Being at the helm of a project is both exciting and scary! If you jump straight into it without a good plan you run the risk of your voyage ending in a shipwreck. You don’t want that, nobody wants that to happen. The best solution for this is what is called a project plan. Yes, as a project manager, it sounds tempting to just go with the flow and wing it, but the dangers of not sticking to a project plan are many.

Let's say you’re already adhering to ITIL standards and an ITIL maintenance plan. That's excellent. But as we know, improvement is a “forever” process; an ongoing, continuous, ever-present quest for betterment. With that in mind, we think it’s a good idea to check out these 5 ITIL standards and best practices you can’t live without.

One of the most important aspects of a good experience in the field of IT is organization. Regardless of the size of your IT practice, keeping everything neat, tidy, and easy to understand is something that will surely save everybody a lot of time and effort. A good way of ensuring this is by understanding how to properly name your assets.

Incident management is the process followed by the area of IT service management to respond to a service disruption, in order to restore it to normal as quickly as possible, minimizing the negative impact on the business. An incident is a single unplanned event that generates a service disruption, whereas a problem is a cause or potential cause of one or more incidents, as defined by ITIL incident management guidelines.

There are various options when it comes to understanding the available IT Operations Management (ITOM) software tools. Especially because, unlike with IT service management (ITSM) say, there are different interpretations of what ITOM software is or includes. This variety is reflected in the Gartner Research view of the ITOM software category, where it has created multiple ITOM software Magic Quadrants rather than simply one.

Over the last couple of years, organizations across the globe have been facing an increasing number of cyberattacks. The rapid shift to remote work left many organizations vulnerable and bad actors took advantage of this situation. And the global average cost of breaches has seen a sharp increase in 2021 compared to the previous year; from 3.86 million USD in 2021 to 4.24 million USD in 2022.

“To err is human.” The possibility of human error is everywhere. However thoroughly a roll-out is planned, however fool-proof an update, however tightly-run a deployment strategy, any business that involves humans is going to carry a certain possibility of human error. It comes with the territory.

Change management is an essential part of IT service management (ITSM), and it's a tightrope walk between implementing the change as fast as possible and mitigating the risks. The risks go up when it's an emergency update. According to Harvard Business Review, 70% of change initiatives fail. But emergency changes are important, they’re essential to keep the business flowing and to mitigate losses. Let's explore the emergency change control process and five best practices for it.

A robust IT asset management solution is key to the efficient delivery of IT services to an organization. It’s important to keep track of the organization’s assets, both hardware and software, to ensure continued service delivery. Without this, these assets may fail or stop functioning as intended and can cause inconvenient service disruption.

UAC stands for “User Account Control”. This is a field of software management that isolates the operating system’s core components from potentially damaging changes. It refers to the level of access that in Unix-like systems is called “root” and in Windows systems is known as Administrator privileges. User Account Control was initially rolled out as part of Windows Vista to allow only admin accounts to give and take away these permissions.

It’s always something, isn’t it? It seems that just as you’ve gotten your organization up to speed with ITAM guidelines, some newfangled idea comes along to stir things up. But IT is (or should be) all about continuous improvement. Stationary things wither on the vine; things that move, evolve. ITAM 2.0 is precisely about keeping things moving along in the right direction. And, like it or not, managing your asset inventory is always going to be open to improvement.

Predicting consumer demand and ensuring you have the resources to support that is key to the success of any organization. The same is true for IT, and this is where ITIL demand management comes in. Demand management is an ITIL process that interfaces with multiple processes and manages expectations on both customer and service provider ends. Let’s explore the demand management process, what it entails, and what good demand management looks like.

Over the last decade or so, we have seen organizations competing to rapidly launch products and new updates. This also often meant that information security lagged behind, as evinced by the fact that we have seen many companies facing major breaches and attacks over the last couple of years. The DevOps approach which focused on rapid development proved ineffective for robust security. This is where DevSecOps emerged. In this article, we explore the concept of DevSecOps and the top ten DevSecOps tools.

Objectives and Key Results or OKRs are a popular goal management framework that helps organizations achieve goals by building specific and measurable actions as well as communicating and monitoring progress toward them. Used effectively, an OKR framework can support increased transparency, better decision making, and better engagement with strategy by organizing colleagues and the work they do around achieving a common set of objectives.

Over the past decade, global spending on digital transformation has steadily increased. With the global pandemic and the subsequent shift to remote work and focus on online business, organizations have realized the importance of going digital and presenting a digital interface for both employees and clients. In fact, the total global spending on digital transformation is projected to reach 1.8 trillion US dollars in 2022 and 2.8 trillion USD by 2025.

In the world of IT, it’s common to see the terms CRM and ITSM being thrown around without much explanation of what they are and what they achieve in the grand scheme of things. The truth is that these tools are integral to any company’s success and learning to identify what they are —and most importantly how they work, should clear up any doubts when trying to implement them in day-to-day IT operations.

For many managers, there are two questions on permanent loop within their work: 1. Am I doing enough? 2. How do we make things quicker? When it comes to the first question, it is often a struggle to know when to let go. As a manager's role and responsibilities grow, and as their teams reach new levels of maturity, there is a need to shift focus towards the most important processes, while letting their team take responsibility of some others.

IT service management (ITSM) is big business. There are so many tools, vendors, and resellers out there, so how do you choose? If you work in a service desk or ITSM environment, the ITSM tool will be one of your most important spends. The right tool can help customer engagement, improve processes, and support effective incident resolution. As IT continues to recover and evolve in this new, post pandemic reality, “the best ITSM vendor” will mean different things to different people.

Network engineers are constantly looking for ways to improve the security and efficiency of their IT networks. High latency can affect the user experience and security measures can have costly impacts on the organization. And splitting the organization’s assets into different networks instead of one single large network achieves this. It reduces network collisions and computing demands from the devices and improves efficiency and improves the user experience.

Even with advances in security practices and technologies, passwords continue to remain a weak point in an organization’s cyber security strategy. Strong passwords are still an essential part of security strategy for most organizations, and poor password hygiene can make their IT network vulnerable. According to the 2021 Verizon data breach investigation report, shared credentials and poor access management practices were among the top reasons for data breaches all over the globe.

The benefits of ITIL to a company or organization are widely discussed. This makes sense for the bigger picture, from the perspective of an organization. Smart organizations these days are adapting an ITIL framework to straighten out their IT service management and achieve business goals. However, it’s not so often you hear the question: what are the ITIL benefits to individuals?

Service management needs to change. The philosophies and understanding that gave way to the original concept of ITSM have been overtaken by time and perspective, rendering them outdated and leaving IT managers grasping with how to move forward. Because the various factors of work are constantly shifting (shown most clearly over the course of the last two years, but broadly true of any given period of time in tech), we need to be limber in our ways of thinking of these concepts.