ABC of ICT™ | Attitude, Behavior and Culture of ICT organizations

This page describes a case of how the ABC cards changed attitude and behavior.

Here is a small example of using the ABC cards to help change the attitude & behaviour of a team of IT managers. At the start of the workshop they felt no need to change. I used the cards at an itSMF conference workshop. We started the session by having people put the 2 of Clubs on the table:

ITSM best practice trainer teaching people about ITIL.
“ITIL uses the terms Customers and Users, what terms do you use?”
The technoids in the class reply “Dorks!”

People then voted on the statement: ‘We are not customer focused enough in IT’.

In the itSMF website vote 89% agreed with the statement and gave examples of behavior that needed changing, many of them directly related to the ABC cards.
At the itSMF best practice conference 86% agreed.
The itSMF Academy workshop scored considerably lower. Only 75% agreed with the statement.

I walked around the teams at the workshop to get a feel of their ‘attitude’. This is what I saw and experienced:

By one table there was ‘irritation’, and the ‘crossed-arm, head-shaking’ negative body language, implying that it was a mistake attending this session.
“So you obviously don’t agree?” I asked.
“Now…yeah. Listen, of course we are customer focused! We are IT managers at this table and we talk to customers all the time, if you talk about the support teams and the techies then you are right…. what do you want us to vote? Of course we can make your figures look high!?”
“Vote as you perceive it”, I said. “The idea is to recognize worst practices that need fixing….. you obviously don’t have any…….as managers”.
Their attitude was WE don’t need to change. WE have no worst practice BEHAVIOR.

For the next task we put the ‘customer’ card on the table. The task was:

“Imagine that end-users or customers are sitting here at the table and we give them the pack of worst practice cards. We then ask them to select three cards that apply to your organization, which cards would they choose?”.

Each participant chose three cards. This task was aimed at forcing them to think from a different perspective, try to take time out from the daily operation to think from the perspective of another stakeholder. The stakeholder that we run our IT systems for,in fact!

The next task was to discuss all of the cards chosen and select, as a team, the top three.
Should we choose the cards that were selected the most? I told them to choose using the following criteria, related to ITIL V3 Service Strategy and ‘value’. Value talks about ‘fit for use’ and ‘fit for purpose’.

“Look at each card and discuss the consequences to the business. Think in terms of ‘wasted money’, ‘lost revenue’, ‘delayed projects’, ‘down-time and non-availability of critical systems’, ‘solutions that fail to deliver business value’”. This created new discussions and new insights.

When the teams were finally finished, I asked them, including the team of ‘customer focused’ managers to present their findings. I call this team the A-Team for obvious reasons; heroic champions capable of aligning business and IT single handedly. These were the results:

The A-team (as well as three other teams) chose the card the Queen of Clubs
‘No understanding of business impact & priority’ as the top recognized worst practice.
Example behavior was:

The business won’t invite us to discuss business needs, we are too late in the process;
we try to tell the business but they won’t listen;
we allocate resources and start a project portfolio and then find they are no longer important;
we have business users declaring that solutions don’t meet their needs.

Example consequences were:

failure to solve ‘real’ business problems;
delays in business projects;
lost business opportunities and business revenue;
not enough testing, causing downtime and additional changes;
unpredictable services and project performance;
increased costs;
business dissatisfaction;
IT frustration.

I then asked the team, “Is this an acceptable business risk?”
The answer was “NO!”
Then the 64 million dollar question, “Now that you recognize that this is what you, as an IT organization do, and that it is an unacceptable business risk, IS THERE ANYBODY ACCOUNTABLE IN YOUR (IT) ORGANIZATION FOR RESOLVING THIS?”………

There was a moment of silence….”No”

“So let me just summarize then, to see if I understand. YOU, as IT managers, are customer focused enough…..however you accept that your current behavior causes unacceptable business risks, and you also accept that you don’t need to do anything to ensure that this business issue is resolved…. is this an example of being customer focused enough?”

The A-Team vote was now 100%. “We are not customer focused enough”.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

“We are going to perform this exercise in our organization…..more people need to be confronted with the consequences of our attitude and behavior.”

The ABC cards in detail

What you can do with the cards

Example: ABC workshop results

ABC card examples

What people say about the cards

A case of how the cards changed
attitude & behaviour