Presentation 1:
Business Success with Supplier Engagement Models

Weds 8th October, 4:10pm

There is much talk about engagement models worldwide, but little guidance and few examples.  How do organisations seamlessly meld with their outsourcing partners?

Managing a development, hosting, application or other outsourcing relationship typically focuses on documenting the processes across both organisations. This ends up as  a redundant, often contradictory recap of existing documentation, with the potential for all manner of confusion. Rob England discusses a smarter approach to outsourcing engagements by designing and documenting how two operating models mesh together.

Presentation 2:
Tipu: Successful Continual Improvement

Thurs 9th October, 10:40am

Enough theory: this is how to actually manage an IT improvement programme.

Improvement changes the way people think and behave. Improving the practices and tools are secondary to changing culture. You can change software in minutes. You can change process in days. But people take much longer to change.

Improvement should happen in an incremental manner: evolution not revolution. Improvement is not a project - improvement is normal behaviour for professionals: to devote a certain percentage of our time to improving the systems we work with. We should all expect that things will be better next year. We should all expect that we will make a difference and leave systems better than we found them. Improvement is business as usual.

This presentation looks at the huge amount of potential improvement in most organisations, and how improvement goes on as part of the professional's daily work. We describe a method of breaking the task down to make it manageable, and then organising that improvement based on small increments, agile approach, empowering staff and a "relaxed" attitude - a pragmatic way of dealing with our constraints.

About Rob England

Rob England is a self-employed IT commentator and consultant. He consults in New Zealand on IT governance, strategy and processes. Internationally, he is best known for his blog The IT Skeptic and half a dozen books on IT, and he speaks widely at conferences and online.

Rob was the NZ IT Service Management Champion for 2010 and his blog was voted the best "IT consultant and analyst" blog in the UK's Computer Weekly IT Blog Awards for 2010. He is an acknowledged contributor to ITIL (2011 Service Strategy book).

Rob has been invited as keynote speaker at over 25 conferences, and invited multiple times by itSMFnz, itSMF Australia, CCLearning PRINCE2, TFT, and Pink Elephant USA. He was voted best speaker at itSMF New Zealand 2011 national conference and was voted second-best speaker at itSMF Best Practice Netherlands 2008.