InvGate Blog

Stuart Rance

Stuart is an ITSM and security consultant who has worked with clients in many countries, helping them create business value for themselves and their customers. He was one of the Lead Architects for ITIL® 4, as well as the author of ITIL Service Transition, 2011 edition, and lead author of RESILIA™ Cyber Resilience best practice. He also works as a trainer and examiner, helping people to learn about IT service management, information security management, and related areas. Find me on: LinkedIn or Twitter

We All Have to Embrace Complexity

Posted by Stuart Rance on May 7, 2020 at 1:46 PM

Before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, many of us may have felt that understanding the difference between simple, complicated and complex problems might be interesting, but that it bore little relevance to our everyday activities. But now, many activities that were previously simple and repeatable have become complicated or complex, as we attempt to manage our working lives under the new realities of social distancing and lockdown. Many of us are having to work differently as we adapt to changed circumstances. And knowing how to recognize and manage the differences between the simple, the complicated, and the complex may be vital to providing the excellent service management that, more than ever, our organizations depend on.

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Topics: COVID-19

ITSM 101: 5 More Ways People Misuse ITIL

Posted by Stuart Rance on October 10, 2018 at 9:37 AM

In my last ITSM 101 blog, I wrote about five ways people commonly misunderstand and misuse ITIL. From overly focusing on the processes, through expecting a new IT service management (ITSM) tool to fix everything, to running large projects (or programs) that take too long to start to deliver value. In this blog, I offer up five more common ITIL mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.

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Topics: ITIL, Service Desk, ITSM

ITSM 101: 5 Ways People Misuse ITIL

Posted by Stuart Rance on October 3, 2018 at 9:09 AM

If you follow Twitter and read blogs about IT service management (ITSM), as I do, you will probably have read lots of complaints about ITIL. And yet most of the IT organizations that I work with use it as the basis for how they run IT, and it seems to work very well for them. So why are there so many complaints? Well, when I read the complaints, they almost always seem to be based on a distorted view of what ITIL is, or what it says you should do. So, before you complain too, think about my first five examples of ways that people misuse or misconstrue ITIL.

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Topics: ITIL, Service Desk, ITSM, enterprise service management, Request Management

ITSM 101: Getting Started with ITIL

Posted by Stuart Rance on February 21, 2018 at 10:09 AM

I suspect that most of my readers have heard of ITIL, the world’s most popular set of practices for IT service management. In fact, I’d guess that many of you have probably already tried to “implement” ITIL. Sadly, however, many of those who do try find that it isn’t as easy as they’d expected. If that’s the case, this blog is for you; I’m hoping to show you just how easy it can be to get started with ITIL, and how quickly it can lead to tangible benefits for you, for your colleagues, and for your customers.