IT-Service Management Barcamp in Munich

This year in March, i was able to attend my first Barcamp in Hamburg… The topic was: IT-Service Management (http://sm-camp.org) and it was organized by Robert Sieber (http://different-thinking.de/blog/).

To learn more about Barcamps check this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcamp

Basically it’s a self-organized conference of people who want to share experiences or their thoughts with others to that specific topic. In my eyes it is a perfect way to discuss a specific approach on which you are working on… this Barcamp is ideal to receive feedback from others. So I learned to love Barcamps… in October Robert already organized the third ITSM-Barcamp, this time in Munich in the LMU Munich (https://www.uni-muenchen.de/index.html) on the 14^th + 15^th of October.

So on Friday (14^th of October) we were 30 participants in total from many small, mid-sized or big-sized companies.

Every morning the possible topics for a sessions will be collected and then the interesting sessions will receive a time and a room slot… in Munich we hat 3 rooms so, we were able to create 12 possible sessions…

Here is the result of the session planning for day one:

Everyone is able to raise a topic for the camp, so if there will be people who are interested into that topic, it will get a session assigned.

For example, I wanted to discuss my “architectures of service company’s topics, which I posted here: http://www.svenheide.de/2016/07/19/architectures/

The main question I had was: How do you deliver the big picture of your whole company to a newly introduced employes or is it necessary to do that?

My first approach was, to create the picture (in the post above) as a support tool to explain that whole architecture of a service company, I thought it is a good idea to explain it with this picture, but the majority of the other people were not happy with this pictures, because it will scare a new employee who has no experience of Service Management, someone who is deeply into Service Management will maybe get a better picture of his company, but only you are able to create some mapping examples within that picture and specific examples from real-life daily story’s from the company.

So most of the people prefered some small daily work stories to explain the big picture, and instead of using the architecture picture, someone suggested to use a other picture, basically it was the picture from this topic: http://www.svenheide.de/2016/06/24/processes-in-companys/. Well, this topic was about explaining “processes” to employees which is basically the same, because without every small process within a company, the whole company in total cannot fulfill their business…

So, that is what I like about Barcamps… Yo received a valid view and feedback to your approach…this has a very high value in my eyes… In the end a session it looks like this: Someone is the session host, and the others are part of the session everyone can add content

In total I was able to attend on 5 other sessions… The topics were:

-CMDB/CMS (Configuration Management Database or Configuration Management System),
-The reason behind Service Management or of the company in total…,
-What should “IT” cost?!
-ITIL is Dead – Lets discuss this
-FitSM (which is the little brother of ITIL… 🙂 ) (http://fitsm.itemo.org)

I really enjoyed to discussions and the exchange, sometimes these discussions were a little to much philosophizing, but on the other hand: philosophizing can be the beginning of innovation!

I also really enjoyed the evening program and the diner in the Augustiner Braustuben (http://www.braeustuben.de) in Munich!

So, if you are working in IT-Service Management, I really recommend you the next SM-Camp (http://sm-camp.org). Next time it will be in Dresden.