops as well as a few large corporate IT enterprises. I have come to the conclusion that they are all very similar on one hand but vastly different on the other hand. Every one of these environments, large and small, requires a baseline foundation in which to begin with and then to build upon. This is usually done thru a trial and error process which will become overly painful not only for the IT professional but for the businesses the IT department is supporting. There is one way to avoid that pain and that is to learn from others, using their experiences to avoid those pitfalls while gaining an understanding of what really works and the reason why it works.

By writing this book, the three authors openly admit to having made their share of mistakes or minimally were witness to mistakes being made by others. Mistakes may be a strong word and I think a better way of putting it is "not being prepared" or "not having the answer" in any given situation. It is in these times that the pain is felt as a lack of confidence occurs and the second guessing begins.

The book walks you thru everyday situations that an IT professional or organization will find themselves in. They relate these situations using some real life scenarios that we all can gain a visual from; a fireman, a restaurant and a SWAT team. These real life scenarios allow us to understand clearly what is happening, the importance of it and the disappointment we would feel if these situations occurred to us in our daily lives. The book then explains some processes that could/should be incorporated as the situation is occurring in a 'reactive mode' and even some other processes that, if they had been used as part of the daily routine, could have avoided the situation all together or a 'preventative mode'.

Certainly every IT organization will experience some level of crisis, some situations being worse than others. They are reactive, damaging and will eventually turn emotional if not controlled. It is in these times that the IT professional is truly tested. Their decision making process, their ability to communicate, their ability to instill confidence and their ability to lead. This book describes how these three individuals approached those situations and yes they share some embarrassing moments #ie; customer telling them of the problem or some crippling performance that they, as IT professionals, did not know existed#, how they reacted to these mo

After being in IT for over 20 years, I never thought I'd see the day that there was a book about IT service quality that not only "made sense" but was entertaining to boot!

The authors approach IT service quality from a REAL perspective. You're with them, in the trenches, hands-on, and you'll find yourself nodding your head in agreement as you go through each chapter. You'll see yourself in the book and recognize your own mistakes. You'll see your clients or customers and shake your head in disbelief that there are more like that out there. That's the amazing way this book was written.

But it doesn't end there. Unlike other technical books, Oleson, Hagan, and DeMoss don't just hand you a bit of dry techno-babble as a solution, they give you practical, real solutions. As if you were standing in their shoes at the time and experiencing it in real time. You're in their heads, asking the questions, seeking the solution, and questioning the processes.

This book is for anyone who has ever been involved in IT or who desires to make a career out of it. In fact, I think it should be required reading in any course on the subject! I know I'll be recommending it to my students!

Achieving IT Service Quality: The Opposite of Luck can benefit the tech department in a large enterprise, down to the independent repair tech. Those who are knowledgeable with ITIL and Six Sigma will recognize certain procedures in the book although not often called out by name. And that's another refreshing angle in this book. Instead of explaining the theory of "Root Cause", the authors give you a real life example of what it means and how to use it!

Although I'm a tech and a technology instructor, I do read novels and regular books. I found myself laughing when I started this book because I found it so riveting, I couldn't put it down! To me, it was as good as any thriller I've read in non-fiction. And that says a lot about a book that covers technology as subject matter.

From chapter-to-chapter, every character in this book is relevant, timely, and tells a story. The story is that IT service quality can be achieved and it's not by luck. By sharing their practical experiences Chris Oleson, Mike Hagan, and Christophe DeMoss have opened a door to IT service quality that allows even the novice to walk through and experience it first hand. You'll read about failures as well as successes and in every story, there's a lesson learned.

I cannot say enough about the merits of this book. Even technical writers should give it a read and learn something from the author's writing style. It's THAT good!