As promised, the SIAM Health Assessment is now live and you can complete it for FREE through our website.
Today, we want to get back a few steps and try to picture you the early stages of conversations about creating the SIAM Health Assessment. And the best ones who can do that are our lead architect Michelle Major-Goldsmith and Daniel Breston.
They wrote a blog on which they will set the scene and give you a quick overview of some of the conversations.
Thank you Michelle and Daniel for writing this blog!
We started writing this blog with fun in mind. This particularly because in the early stages of conversations about creating a SIAM assessment there was a lot of a banter and barracking and a general disagreement about the role of assessments in a modern service environment. Here a quick overview of what some of the conversations looked like from two of our most prolific protagonists.
Allow us to set the scene
Below, a few words from an initial conversation between Michelle and Daniel who were on a call about a matter entirely unrelated to anything to do with assessments.
Michelle to Daniel:
“Erm, Daniel, I am just in the early stages of starting a project I could use your help with….
I know you said you were ‘retiring’ but I don’t believe you, plus, I know how much you love our fun Scopism projects and Claire (Agutter), Simon (Dorst) and I have just started talking about assessments …
Daniel: “Oh no, not another maturity assessment. I hate the word maturity. Who’s to say my teams are mature or not? Not a tool or a vendor. Only we can say what good looks like, or great or bad and then work to learn how to solve our own problems. Maturity assessments do not work with any form of ITSM, DevOps or Agile!”
Michelle: “Look, I took some convincing too and if it wasn’t for the fact that it was Claire and Simon I was talking to about it, I likely wouldn’t have given it a 2nd thought. So, please hear me out…
Daniel, I know you’ve … ”seen it, done it and got the t-shirt”, and so I appreciate what you are going to say on this matter. Maturity assessments set the wrong tone and can drive the wrong behaviours with the whole numbered scale and pursuit of some kind of rating.
Like you, I have seen them used in the worst possible way. They’re just so arbitrary and inflexible with their black and white mountain of questions and the ultimate outcome which is often just a number supposedly evidence of a level of excellence in some area.”
Daniel: “Exactly, just the words ‘Maturity assessment’ has me shuddering!
How can there be a blanket view of what mature means or looks like? Even if you are “Expert” at the practice, each situation is unique so all you can do is provide a baseline assessment, and then let the people doing the work, drive to their goals based on the strategy and vision of their organization.”
Michelle: “I appreciate what you are saying, and I’ve taken some convincing myself. I hate the use of the term ‘maturity’ and I struggle to see how an assessment can be built for unique and complex adaptive environments. But, I’ve had some interesting conversations about this. I’m starting to feel that some type of assessment is worth looking at. I’m also encouraged that Claire and Simon both get my reservations with this. We’ve started talking about what we don’t want from an assessment as much as what we do and how our real focus is service improvement and creating something to help organizations think about service outcomes, capability and customer satisfaction. We don’t want a tick box exercise that demonstrates they have some beautifully crafted process documents and a naive encouragement to celebrate the achievement of ‘maturity’ levels rather than focusing on meaningful outcomes. In fact, as a start we have banned the word ‘maturity’ from the discussions”.
Daniel: “Ok, I’m listening. The three of you have set the standard for SIAM and I did enjoy working with the global team to author the Foundation and Professional SIAM Bodies of Knowledge. But I will leave the team the moment you remove the flexibility for people benefiting from our work and instead, impose a maturity goal that might not make sense for them. We must make the use of this assessment to be a positive experience”.
And this was the start of a journey to gather a few of our most esteemed SIAM subjected matter experts to talk about creating a useful mechanism to help organizations in their SIAM journey. In our early meetings the group agreed without exception that whatever was created would act as an improvement guide towards an organization’s integrated service strategy.
Determining the name
We both started to change our opinions when it was clear that the team were all very much unified on what they wanted to achieve. We would create a baseline of good practices based upon the SIAM Bodies of Knowledge. The intent to act as a starting point for changing the way service providers and services are integrated into a cohesive framework and aligned to specific business drivers and priorities.
Each use of the assessment should visually highlight the deficiencies and suggested improvements, based on the global experiences of the authors, which has been captured in the BoK’s. We also agreed that our assessment needed to account for every organization being different, whether that was stages of their journey or the drivers and benefits for their SIAM aspirations.
Inspired by the current focus on health due to the global pandemic, we also agreed that a health check is an important ongoing factor in the success of any system, be it human or business. The aim of the SIAM ‘Health’ Assessment (definitely not maturity) is predominantly to provide organizations with a scan of the current condition regarding the health of service integration within an organization and some ideas about what could help them to make improvements.
Language is important
This is not a rubber stamp or gathering a shiny badge exercise. Whilst the SIAM Health Assessment focuses on providing a scan of the current condition of SIAM in an organization, it is NOT an endpoint for benchmarking, baselining or comparison to other organizations.
Of course, there needs to be some classification scale and convention still dictates that the results of an assessment are presented in quantified form. For this we have still used numbers, progressive levels to help create an understanding of where an organization is from a service integration point of view. Often when undertaking an assessment, organizations focus more on the outcome (i.e. the level achieved) or even a comparison (to the level other organizations have achieved or some other arbitrary benchmark) without analysing what the assessment means for their specific environment and how they can improve.
Another difference with the SIAM Health Assessment, that helps avoid the arbitrary judgment that is sometimes associated with assessment, is that it doesn’t rely on simple yes or no answer options. These are of course great in determining the absolute presence of something, but they don’t allow for the in-betweens. As consultants we know that the ‘in-between’ is important as things are not always black and white. As we are keen to consider context within the assessment, different types of questions, grading and rich logic allow us to delve further, gather more information and generate more complete answers.
On the same page
So, there we have it. What started as a conversation about all that was wrong with assessments became the starting point of a project to develop an assessment which we feel has real value for an organization. We are delighted that we remained true to our wish not to create something we both felt wasn’t within the spirit of what we stood for.
Having already undertaken a few assessments of willing organizations as a ’soft launch’, we have had some great feedback (much of which course we have re-incorporated into the final product as part of our own ‘assess and improve’ cycle).
We are confident that this assessment will help respondents focus on looking at what is really important in considering SIAM ecosystems; customer satisfaction, service outcomes and building an environment where all of the service providers, the service integrator and the customer organization work in an integrated and collaborative way.
The assessment can help to identify what’s good and not so good and provide an action plan to work on those improvements to hone your environment but also retain focus on what is really important; a healthy SIAM ecosystem leading to a buoyant customer organization in tip top condition!
About the authors
Michelle Major-Goldsmith is the Lead Architect for the Scopism Service Integration and Management Professional Body of Knowledge (BoK) and was a founder member of the SIAM Foundation BoK architect team, as well as a subject matter expert for both EXIN and BCS in developing the accreditation around this. Michelle was involved in the creation of the IFDC’s VeriSM approach and she is also one of the authors of the VeriSM Pocket Guide. She has been actively involved in service management committees for many years, including AXELOS Working Group, itSMF Australia and Standards Australia as part of the International Standards Organisation (ISO).
Michelle is currently engaged in the consulting and training space; she is passionate about service management and all best and enabling practices. in 2017 Michelle was awarded the Service Management Champion of the Year and in 2018 Thought Leader of The Year (alongside Simon Dorst), by itSMF Australia.
Daniel Breston has 50 years in IT and has integrated services, suppliers and technology with users and customers all his working life. SIAM is an important aspect of all he has accomplished in terms of outcomes, but to perform it successfully, he suggests we need a flexible strategy with a guard-rail governance approach. He has been part of the Scopism SIAM team since the writing of the Bodies of Knowledge and to help others learn how to progress iteratively was his incentive to join the SIAM Health Assessment Development Team.
