What is ITIL Service Delivery? – BMC Blogs

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This blog post walks you through what ITSM and ITIL are, what an IT Service is, what types of services are available, and the evolution of ITIL service delivery.

IT Service Management (ITSM) are the plans, activities, and processes an organization used to design, deliver, and manage service delivery for its customers.

itil-v3_01

Source: http://www.adneurope.com/index.php?id=53&L=2

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a framework for implementing ITSM and the framework is based on a set of best practices evolved from experience.

An IT service, as described in ITIL v3 framework, is “a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes customers want to achieved without the ownership of specific costs and risks.”  In other words, delivering something customers value where the customer cannot or does not want to own  and perform itself.

Four categories of IT services are described: business process services, IT skill services, application services, and infrastructure services.

The final definition of ITIL service delivery in the post is:

ITIL service delivery occurs when an IT organization performs an IT service for a customer (business process, IT skills, application, or infrastructure service) that the customer values and desires and that the customer cannot or does not want to own and perform itself.  Services are designed, deployed, delivered, improved, and retired by using the ITIL v3 service lifecycle.

Click the link to read the full article.

Source: What is ITIL Service Delivery? – BMC Blogs

[Featured image courtesy of Flickr: Poptech]

5 Key Performance Indicators for a High-Performance Service Desk – BMC Blogs

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Blaine Bryant, Director, IT Service Management and IT Finance at BMC Software, explains his choice of five key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep your high-performance service desk on track.

There are tons of KPIs to choose from and these five are the foundational.  In the article, he provides the details of how the KPI is calculated and the target range.  Worth the read.

1. Increase/Decrease of Incident Re-Assignments

Incidents and requests that are moved among support teams take longer to resolve. Manage your teams to ensure that these are forwarded to the correct support group the first time by updating work logs and following incident management processes and best practices.

2. Decrease of Incorrectly Assigned Incidents

An incorrectly routed incident wastes everyone’s time and delays time to resolution. Again, manage this count downward by retraining service desk staff on incident management processes and best practices.

 3. Increase in Incidents Responded within Target

Your responsiveness to reported incidents is a critical factor in both customer satisfaction and the credibility of IT among business users. Make sure you’re meeting expectations by hitting defined service level targets the vast majority of the time, and work to continually improve your success rate.

 4. Increase in Incidents Resolved within Target

There may be no more important metric than your ability to fix problems as quickly as you’ve promised to. This metric validates your core effectiveness as a service desk in resolving incidents within defined service level targets.

5. Reduction in Aging Incidents by Priority (Backlog)

Your backlog should keep you up at night—it might well be costing your business users some sleep, too. Clear out aging incidents (defined as those more than 14 days old) to keep users satisfied and avoid high support time and cost.

Source: 5 Key Performance Indicators for a High-Performance Service Desk – BMC Blogs

Three Requirements for Consulting Success

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Helping Hand - wikimedia.org

Photo credit: Wikipedia

 

The first requirement is key – be different.

What do you do and how is that different than other doing the same thing.

The article, The Three Requirements for Consulting Success per Deloitte Consulting CEO Jim Moffatt – Forbes gets you to think about how can I ensure I don’t end up “competing for consulting work on price.” Answering this question gets you started.

You need to know how you can translate your difference into solving a client’s problem in an elegant way.  You need to consider your interpersonal skills.  In “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” Marshall Goldsmith reminds us that successful people sometimes have blind spots about a part of our personality that is preventing us from getting to the next level.  Work on this as well, and watch what happens.

The other two requirements are be strong by having a partner or ally and be committed to customer satisfaction, continuous improvement and business development

Dr. Amy Cuddy - flickr

Power Poses – Feel More Confident Now

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Can the way you hold your body or move, have measurable affects on how you feel? Absolutely and Dr. Amy Cuddy has research to back it up. Dr. Cuddy is social psychologist, teaches at the Harvard Business School, and studies our perceptions of others and how others influence us.

Fake it until you make it works!  There is evidence to back it up as a useful strategy (for more details see “Power Postures Can Make You Feel More Powerful” (WIRED Science, May 15, 2012.)

The first video is a five minute overview and the second video is a 17 minute presentation about the idea that we can change our feelings about our own status by changing the positions of our bodies.

What do you think?

[Featured image courtesy of Flickr: Poptech]

Tips for finding files Windows 7

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Tips for finding files.  There are some new qualifiers to learn to be effective searching in Windows V7.  The advanced search examples from the article were:

size:>=3mb <=9mb

author:(Yatri OR Geek)

modified:January..yesterday

type:music bitrate:>=160kbps

Remedy ARS 7.x LoadRunner | Kiranbadi1991’s Blog

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Information on how to get LoadRunner to work with Remedy was tough to find. A couple of post on Kiranbadi1991’s Blog explained a lot.

The post, Little Fun playing Remedy ARS 7.x version with LoadRunner 9.x–Part 1 covers the APIs used and describing the ideal recording settings for LoadRunner.  An explanation of the benefits of recording in URL mode, with headers, not to comment out cookies, and not to underestimate the value of understanding the application and what happens when a button is clicked or make a selection from a drop down menu.

An example of typical code is provided and explained.

Part 2 in the series refers to the post, VuGen scripting for BMC Remedy Action Request System 7.1 by Stuart Moncrieff where he covers how he got VuGen in LoadRunner to work with Remedy 7.1. The tech tip covers recording and script generation, backchannel requests, error messages and verification, some code snippets, and correlation.

A comment on September 27, 2016 at 11:07 pm from Sudeep Dutt said “I have worked on BMC Remedy ARS 7.5 and the above methods work perfectly for scripting via HP Loadrunner v12.53 with Web (HTTP/HTML) protocol”.

Back to part 2 in the series.  This post discusses the errors most frequently encountered. Those errors were:

1. Authentication failed: This error can happen for many reasons. Repeated login with the same users with proper logout lead to the authentication failure message. This message is good to have as global verification. Once user sees this message he need to start the clean iteration again. Second option is to ask DBA to clean the user session from the backend. Both can be done.

2. Network protocol/data error when performing data operation: This message comes when we have either the failed correlation or for some reasons post request gets corrupted. This message is triggered from the backend database. Your backchannel request may succeed but for some reason Database might not send you the required information. To debug this error, one has to start with error code which comes with this message. Its normally 9095. This message can also come under load. So its good to have this text in either content check or global verification point.

3. Session is invalid. Please contact administrator: This message can come under load and it could indicate the performance issue. So having this text in content check or global verification really helps. One point to be noted here is that this message is no way related to failed correlation. Remedy is complex systems and session needs to be maintained across various layers. Sometimes inaccurate timeout setting set up in the various layers often trigger this message. One has to check the error code which comes along with it for further debugging.

4. Message not found: This is message which comes when either your post request is incomplete or your post request sends the hardcoded data which is not present in the backend database. We need to remember that most backchannel requests work like query,so when we get this message it means that our request succeeded but for some reason backend database executed the query which post request had and it did not fetch any data. Its good to have this message in content check or global verification point.

5. User is currently connected from another machine: Whenever we get this message, it means that user is locked. Reasons for locking could be either license issue or session issue. Users with floating license frequently get this message in case session management is not clean. This could be performance issue or functional issue.