ITSM UK 2019

So another conference is done and dusted.

There was a certain sadness that many old friends weren't there, but also great optimism that so many new faces were, and not only there but they were speaking. I have to say that I had great fun mentoring several of the presenters, and chairing innumerable sessions where I mispronounced the speaker's surname.

But enough about other people.

I spoke in two sessions, and I found the audience reaction to be both interesting, and dispiriting.

My big session was about Business Agility and the impact that has on people.  Afterwards, I had lots of people come up to me and the one word that they used time and time again was awesome. I scored around 75% 10 out of 10s.

Which is great, but you can't please all the people all of the time. Looking at the evaluation chart it is clear a lot of people didn't like me or my message.

I'm wondering why. It can't be because I called the audience representatives of the metropolitan liberal elite, can it?

Sadly I suspect it is because I told people that there are no easy answers. You can't turn your business into an agile enterprise by just adopting a framework like SAFe. And there isn't an easy ten-step plan to adopt.

I'm glad to say the Forrester guys were listening and referenced my presentation three times in their entertaining final keynote session.

The more fun session was a Room 101 panel where I tried to convince the audience that SLAs deserved to be consigned to Hell.  It seems that after 25 years of saying that, it is still a radical message, and SLAs remain a psychological crutch for IT departments who don't want to actually engage with customer needs.