What is it that early adopter Steve Leach likes about VeriSM™?

Claire Agutter – Chief Architect of VeriSM™ – spoke to Steve Leach from 6point6 Cloud Gateway on the ITSM Crowd series on Youtube.

6point6 is a consultancy organization specializing in Cybersecurity, Big Data, and Digital Transformation. Within this company, 6point6 Cloud Gateway is a separate company, part-owned by 6point6, which has designed, developed, and sold the Cloud Gateway product to UK Government customers.

Cloud Gateway is a suite of related products that enable a business to connect all sites and mobile users through a single secure connection to their Cloud provider – it sits between a Customer’s existing network on one side, and the Internet and their choice of Cloud Service Providers on the other. It enables Customers to eliminate physical devices, is fully managed, enhances security, and reduces costs.

Steve himself has over 20 years of experience in the ITSM industry and the organization will feature in a case study for adopting the VeriSM™ approach in the new VeriSM™ Professional publication due out later this year. He has been very interested in the VeriSM approach since he heard about it and is looking at using VeriSM™ to create a fit-for-purpose Service Management organization for their start-up Cloud company.

Why is VeriSM™ the correct approach for 6point6 Cloud Gateway?

Being a start-up, the core staff have been recruited by word of mouth and personal recommendations, which is how Steve joined some 3 months ago to “implement Service Management from the ground up”. As an ITIL expert, practitioner, and evangelist for many years, his initial reaction was that he wasn’t keen to implement a pure ITIL based support model, as he felt that ITIL alone wouldn’t give the flexibility required in today’s Cloud Computing, Agile and DevOps environment, the technology of which has been implemented since ITIL was first written and updated.

VeriSM™, he feels, is the right approach at the right time. Combining the best of the new practices with the best of the traditional ITIL practices gives them the responsive organization that they need, but with the minimal Governance provided by Change Management, and with the Customer facing responses and resolution processes retained.

He commented “being an early adopter of anything is risky until the approach has matured, but the nature of start-ups is one of taking and managing risks and so adopting an approach giving the designers and developers what they need and combining it with mature ITIL processes where needed, was certainly an acceptable risk to us. The authors and industry experts involved in the project alleviated any further fears as they are an impressive group of people and organizations”.

STEVE’S APPROACH IS:

• Understand the product, the offerings, the markets, and the environmental factors;
• Help produce a vision statement, embracing the company ethos of “all customers are special, and we want to be the supplier they ENJOY working with”, which helped create the Service Management principles we will all be conforming to;
• Persuade the management team and my peers about the need for VeriSM™. Having a blank canvas to work from was a real help here, as there was no existing Service Management model to be replaced;
• Examine the existing mesh components (resources, practices, environments, and emerging technologies) to ensure the required management mesh can be created;
• Gradually transform the organization into one where Agile and DevOps practices are understood, documented and used for “Define and Produce”, marketing practices are allied to traditional ITIL processes for the “Provide and Respond” stages, and where Management, Marketing, Sales, HR, PR, Finance and Support teams all understand their roles in Service Management and can work together.

How the VeriSM™ implementation moves forward in practice and its role within the organizational capabilities of 6Point6 Cloud Gateway will be explored in greater detail in the VeriSM Professional publication when it is released. 

“ITIL best practices still have a role to play in support in the Cloud era, but traditional “Design to Transition” processes don’t deliver the desired outcomes quickly enough meaning VeriSM™ has come along at exactly the right time for them and they are excited about being an early adopter.” Steve concludes “This really is “a real story about a real company” and I hope it delivers the message that by adopting VeriSM™ early, 6point6 Cloud Gateway is expecting to benefit from implementing a very current, state of the art Service Management model and can also help VeriSM “Evolve” to keep abreast of developments in technology and new management practices”.