As promised, here we are back with BIG news on the SIAM Health Assessment.
In the third and final blog ‘From the Architect’s desk’ series, Michelle Major-Goldsmith and Simon Dorst are sharing their overview of the SIAM Health Assessment and its use for organisations.
And the most exciting news is that they are as well revealing the Assessment launch date.
Thank you Michelle and Simon for writing the “From the Architect’s desk’ series and for sharing the Assessment journey with everyone!
Hello again from Michelle Major-Goldsmith and Simon Dorst writing from ‘the architect’s desk’. In our first and second two blogs we told you about the development process for the SIAM Health Assessment as well as a little more about what it looks like. We feel this is quite unique and something with benefits for any organisation thinking about developing or actively managing a SIAM environment.
A two-pronged attack
And here is how. The SIAM Health Assessment comes in TWO layers, which provide a progressive level of scope and detail. The first level or layer of the SIAM Health Assessment is to be used by … well everyone, it’s more or less a self-assessment.
This assessment will be available online, which means it has to be about simplicity. It can’t take too long to complete and we’ve tried to assure this by not only having the ‘lower’ levels assessed, using enhanced answer options (rather than just yes/no) but also not including the half-levels in this assessment (these were all described in our previous blog).
And finally, and this is the beauty of most of the SIAM artefacts, this assessment is free, available through Scopism (which also provides the SIAM Bodies of Knowledge as a free download). The assessment is an accompanying service that extends its content to provide a practical, real-life, organisation specific health assessment (remember this is about considering the health status, looking at overall condition, specific pain-points etc.).
But of course being short, simple and free, it cannot be everything to everyone, so at this layer the health assessment will mainly provide the current state of the organisation and (together with the theoretic guidance of the BoKs) and insight into how to move forward from here, without being able to provide specific recommendations.
But, in the second layer of the SIAM Health Assessment, consultants play a role. This assessment is also available through Scopism, but only to selected consultants across the world (at this stage those that have been involved in the creation of this assessment). The expectation is that the consultant will play a key role in facilitating the assessment for an organisation, perhaps through a workshop and thus involving more people, from different parts of the organisation (and different layers of the SIAM model). This will already provide a more nuanced outcome.
From experience we know that when facilitating a workshop, it is not only the YES and NO answers that you receive to the assessment questions, but also the further comments, the MAYBE and SOMETIMES or the additional commentary, that can be enlightening. Often, they indicate more directly an area for attention or improvement.
The layer 2 assessment will also be across the additional half-levels, which means that the results will be more detailed and specific. And it is expected that the outcome of a layer 2 assessment is more focussed on improvements, not only based on the more detailed results, but also the consultants’ observation and more knowledgeable interpretation of the SIAM Bodies of Knowledge.
However, this is still a global assessment and thus its outcomes and results will still mostly be based on the global, generic practices (mostly as described in the Bodies of Knowledge). This then leads to added value to the SIAM Health Assessment, whereby the consultants’ specific expertise or activities can be utilised.
For instance, a consultant may be specialised in people-management, perhaps the SFIA skills framework. In this case they can ADD specific SFIA assessments to the SIAM Health Assessment to provide even more specific recommendations around people, skills, and capabilities. Anything is possible here, for instance within Kinetic IT we can further assess the capability of the service integrator function, in accordance with our Service Integrator operating model MAIDE (of which we published a white paper).
But any SIAM Health Assessment, from any consultant, anywhere in the world, is still based on the generic, globally defined assessment content which gives it an underlying validation (as well as portability in case the organisation wants to re-do the assessment with a different consultant or perhaps even as a self-assessment). The focus is on improvement and as we said before the assessment is not a destination but an ongoing journey, so going back and taking another look at health is an important part of this.
What about the outcome?
The main outcome of the SIAM Health Assessment is the well-known spider- or radar-chart. This is a great pictorial, one-page representation where peaks and troughs indicate strengths and weakness, leading to priorities and areas of concern, without any text or detail. There is also an ‘average’ per practice indicator, which does the same but at a higher level.
This assessment will be available online, which means it has to be about simplicity. It can’t take too long to complete and we’ve tried to assure this by not only having the ‘lower’ levels assessed, using enhanced answer options (rather than just yes/no) but also not including the half-levels in this assessment (these were all described in our previous blog).
We have refrained from adding a benchmark, although through Scopism we do hope to gather ‘averages’ from organisations undertaking the assessment. The issue is that one organisation cannot be directly compared to another or an average and therefore scoring higher or lower has not direct implication. Also, it may detract from recognising the opportunity to improve, regardless of whether a benchmark was reached, exceeded or not.
We don’t want this to be like the old school maturity assessment, where the focus was on numbers or how do I compare to others? This assessment is more granular, more context specific and much more pragmatic in terms of where organisations are likely to be in their SIAM journey and what the possibilities are to develop using the guidance in the SIAM Bodies of Knowledge, but also possibly (in the level 2 assessment) with support from a consultant with that extra SIAM ‘know how’!
And it’s also possible to slice-and-dice the assessment, providing a result in only one area (which in layer 1 would make it easier\quicker to do, or it would allow a consultant to add more of their experience and expertise).
For each assessed topic in the practices, the SIAM Health Assessment provides a SIAM specific description of each of the levels, which indicates what is present or has been achieved in an organisation. Even better is the offered guidance to achieve the next level, which holds the clues of the improvements that could be made with reference to specific sections of the Bodies of Knowledge.
That just about captures it!
So, that was our overview of the SIAM Health Assessment and its use for organisations. As we’ve explained it is based around the SIAM practices of People, Process, Technology and Measurement, but also includes the assessment of the Governance & Strategy.
Very importantly, it is not a benchmark for validating an achievement or a comparison to other organisations. Instead it is meant to be the starting point for improvement. As we state in the assessment:
It’s NOT about achieving a particular assessment level but understanding WHAT could be improved!
With all assessments there is the question on whether to undertake it yourself, which may be cheaper to do, or whether to involve a consultant to facilitate the assessment. It could be argued that an external consultant not only brings a greater level of subject matter expertise (which should benefit the resulting outcomes) but also an objective view of the organisation (not hindered by political or historical conditions).
The SIAM Health Assessment can be both though, and the self-assessment will be freely available through the Scopism website.
And now the BIG NEWS! The launch date is 20th September, so make sure you access it through Scopism website next Monday!
Feel free to contact us with question on the assessment or SIAM in general and be sure to follow us on Twitter.
About the authors
Managers, Service Management – Kinetic IT. With a combined experience of over 50 years in service management, Michelle and Simon are well known in the industry. They are Lead Architects for the Scopism Service Integration and Management Professional Body of Knowledge (BoK) and founder members of the SIAM Foundation BoK architect team, as well as Subject Matter Experts for both EXIN and BCS in developing the accreditation around this.
The team was awarded Thought Leaders of the Year at the Professional Service Management Awards by the itSMF UK (in 2017). Both have been an active committee member of various service management groups and forums for many years, including the itSMF in WA. They shared the award of ITSM Thought Leader of the Year in 2018 and were both the Service Management Champion of the Year (Michelle in 2017, Simon in 2018) from itSMF Australia. Michelle was also awarded HDIs Top 25 Thought Leaders in Technical Support and Service Management for 2020. They are both passionate about service management and keen to share their knowledge.
