On my second trip down under, I joined the PACRIM team in the city of Sydney for the second time. On this trip, I was able to visit the botanical gardens and see parts of the city I wasn’t able to explore on my first visit.
This year I facilitated a roundtable discussion on Choosing a Service Management Strategy for Your Company and another panel discussion on the Future of the Service Desk. My keynote this year was High Impact Leadership. I also did a second session on Preparing for the Impact of Technology. When another speaker didn’t show, I was asked to fill in and did a second presentation on Everything I Ever Learned About Management, I Learned from the Movies.
Also, I conducted two 1/2-day pre-conference workshops. The morning session was on Eliminate Incidents Before they Occur: Strategies for Implementing Reactive and Proactive Problem Management and Manage Service Change and Deployment: Integrating Change, Release and Deployment, and Service Asset Configuration.
Topic Overview
High Impact Leadership (Keynote)
Why do some IT organizations or teams flourish, consistently exceeding goals, and other teams flounder, often falling short of the projected expectations? They use the same tools, draw from the same employee pool, deploy the same processes, and serve the same customers, yet some teams consistently produce lower employee turnover and higher customer value. Why? All too often in our industry, we are given tools to ‘manage’ our staff, yet very little training or tools are offered to help us ‘lead’ our staff. Whatever your type of environment, this session will be informative, entertaining and motivating. It is time for you to look at how you lead, tap into your core values and strengths and lead your team and your organization to a higher level of performance and success. The session covers five fundamental concepts of high impact leadership:
- Know your own voice
- Inspire a shared vision
- Challenge the process
- Empower others to act
- Encourage the heart
This session is highly interactive and will challenge your beliefs and tap into your inner strengths.
Everything I Ever Learned About Management I Learned from the Movies (Keynote)
Motivation is more than just a feeling. Managers have to create the right work environment that inspires leadership, motivation, and satisfaction. In this session, we explore vital motivational tactics in the workplace through lessons learned from the movies. From short movie clips, you will explore crucial motivational tactics and change the way you view difficult situations. Develop leaders, not followers. Create a workplace where everyone wants to work and enjoys serving your customers.
Preparing for the Impact of New Technology
Your help desk probably hums along pretty well, logging and resolving voice and data issues. But with contact center technologies such as CTI, VoiceXML, and Voice over IP, things look different. The problems, resolutions, and owners can change. Attend this session to hear what the new technologies mean for your help desk and how you can prepare for the changes ahead. Session overview:
- Best Practices for Technology Implementation
- Processes
- Metrics
- Defining Customer Impact
- Understanding Customer View
- Define Requirements
- Define Organizational Priority of Requirements
- RFP Process
- Tips for Working with Vendors
- Technology Trends
- What’s Hot
- Summary & Questions
Eliminate Incidents BEFORE They Occur: Strategies for Implementing Reactive and Proactive Problem Management (Workshop)
Problem Management can drive value to the business by eliminating failures to the infrastructure and by preventing incidents and problems from occurring through analysis of historical data and trend analysis. This workshop investigates the core requirements of problem management including its relationship to incident management and the incident/problem/change lifecycle. We look at a case study implementation of the ITIL problem management process and illustrate how to map out problem management utilizing swim-lane or cross-functional diagrams. All key technology interfaces will be depicted along with the critical function of the technical support partners throughout the problem management process. A focus will be placed on developing strong internal communication and managing the change to the IT culture. Technical Support Partner’s roles and responsibilities are defined. Strategies for effective Proactive Problem Management will be demonstrated and explored.
Manage Service Transition: Integrating Change, Release and Deployment, and Service Asset and Configuration (Workshop)
Once a service has been designed, it is important that it be built, tested, and released into the live environment as successfully as possible. The organization must develop processes to manage and assess the change, standardize processes for the build test and release, and prepare the organization to use and support the new service. All of these processes rely on the accuracy of the Configuration Management system. This session evaluates how to integrate these three core Service Transition processes into your organization. This session will explore:
- The Service Transition phase of the lifecycle
- Change Management Overview
- Release and Deployment Overview
- Configuration Management Overview
- Implementing Change, Release and Deployment, and Configuration