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ITIL Consulting:

ITIL Expert®

Strategy, Assessment, Design,

Implementation

Accredited ITIL Training:

ITSM Academy GEM Partner
ITIL Version 2 and 3

The Adaptive Coach

Executives, Managers, Small Business Owners, Consultants, Coaches, Project Managers and others

Team Building and Group Coaching

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One thing I love to do is combine training and consulting. These days it’s hard to find an experienced ITIL consultant who is also an accredited ITIL trainer. My consulting clients love it because I can provide effective knowledge transfer. My training clients love it because I share stories of the experiences of 10 years of design and implementation projects.  And I’m still consulting, so the stories are fresh and real. Get a trained adult educator with a track record of higher-than-average pass rates, who also knows how to make it work across industry segments and has been there and done that.

What do you think of ITIL Version 3? I’ve been teaching Version 3 Foundation, Foundation Bridge, RCV and OSA.  The reactions people have to the new model are a mix of “this is sensible” and “too much information”. I’d love to know what you think. Follow me on Twitter and leave me a direct message about it!

Thank you to my students in the latest RCV class for giving me an average 4.8 out of 5 satisfaction rating! And I was very proud that you all passed!

Speaking of teaching, when I get to choose ITIL training materials for the classes I teach, I always use the materials from ITSM Academy.  I think they’re the best in the business.

If you are looking for ITIL V3 training in-house, I would be happy to help! Here’s a good rule of thumb: For in-house training, for every day of training, you need one student to match the price you’d pay for public training. For a three day course, like ITIL V3 Foundation, if you can get three people together on the same day, you would pay about the same as you would for a public class. Add at least one more person and you begin to save money! Plus, you set the date. No more waiting for public classes to be confirmed.

Yes, I’m also a Certified Business Coach.  I have worked with managers and business owners struggling to adapt to constant change in their businesses. Having a coach to talk things through, brainstorm, and set and keep goals can mean the difference between a transformation project floundering or taking off.  I am certified through the International Coach Academy, a coach training provider recognized by the International Coach Federation. For more information go to my other site, The Adaptive Coach

Teams are how businesses put strategy into action.  Unfortunately, we don’t give our teams the tools to get the most out of their time together. We can help, using protocols for unambiguous collaboration, decision-making, idea-sharing, and leadership.  It’s just how we get things done.  Great results, with passion and fun, on time and on budget, every time.  Find out more here.

When I’m not consulting, coaching or teaching, I work out at the HEAT studio in Bridgewater, NS, am a ranked member of the Lunenburg Aikido Dojo, and play cello and flute with other local musicians.

I particularly enjoy working with my partner in all things, Paul Reeves, another ITIL Expert, consultant and trainer.  Check out his website here.

IT Service Management Team, Leadership and Customer Service Assessment and Capability Development

Because our customers use teams to implement and operate the processes we help them design, in order to have a great process outcome we need to ensure the team has great capabilities and tools.  However, many IT Service Management consulting organizations are not skilled or equipped to assess and influence the team and leadership challenges of an organization seeking to improve its processes.  Because these consulting organizations are only capable of addressing the process and technical issues arising from a process assessment, the IT Service Management programs often struggle to address cultural gaps without having proven tools and techniques at their disposal.  

Over the years and over many IT Service Management projects we've seen great teams take great process designs and create great value for their customers. Other teams, perhaps struggling with personality clashes, communication challenges, technology silos, political turf wars, or the overall culture of the company have struggled with their process implementations and, despite heroic effort and good intent, have had a hard time showing value from their project.

We have become so convinced that addressing team capabilities is critical to IT Service Management program success that we have developed, and continue to develop, capabilities, tools and techniques to close this team gap. We have deliberately and consciously included individual, team, leadership and customer service assessments, workshops and coaching in our ITIL implementation in order to address the "elephant in the room" we see in most ITIL projects.

As well as using a checklist of ITIL assessment questions taken from the BS15000 standard, upon which the ISO20000 standard was based, we use the best individual and team assessments available to organizations today.  To make the assessments both efficient and useful, we employ the automated online tools available through Extended DISC®.

Extended DISC® Theory does not classify people into good or bad. Nor does it limit a person’s possibilities to develop in any other direction or work environment. Extended DISC® Theory describes the person’s natural reaction mode or behavioural style in different situations. It gives the person a better ability to understand one’s own and others' behaviour, to adjust one’s own behaviour to better suit the situation, to avoid unnecessary problems in communication and to point one’s life into the direction where he or she better succeeds and enjoys it the most. Extended DISC® is one of the most popular and respected individual and team profiling tools available in the world today.

In addition, we have specialized in a set of team tools for communication, decision-making and accountability, called The Core Protocols, which we bring to teams to help them reach their goals as effectively as possible. The Core Protocols are our "best practices" for people, teams of people and organizations that want to get great results - all the time.  They are "Core" because they are foundational - they can be used by all teams, anywhere, even if you already have organizational patterns and best practices of your own.  They are "Protocols" because they name and prescribe ways that people can interact (behaviour), predictably, like the "protocols" followed in diplomacy. 

And finally, with a certified business coach on our own team, we bring individual and group coaching to the challenging issues that individuals face as they work with others to achieve results, helping individuals and teams maintain a bias toward action and accountability.

Here's how we use assessments, coaching and team communications protocols to achieve great results for the IT Service Management organizations:

1. •We will ask the organization to identify the team members who will participate in the ITIL assessment and program. We will also ask which of those individuals should be included in the leadership assessment.
   

2. •We will ask the identified individuals to take a confidential 10-minute online individual Extended DISC® assessment. 
   

3. •We will receive the individual assessments, leadership, consolidated team, and customer service capability assessments.
   

4. •Combining the results of the DISC assessments with the ITIL assessment we will create a detailed roadmap of the process areas to focus on, in order of urgency and impact to the IT organization and its customers.  In addition, by addressing the areas of greatest benefit identified in the DISC assessment, we will create an individual coaching and team development plan that will enhance and support the ITIL program's efficient maturation. 
   

By aligning the ITIL program work with team development that is specifically targeted at the efficient and effective fulfillment of process maturity, we intend to address the cultural gap other ITIL consulting organizations usually will not or cannot influence, and instead intentionally build the team's IT Service Management capability in parallel with the design and implementation of the processes.

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