“Top-tier ITSM skills go beyond a good tool set” on TechTarget, May 17, 2018.
“IT professionals [who] develop the skill of ‘seeing the whole’ can make themselves indispensable to their organization,” said Alan Zucker, founding principal at Project Management Essentials, a training and advisory company in Washington, D.C. The concept of seeing the whole comes from the lean movement, he said. Essentially, everyone should understand what they are doing and how it fits into the product they create or the value stream they deliver. This integration with business should be counted among ITSM skills, alongside things like asset tracking, change management and reporting.
Many IT professionals are deeply knowledgeable about technologies, pipelines and architectures, but focus on their specific role or function in the organization. They don’t consider the downstream effects on the rest of the business; instead, they try to optimize their part of the process in a vacuum. For example, Zucker said, too often a small component of an application or project receives disproportionate attention, because it is using a new technology or tool that interests IT, but that slice of the project may not matter in the larger scheme.
“IT professionals [who] understand how to optimize the end-to-end project … stand out in the eyes of their customers; they become the future leaders because they understand how everything fits together,” Zucker said.