A hilarious former IT geek and a highly-experienced emcee, Wayne Cotter brings laughter to all who are around him. Wayne is a favorite of the talk shows, having appeared dozens of times with both David Letterman and Jay Leno.

According to Variety, Wayne’s comedy “draws on the everyday, but in a manner which is anything but mundane.” From observations about daily life to personal stories of his varied experiences as an engineer, entertainer and parent, Wayne is known for his clever, original humor and his warm and engaging persona. David Letterman calls him “one of our favorites” and has remarked on-air about his “personable” style.

Pink19 Opening Keynote

Former University of Texas System Chancellor William H. McRaven, a retired U.S. Navy four-star admiral, led one of the nation’s largest and most respected systems of higher education until his retirement in June 2018. As chief executive officer of the UT System, McRaven oversaw 14 institutions that educate 217,000 students and employ 20,000 faculty and more than 70,000 healthcare professionals, researchers and staff.

Prior to becoming chancellor, McRaven was the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command during which time he led a force of 69,000 men and women and was responsible for conducting counter-terrorism operations worldwide. McRaven also is a recognized national authority on U.S. foreign policy and has advised presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and other U.S. leaders on defense issues.

His book, Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...and Maybe the World (April 2017), reveals the ten fundamental life lessons that Admiral McRaven learned in Navy Seal training that help readers face and overcome challenges in their lives, and ultimately change the world!

A highly celebrated and award winning individual, McRaven has been recognized for his leadership numerous times by national and international publications and organizations including in 2011, he was the first runner-up for TIME magazine’s “Person of the Year” and was named “Texan of the Year” by the Dallas Morning News. In 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named McRaven one of the nation’s “Top 10 Foreign Policy Experts” and one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers”. In 2014, Politico magazine named McRaven one of the “Politico 50”, citing his leadership as instrumental in cutting though Washington bureaucracy.

What do the world's most successful teams have in common?

Answer: The ability to upgrade their "Teamwork" to “Human Synergy”!

If your goal is to increase performance by inspiring your team to adapt, overcome, and win as ONE, this keynote conveys the perfect message.

Robyn will take you on a fast-paced multimedia adventure which visually and viscerally imparts the attitude and mindset that allows groups of ordinary people to accomplish truly extraordinary feats together especially when the stakes are high, the goals are audacious, and constant change is the only thing your team can count on (aside from one another!).

This World Champion Adventure Racer, CNN Hero and San Diego Firefighter will have conference attendees buzzing with inspired ideas about how to raise your team to the next level (against all odds), both personally and professionally. And you’ll take home simple and easily applied skills that allow you to create human synergy with all of your teammates.

There is an old proverb that says, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." The epic, entertaining and meaningful stories and videos shared in Robyn's keynote leaves your team with this deep understanding: with true Human Synergy they will go farther AND faster in pursuit of their goals!

Way back in the mid-1980s, Steven Spielberg produced the now-classic movie, Back To The Future. And at the same time in the UK a team of IT nerds were producing the first volumes of IT best practices, which came to be known as IT Service Management and ITIL.

Back To The Future also had very successful sequels, including the futuristic images of 2015 with the flying hover board, remember that? (Do you have yours yet?!) ITIL has also been updated and had successful sequels too, including another one planned for early 2019.

So – before we get too carried away – let’s think again about that original movie and what we learned from it. Remember? It starred Michael J. Fox as the high school senior, Marty McFly, and Christopher Lloyd as Doc Emmett Brown. The movie is a far-out story about time travel, automation and technology, and the implications these have on the world in general and the specific lives of individuals. Sound familiar?

The movie provides us with fun and laughs for a couple of hours, but there are certainly “rings of truth” embedded throughout the story about our everyday personal and business lives; including plenty of IT leadership lessons – yes, that’s right! So, strap in for this fun and impactful closing keynote session. We’re going to turn on our very own flux capacitor and blast off into a new era of knowledge and practices, led by some of Pink’s leading time travel and IT experts. David, George, Troy and one or two surprise guests will each introduce their favorite clips from the m ovie and explain how what we saw in 1985 reminds us of so many “new” practices we’re still trying to get to grips with today – ITIL, Lean, Agile, DevOps, Organizational Change Management, Business Relationship Management and other popular IT and business models – they were all there in plain sight in “Back To The Future” (the Best Practice Edition!)

Don’t miss this entertaining, but very meaningful look at leadership in today’s (and tomorrow’s!) IT organizations.

Code: General

Automation. Speed. Agility. Adaptability. Are we talking about the organization of the future? You could be forgiven for thinking so, with the hazy and vague view of DevOps that is so commonly seen today. But at Pink, we believe this describes how your IT organization could be today.

We have worked relentlessly with subject matter experts to bring you the ideas and innovations that shape the future with Pink Elephant’s 15 Essential Practices For DevOps Success.

Attend this two-part session with our DevOps guru, George Spalding. Taken from Pink Elephant’s DevOps Essentials Certification Course, George explains the exclusive-to-Pink ‘Full Stack’ approach, which integrates best practices such as Lean, Agile and ITIL/IT Service Management. George’s practical and uncomplicated advice will guide you on where to begin, and what to do to ensure your DevOps implementation transforms your department into an organization of the future – today!

Presented as two Power Hour Sessions, Part One includes Practices One Through Eight and Part Two includes practices nine through fifteen.

Code: General

Using one of the most famous and best-selling albums of all time as a backdrop, Dark Side of the Moon, David will highlight 9 traits of today’s “modern and progressive” IT organizations. When this album first gained notoriety (1973), IT as a business discipline was just being formed. As a young IT techie, David was a part of this initial movement and over the decades he has watched IT go through many reinventions and different versions of itself – growing pains, successes and many ups and downs. Today’s very turbulent business and global environments are very different from 1973! David’s focus in this session is on what’s needed to succeed as a business-minded IT leader and how to create efficient, strategically-focused and highly-productive IT organizations.

David will share his list of traits in a very entertaining fashion, using the song list from the album itself:

1. Speak To Me/Breathe
2. On The Run
3. Time
4. The Great Gig In The Sky
5. Money
6. Us & Them
7. Any Color You Like It (or IT!)
8. Brain Damage; and
9. Eclipse

Code: General

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!

Do you live your life with fire and enthusiasm? Denise offers you a series of questions and a six-step process to determine if you BURN, which includes how to get and stay motivated. What are the steps? First, you have to really want to be motivated and fired up. What? You think this stuff is easy? If it were easy, we’d all be happy and living our lives to the fullest. Staying motivated is sometimes hard, but when you want something badly enough, move to step two, which is about waking up.

Denise believes most of us get so caught up in our busy routines we miss our lives. Years fly by us. Think of your next major birthday – maybe you will be 30 or 65. Think about what it will be like to be that age if you continue on your current path. Are you good with that? What do you want for yourself? Better health? Children? More friends? Better work? Wake up now and start working on it – or go back to sleep and miss your own life. It’s up to you. What are the other steps? Attend Denise’s very electric session to learn more, and then...start burning!

Code: General

The work environment is loud, busy and full of constant interruptions – and that all happens before your first cup of coffee! Do you ever, at the end the day, exhausted, wonder “what did I really accomplish?” Do you watch with a feeling of helplessness as, despite frenetic activity, you and your team miss goal after goal? You are not alone, and the good news is it doesn’t have to be this way – there is hope!

During this session, Jonathan will discuss how to best use your greatest asset – your attention. He will use the story of Herbie, from Eli Goldratt’s book, The Goal, to explain what prevents individuals and teams from accomplishing their dreams. Jonathan, using his personal experiences from his family, life, and work at First Fidelity Bank, will discuss practical strategies and methods you can use to get stuff done and accomplish individual and team goals. Whether you are a team of one or many, or lead a team, this session is for you.

Join Jonathan and:

• Learn how to develop a practical understanding of the theory of constraints
• Learn how to identify and isolate distractions
• Discover what you can use to increase cognitive throughput

Walk away with practical methods you can employ individually, or as a team, to get the right stuff done.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Using one of Troy’s favorite albums, and one of the most famous and best-selling albums of all time, War by U2 sets the stage for his entertaining but very educational discussion about Integrated Service Management. Troy takes a look within IT to highlight 12 traits that either impede and hold back, or propel and move forward, IT departments and functions from being either at peace or at war with one another. Troy will profile what is needed for an IT culture that operates holistically and collaboratively. As he walks you through these traits, he will discuss what it takes to create an integrated and highly-collaborative approach to service management using best practices contained in ITIL^®, Agile, DevOps, Lean, Business Relationship Management and Organizational Change Management, and other business practices.

Troy shares his list of traits and best practices in a very entertaining fashion using the song list from the album itself (and yes, you can even sing along!):

1. Sunday Bloody Sunday
2. Seconds
3. New Year’s Day
4. Like A Song
5. Drowning Man
6. The Refugee
7. Two Hearts Beat As One
8. Red Light
9. Surrender; and
10. “40”

Code: General

It is no surprise to anyone that men and women think differently! We know this, right? Much has already been written about the subject especially as it pertains to the areas of relationships and love.

Work With Me is a best-selling book from two of the world’s foremost authorities on gender relations. Barbara Annis, world-renowned expert on gender issues in the workplace, and John Gray, author of the number one relationship book of all time, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. The authors teamed up to resolve the most stressful and confusing challenges facing men and women – not in love, but at work! In the book, the authors reveal survey results of over 100,000 in-depth interviews of men and women executives in over 60 Fortune 500 companies.

David will provide an overview of the book and its key teachings about the eight blind spots. He will also include day-to-day examples of how these often translate into messy situations, especially during major organizational change initiatives, project management, and while leading others.

David’s review includes a look at the false assumptions and opinions men and women have of each other and, in many ways, believe about themselves. Through research, science, and stories, the book exposes the blind spots that cause our misunderstandings, miscommunications, mistrust, resentment, and frustrations at work. David will share the biology and social influences that compel men and women to think and act as they do and direct how they communicate, solve problems, make decisions, resolve conflict, lead others, and deal with stress, enabling them to achieve greater success and satisfaction in their professional lives.

Code: General

ITIL 4 is very nearly upon us and we’re so excited to tell you about it. In this session, Mark Basham, AXELOS CEO, and Roman Jouravlev, AXELOS ITIL Product Ambassador and Lead Architect for the ITIL update, will talk through some of the most exciting changes and explain why the future is built on ITIL.

In this time of unprecedented change, ITIL is evolving to help IT and digital service providers adapt and meet the needs of a demanding customer base. ITIL 4 expands on previous versions by providing a practical and flexible basis to support organizations on their journey to the new world of digital transformation. Because the more a business can do to deliver seamless transformation, the more its people will be empowered to unleash their full potential – and drive real growth.

Attend this Power Hour and you’ll discover what the future looks like for ITIL and how ITIL 4 will address the challenges faced by IT and digital teams today

Also, if you’re curious to know if your current certifications will stay valid, or what you should do next, then this is the place to be.

Careers. Reputations. Business growth. It’s all built on ITIL.

Code: General

In today’s business climate it is more critical than ever to remain flexible, keep costs low and shorten delivery cycle times. These growing pressures demand a new approach to development activities, project management methodologies and business in general.

Agile product development practices provide an iterative and adaptive approach to accelerating business value generation through the collaboration of cross-functional teams focused on continuous improvement, scope flexibility and delivering essential product quality. Scrum, the most popular Agile methodology, is a framework for developing and sustaining complex products, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.

Matthew will provide an overview of key best practices associated with Agile and Scrum, and profile very exciting details about the related certifications.

To maximize participation, this session is scheduled more than once throughout the conference – it is presented on Sunday afternoon as a Pre-Conference Optimizer and Monday as an Early Riser session.

Code: General

No doubt about it – DevOps continues to be a growing movement! But, what exactly does it mean? Join Graham for this very revealing session as he debunks many myths and misconceptions surrounding DevOps.

Graham will highlight how DevOps has become a very strong cultural and professional movement that stresses communication, collaboration, integration and automation to improve workflows and efficiencies between Software Development, IT Operations and ITSM professionals.

Graham will also profile a very exciting new DevOps certification program that profiles a “Full Stack” approach with focus on people and culture, processes and automation. Attend this revealing session to learn how to instill a culture of collaboration and increased communication across the enterprise.

To maximize participation, this session is scheduled more than once throughout the conference – it is presented on Sunday afternoon as a Pre-Conference Optimizer and Monday as an Early Riser session.

Code: Beyond Beginner

ITIL is still very relevant!

For almost twenty-five years this best practice framework for IT Service Management has enabled IT organizations to be more productive, effective, service oriented, and process-minded. This session is designed for those new to ITIL or needing a refresh, and the agenda includes a high level overview of ITIL’s history, key concepts, practices, and it also highlights ITIL’s business value.

To maximize participation, this session is scheduled more than once throughout the conference – it is presented on Sunday afternoon as a Pre-Conference Optimizer and Monday as an Early Riser session.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Are you a senior IT manager or aspiring to become one? Then you need to know the answer to: what is a Lean IT Leader?

A Lean IT Leader is someone who knows how to model and continually improve the Enterprise IT value system. Lean IT organizations enjoy a culture that celebrates excellence, teamwork, and innovation. Lean Leaders promote a mantra of continuous improvement through Leadership methods that instill within teams and individuals a Kaizen mindset and a shared passion to create value, increased speed and reduced costs.

To achieve these goals, Lean Leaders, including (Lean CIOs!) are able to examine how well work flows through the whole organization, irrespective of boundaries such as functional silos. Using Lean principles, IT Leaders can look at IT processes, policies, workflows, and data in order to identify sources of waste and impediments to the overall value flow. This effort requires systems thinking and the holistic ability to review the relationships between people, process and technology factors that contribute to each value stream.

How is this all accomplished? Can it really be done? Yes! Troy, one of the world’s leading Lean IT authorities, will tell you how.

To maximize participation, this session is scheduled more than once throughout the conference – it is presented on Sunday afternoon as a Pre-Conference Optimizer and Monday a breakout session.

Code: Beginner

In this overview, Beverly will explain Lean’s origins and major guiding principles. You’ll walk away with an understanding of what Lean Management is, and an awareness of its business and IT value.

Simply put, Lean is focused on getting the right things to the right place at the right time in the right quantity to achieve perfect work flow, while minimizing waste and being flexible and able to change. To accomplish this, Lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers. Eliminating waste along entire value streams, instead of at isolated points, creates processes that need less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time to make products and services at far less costs and with much fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems. Organizations are able to respond to changing customer desires with high variety, high quality, low cost, and with very fast throughput times.

To maximize participation, this session is scheduled more than once throughout the conference – it is presented on Sunday afternoon as a Pre-Conference Optimizer and Monday as an Early Riser session.

Code: General

We have all heard it said that “the only constant in life is change”, however most organizations rely on tribal knowledge and ad-hoc strategies to manage the complicated issues triggered by change initiatives. Many of us have been part of failed projects that were flawed due to unforeseen cultural issues or simply lacking the resources to make it to the journey’s end. One thing we can all agree on is that “Change. Is. Hard.” The GOOD NEWS is that Organizational Change Management is a growing discipline. And there is a plethora of research, academic papers, books, methodologies, models and tools that support the science and discipline. So where do you begin?

The answer to this perplexing question is found in the form of the Change Management Body of Knowledge (CMBoK) developed by the Change Management Institute. This emerging body of knowledge provides clear guidance and structure on how to practically apply the best elements of the various organizational change models found in the industry.

In this informative thought leadership session, Robin will provide you with an overview of the CMBoK’s 13 critical knowledge areas and the related professional certification levels.

Join Robin again at a Tuesday Early Riser session to learn how to navigate the people side of change and manage successful projects and transformation initiatives.

To maximize participation, this session is scheduled more than once throughout the conference – it is presented on Sunday afternoon as a Pre-Conference Optimizer, and Tuesday as an Early Riser session.

Code: General

The contemporary IT shop finds success through the engagement and commitment of teams of highly-talented individuals. The leadership challenge is finding the means to motivate the team to achieve goals that may have a short-term focus but oriented to achieve organizational purposes that stretch into the future. Goal Setting Theory by Locke and Latham provides a seedbed for leaders and managers to motivate teams to achieve high levels of performance. Join Jack as he explores the practical side of Goal Setting and management for today’s team-oriented IT organizations. Jack will provide a validated context and frame for team goal setting.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Why is it that in IT – despite the plethora of “proven best practices” – we continue to struggle to deliver successful projects and transformational changes?

In this session, David will outline the core phases and activities within the “Pink Elephant 20/20 Change Model” – a generic approach drawing from the teachings, models and experiences of all those who have gone before us. The Model also emphasizes critical components that are not always mentioned or stressed in other guidance.

Additionally, we will learn about the important enablers and dependencies that need to be understood and in place for ANY change model to be used effectively, including:

• How to “lead” change and how to “manage” change
• Dealing with inertia and complacency
• What makes YOUR people tick
• The relationships between “vision”, “strategy” and “objectives”
• Respect for today’s evolving business forces

Stick with this session and David promises when you return to your workplace you’ll be better equipped to lead and manage business critical projects and transformations.

Code: General

Leaders, by virtue of their positions in an organization, wield a certain amount of power. In fact, a person’s ability to influence others is related to the concept of power. Even if you aren’t a formal leader, you can acquire the skills to become an informal one and, despite having no authority, you can accomplish great things through personal power.

In this session, Jack will disclose steps you can take to improve your ability to be influential. This quality of being able to influence others without any direct authority is important to roles such as business relationship managers, project managers, process owners, consultants, etc. Learn three important concepts on how you can become an informal leader and enhance your professional standing.

Code: General

Join Pink Elephant’s Executive Vice President George Spalding as he takes you through an all-too-common scenario: a CIO’s first day on the job. The well-educated and experienced CIO is prepared to share innovative strategies that will undoubtedly deliver more business value. But in the first meeting with C-level colleagues, his/her idealism is quickly pre-empted by reality. The organization’s IT department is operating far below par.

Based on his TechTarget article by the same title, which was chosen as the #1 Top Guidance article for CIOs in 2017, George will show you how to turn this disaster into an opportunity to shine. Learn from his expert guidance about specific steps that need to be taken to restore (and/or implement IT) operational excellence. George will reveal which frameworks and best practices need to be applied – and in what order – to immediately reduce incidents, improve availability and stability, increase reliability and enable business to start trusting IT.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Trying to align the business and IT in many organizations today can be extremely challenging yet it is one of the most necessary functions to be performed. One of the primary roles of the Business Relationship Manager (BRM) is to help break down the barriers between the business and functional groups of the organization to build cohesive teams that work together to increase the overall value for the organization. Beginning the BRM journey can seem like the start of a mis-adventure for some. To be successful it is important to set goals and objectives, as well as communicate the purpose of the BRM role.

During this session, Jana will discuss the BRM implementation at Texas A&M University and how she started her journey as a BRM. She will elaborate on the initial roles and objectives that were developed along with the intended benefits of each. Jana will use her personal experiences to take a deep dive into the first year of BRM within Texas A&M University and discuss what worked well, what didn’t, and the lessons learned along the way by her and team. She will share the successes already achieved, as well as the changes that she hopes the future holds.

Code: General

Establishing and managing goals has been a mainstay of management that can be traced back to the days of Fredrick Taylor and the emergence of Scientific Management. The purpose and intent of goals has been to motivate individuals, groups and organizations to achieve higher levels of performance. In 1990 Edwin Locke and Gary Latham published a consolidation of their work on Motivation in the form of the widely accepted Goal Setting Theory. Locke and Latham described a High-Performance Cycle that lays out how goal mechanisms, modifiers and enablers lead to higher levels of performance and employee satisfaction. In this session Jack will introduce you to the key concepts of Goal Setting and how to apply the High-Performance Cycle in your organization.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Is your IT ‘orchestra’ performing together harmoniously – or are some members playing off key or even playing an entirely different melody?

A culture of silos and a focus on localized optimization continues to be a key constraint to accelerating value delivery across the end-to-end IT value chain. Processes and information technology services can be refined and improved, but can also be totally ineffective if the people responsible for developing and utilizing them are not actively engaged. Your organization must strategically share a constancy of purpose integral to the development of a team-based culture that is focused on shared accountability and results.

In this session, Troy will guide you through Lean leadership practices and the development of teaming models – and their evolution within the Agile and DevOps communities – including cross-functional and self-managing teams that result in organizations functioning more like a jazz ensemble than a marching band!

Code: General

Critical to an organization evolving for future success is finding ways to understand how business value is created and sustained. Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline grounded the Learning Organization through Systems Thinking. Understanding how the organization works, survives and grows as a system within its own eco-system is a continuing leadership challenge. Blending systems thinking with Lean practices provide a construct for understanding, mapping and improving how value is created with the organization and provided to organizational customers as value-based products or services. Jack will provide a rich discussion of systems thinking with examples for how organizations have applied these valuable tools to achieve long term success.

Code: General

Jack will use one of his favorite albums of all time, Cream’s Wheels of Fire, to help him illustrate 13 best practices for one of today’s most important IT and business subjects, Business Relationship Management (BRM). Recognized as one of the most popular, classic and psychedelic of all time (and we mean BOTH the album and Jack – LOL), Jack’s insightful perspective on the subject includes a look at BRM from a few angles: a strategic view explaining how and why to establish and entrench the required BRM culture; a tactical view including a summary of key processes, capabilities and skills that should be planned out, developed and implemented; and an operational view including key roles and responsibilities.

This is a subject very near and dear to Jack’s heart and he will also share findings of his recent research into the subject with you. But, there will be no death by boring powerpoint here! Jack will have some fun with you and use the album’s song list as a reference for building his set of 13 BRM strategic, tactical and operational best practices. Come along for a very entertaining look at BRM (Cream and tie dye T-shirts are optional!)

1. White Room
2. Sitting On Top Of The World
3. Passing The Time
4. As You Said
5. Pressed Rat & Warthog
6. Politician
7. Those Were The Days
8. Born Under A Bad Sign
9. Deserted Cities Of The Heart
10. Crossroads
11. Spoonful
12. Traintime; and
13. Toad

Code: General

New technology can provide organizations with either a valuable evolutionary improvement or a revolutionary new business opportunity. As new technologies and new social trends continue to emerge, organizations need to be ready to seize opportunities to understand and control risks and opportunities to more efficiently achieve their business objectives. But, you can’t dictate innovation. It needs the right environment in which to flourish.

What are your organization’s business objectives? Unfortunately, many IT professionals don’t know the answer. For IT to contribute to a successful new products development process, your team needs to know this crucial information. Join David as he explores key competencies necessary for leaders to create a culture of information and knowledge sharing that enables risks to become apparent so they can be mitigated and also allows for opportunities to be discussed and exploited.

The sessions concludes with a summary list of the recommended steps you can take to encourage and empower your team to innovate while maintaining focus on business objectives.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Like most companies, The Boeing Company is placing ever-increasing pressure on its internal services to deliver comparable, if not better, performance at a lower cost. Internal service providers can position themselves for success by developing an in-depth understanding of the components and relationships that underpin their service. This knowledge enables them to better understand the impacts of their decisions as they optimize the technical aspects of the service(s) they provide. Such awareness in turn reduces the likelihood of unintended consequences upsetting their service delivery.

During this session, James will discuss how the IT service modeling effort at Boeing is being used to identify and document the technical and non-technical components of each IT service, as well as to establish relationships among the various constituents of the service’s ecosystem. James will share his personal experiences detailing how developing this foundational architectural understanding was the first step towards reducing the risk that comes with the increased speed and agility that will be necessary for the IT services to properly enable Boeing’s business units in the company’s second century.

James will also discuss the following during his session:

• Boeing’s approach to IT service modeling
• Boeing’s IT service metamodel
• Leveraging service models to improve service performance
• Going beyond technical and process architecture business modeling

Code: Beyond Beginner

For more than 165 years, Corning Incorporated has combined its unparalleled technology and manufacturing expertise to develop life-changing innovations and products that transform people’s lives.

Looking at its strategic objectives for the next few years, Corning quickly recognized that harnessing the power of information technology would be critical to the company’s future success. To further enable the company to achieve its goals and add greater value, Corning’s IT function needed to fundamentally transform its approach and culture to create a sustainable and best-in-class IT environment. By shifting from being a technology and project-based organization to one that focuses on providing value-added services, Corning IT can focus on delivering proactive solutions that promote future growth, profitability and innovation for the company.

Join Mark as he shares an inspiring story of Corning IT’s transformational journey from a reliable utility provider to a strategic business partner that provides sustainable value and delivers tangible economic value.

Mark will share his experiences and lessons learned in:

• Developing and implementing a comprehensive business strategy for the IT function that directly links the work of IT to the execution and achievement of Corning’s corporate priorities and overall strategic framework
• Designing and implementing a global IT organization grounded in the principles and frameworks of IT Service Management
• Managing the significant and multiple dimensions of change associated with the function’s transformation

Code: Beyond Beginner

As organizations come under pressure from the emerging digital economy to adopt new service delivery models, increase speed to market while at the same time reducing costs, they are recognizing their need to dramatically transform current culture, practices and tools. Traditional corporate IT functions are facing irrelevancy and extinction as the nature of information technology and the model in which its delivered is turned on its head. Leadership teams and their boards are demanding greater value from their IT investments, while the Cloud has fundamentally changed how IT services are delivered. IT functions have two choices – transform to deliver greater value or die a slow and miserable death from the likes of “shadow IT” and outsourcing.

Join Don in this strategic session as he shares how leaders successfully enable organizational transformation by focusing on what he describes as the “5 Keys To Success.” Don describes examples and case study scenarios from his extensive background working in partnership with IT Executives and Senior Leaders who have struggled both successfully and unsuccessfully to transform the role of IT from a technology / project-focused culture to one focused on business partnership.

You will learn the key steps and the critical success factors to:

• Re-establish your function’s relevancy and criticality to the business
• Re-align your operating model to increase the value your business partners realize from their IT investment
• Re-cast your standing in the business — moving from a “support group” to a valued business partner

Code: Beyond Beginner

In 2012, NIC Inc. was presented with growth opportunities. While the organization was prepared for the growth, the enterprise IT organization was ill-prepared from a people, process and technology standpoint. There were very few documented processes, the service availability was poor, there was minimal understanding of the business’ commitment or SLAs to their customers and there was no awareness of upcoming projects that the business would be relying on the IT department to deliver. The poor performance resulted in the business procuring IT services on their own. The executive leadership team knew that to achieve its strategies, a significant investment in the IT organization had to be made.

During this session, Marty will discuss how NIC’s nearly five-year journey has yielded tremendous results. The organization has experienced unparalleled success in speed to market, service availability, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. These improvements have resulted in the IT organization quadrupling in size and responsibility. They are now viewed as equals to the rest of the business and regularly engage in proactive and consultative discussions, in addition to having a voice in strategic business decisions. Marty will provide his real-life examples to help other leaders see how a commitment to an integrated service management strategy can yield incredible results for both the business and IT.

Code: General

So, you’re using best practices according to ITIL. Many organizations only use some of the processes, especially the big three – Incident, Problem and Change management – and often stop there. Other organizations employ various numbers of the 26 processes and the ones they use are at various levels of maturity. They all want to take ITIL processes they currently use and make them better and they ask: What’s my next step?

Join George as he provides the answer to this question: Lean IT. The Lean manufacturing doctrines, which have been around for 100 years, are applied to IT products and services to continuously improve the value delivered by IT organizations to their customers and also enhance the professionalism of IT people. Delve into the guiding principles of Lean IT and acquire not only the techniques that will lead your organization to meet your goals, but also learn about the unique characteristics of a Lean Leader and how crucial it is to adopt them.

Code: General

Taken from Pink's Lean IT certification courses, Gary presents an overview of one of Lean's core teachings – the DMAIC model.

Service organizations, including IT, are embracing Lean practices by the tens of thousands! Lean is all about continuous improvement, which includes designing and managing efficient processes to eliminate waste and bottlenecks. DMAIC is an acronym that represents 5 components: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control. It’s used by Lean Six Sigma organizations as a roadmap for problem solving and process improvement. Gary, a highly seasoned ITSM consultant who has helped hundreds of organizations become more efficient and productive, provides an overview of Lean and the DMAIC model, and he also digs into his consultant's case book, reviewing each of the model's 5 components profiling best practices for IT Service Management.

Code: Beyond Beginner

If you are a Project Manager or a Scrum Master, you know that project teams are constantly pulled away from high value work based on unplanned demand or production issues. Most organizations don't realize how "unplanned work" is negatively impacting their ability to deliver business objectives on time and on budget.

Join Troy for his thoughts on effective Service Portfolio and Project Management (PPM) practices. Troy will explain why it's critical to integrate PPM with other Service Management and Lean Visual Management practices to build transparency into unplanned work in order to gain the critical knowledge needed to minimize disruption and drive customer value.

Code: General

In early 2001, seventeen creative and forward-thinking developers got together at a ski resort in Utah and created what we now know as the Agile Manifesto. Comprised of four basic tenets and 12 guiding principles, it clearly describes the concept of Agile Development and Project Management in just a few pages. Using a number of Lean principles, concepts and tools, Agile flew directly in the face of the generally accepted development and project management methodologies. It was, indeed, subversive. Challenged the status quo. Made lots of people very uncomfortable. And it made a lot of sense. It was truly a paradigm shift in terms of delivering value. It still is. No more 'one and done'. No more waterfall. Agile is an iterative and flexible approach that embraces last-minute changes, downplays detailed documentation, encourages customer involvement and shrinks the project release cycle to a matter of weeks. This is a must-attend session! Time for you to learn what all the fuss is about.

Code: General

In 2016 Cable One embarked on a journey of continual improvement using Lean IT methods and tools including a series of Kaizen events. The primary goal of the improvement program was to explore opportunities to improve customer experience by providing excellent service and products. With this objective as the focus, identifying voice of customer input and what was critical to quality was key to prioritizing problems and getting to the root cause of the issues. After an initial set of successful Kaizen events, Cable One’s Lean movement was in full gear so implementing additional Kaizen events became an important part of the journey.

Join Sean as he discusses how Cable One, using Lean IT tools, was able to significantly increase the quality of service provided and improve overall customer satisfaction. He will explain how the improvements from the events were tracked and reported as well as share his real-life experiences of how Kaizen events resulted in a reduced demand for customer and IT labor as well as improved service and delivery uptime.

Code: General

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) technical infrastructure supports over one million students, teachers and other users at over 1,000 schools, distributed across 710 square miles. LAUSD’s vision is to differentiate and personalize instruction, increase academic rigor and build student ownership of learning powered by technology and automation. To achieve this objective, the District implemented a program to provide every student and teacher at over 100 K-12 schools with a wireless mobile device (i.e. tablet). As a result, they were faced with the daunting challenge of providing adequate capacity to accommodate an additional 165,000 wireless devices, increasing their capacity requirements by 80% growth in less than two years.

As a result, the Information Technology Division (ITD) launched a project to implement an Enterprise Capacity Management (ECM) program to improve operational structures, processes and resources to deliver the high quality of service necessary in the most cost-efficient manner.

LAUSD is the recipient of Pink Elephant’s 2016 IT Excellence Project Of The Year Gold Award. Attend James’ session to hear how his organization used ITSM frameworks and Lean best practices successfully to conduct an ECM program, directly impacting the instruction and learning necessary to meet the worthy goal of increasing student graduation rates.

Code: General

Research shows that quite a number of Lean initiatives fail due to a lack of Lean leadership. What exactly is Lean leadership and is it different than other leadership concepts? Gary will tell you. No matter what leadership level you are, where you are in your organization, or where you are in your Lean journey, Lean leadership is a critical component for successfully realizing the true benefits of Lean.

As described in Pink Elephant’s Lean Leadership Certification Course, there are many skills involved in becoming a successful Lean leader. This session will focus on what Gary feels are the top five. Gary invites a lively debate, but invites you to attend his session to hear his top five and the specific reasons for his selection.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Increasing the delivery of value while improving process efficiency can be a very difficult balancing act. In fact, measuring process efficiency is not often possible at all and as every service manager knows, what can’t be measured, can’t be improved. Recently, as part of its innovation initiatives, Dell EMC has developed an internal methodology for value stream mapping that is being applied across its managed services division to increase the delivery of value to its customers while increasing process efficiency.

During this session, Gabriel will share Dell EMC’s best practice approach to value stream mapping (VSM) and how it has been applied to one of its Regional Centers of Excellence (CoE), landing Lean IT-VSM’s theory into actual real-world practice around incident management.

Gabriel will also discuss and elaborate on the following:

• Practical utilization of VSM for incident management
• Effective ways of “Going to Gemba” in a technical support environment
• Calculating process efficiency
• Monitoring and measuring improvements

Code: General

Have you ever reached the end of a project, or delivered a product or a report only to hear “that’s not exactly what I wanted,” or “I can’t use that – who gave you the requirements?” Does your ITSM program have a negative reputation? Do people not understand what and why you do what you do? We all want a customer-serving mindset, but do you know who your customer is? Have you spent time to define the internal versus the external customer and truly identified whose voice should be heard rather than whose voice is the loudest? Voice of the Customer (VoC) has been around for many years, often discussed during Six Sigma projects, however it should be leveraged beyond a project or improvement exercise. VoC is a key benefit for both the service provider and the consumer – it should be part of your regular operational activities. There are techniques that can be applied to ensure a successful approach for defining, identifying and approaching the VoC that will ensure that you improve customers’ experiences and change your company culture.

During this session, Cathy will provide actionable approaches to move from insights to action. She will discuss how to define your customer both internally and externally and how to plan your VoC Program. Cathy will also elaborate on how to build and support a customer-serving mindset through a continuous cycle of VoC activities that can quickly articulate who your customers are and how to act on VoC insights.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Yes – Netflix, TripAdvisor and Spotify are over-referenced examples of companies who prospered (well, Spotify is getting there) and disrupted industries because they provide a better, more convenient experience for their customers. BUT, you don't need to be one of these 'darling' companies to grow your business by also focusing on your customers. Banks are providing convenient mobile banking apps, energy suppliers are providing rich mobile power management experiences and government agencies are reducing taxpayer spend with handy citizen services. During this session, Kirsten will discuss a range of service design, Lean and customer experience techniques to help you firstly understand who your customer is, (hint: it’s not always who you think it is) and secondly how to gain an understanding of what will satisfy that customer’s need, particularly when they don't know the answer themselves. This session will delve into some of these techniques and leave you with a better understanding of your purpose in your professional life.

Join Kirsten and learn:

• How to distinguish who your real customers are
• Techniques to understand your customers
• Techniques to uncover your customers’ needs

Code: General

The nature of complex and dynamic systems makes it challenging to predict how any action will positively or negatively impact service availability and performance. However, one certainty that you can take to the bank is that eventually these systems will fail and require rapid recovery. Another certainty is that due to the dynamic nature of these same systems, the impact and criticality of service failure can change quickly, dramatically and unexpectedly, which will require very different support models.

The ITIL Service Management process framework identifies three separate, but highly-dependent processes to deal with this challenge. However, in most organizations these support practices are implemented as silos with little to no integration.

In this highly informative session, Troy will provide an overview of the three separate processes – Normal Incident, Major Incident, and Service Continuity Management. He will outline how they are related, and how each one is triggered to support the rapid escalation or de‑escalation of your service recovery processes to ensure the best possible Mean-Time-To-Repair, balanced with cost and risk.

Code: General

Human-centered ITIL Service Design ensures the customer is always at the heart of all ITIL support processes and metrics. Using human-centered design techniques, consideration of the end user’s needs, desires, limitations and environment form the inputs in the design of support models and metrics. One of Australia’s most popular airlines recognized that it had limited ability to demonstrate how it could best contribute to the Airlines’ business outcomes. Factors hindering this problem were complex support models and outdated IT metrics that provided nominal value to business users and in most cases, IT.

During this session, Katrina will explain the framework of human-centered ITIL Service Design and how using it has enabled airlines and major organizations to identify how to improve end user experience and staff efficiency. She will demonstrate how this innovative approach to the design of end user support models and metrics has had a resoundingly positive impact for both IT organizations and service providers. Katrina will also explain how human-centered ITIL Service Design can make your product or service more useable, efficient, desirable and profitable.

Code: General

What is cultural debt? According to Kris, it’s when an organization makes a technical decision that borrows against the culture of that organization. Does your organization have cultural debt? Kris’ view is that if Service Management, Governance, SLA’s, KPI’s and Agile are familiar terms to you then you can bet that you have cultural debt! As with most government entities, change doesn’t happen at the speed of light and the City of Eugene is no different. Shifting the internal process and introducing ITIL is only half the battle in building a Service Management culture.

During this session, Kris will describe how the information services division at the City of Eugene has been tackling their cultural debt and changing customer perception, one question at a time. She will discuss how they built their team up to provide the services their customers were demanding and how they’ve sold those services without losing site of their vision and values. Kris will share her experiences on how the information services division is becoming a strategic business partner within the organization and how skeptics are now seeing its value.

Code: General

There are only three times in business when the IT department is noticed: when it’s new, when the bill is due and when something is broken! Statistically speaking, it’s more likely to break when it’s new, therefore there is a good chance that most of your high-pressure interactions with the business will be when something is broken!

The way in which an IT department responds to a major incident is critical. Poor communication, slow response and lack of updates are all major issues that cause friction between the IT and other departments at these critical times.

Join Peter as he discusses how to create a Major Incident process and the dos and don’ts of how to manage them. He will use his personal experiences in dealing with major incidents to illustrate the lessons that can be learned. After all, no organization should waste a good disaster!

During this session, Peter will also explain the following:

• The difference between an Incident Process and a Major Incident process
• How to create Major Incident checklists to standardize, speed up and guide response
• The importance of the Major Incident Manager role, as well as the attributes of a good Major Incident Manager
• How to turn the MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) and (MTBF) Mean Time Between Failure from admissions of failure to a showcase of how well your IT department is performing

Code: General

Troy is currently part of the team responsible for updating ITIL content, which is slated to go live in 2019. Attend this session to get an informed overview of the updated content from someone who is an integral part of the changes.

Code: General

Change management can often be a roadblock for development and infrastructure teams wanting to get their changes in place. Unfamiliar processes and procedures, having to track down multiple approvals, waiting for CAB meetings, etc. can all lead to the perception that change management adds little value and just gets in the way of getting things done. Effective change management can take an IT group and organization to the next level. Tackling improvements can often seem overwhelming and downright daunting – especially since the reality of change management can often appear to conflict with ITIL recommendations. The good news is, it doesn’t have to be!

During this session, Kris will take you on the American Fidelity journey – how they went from low value ‘production control’ to a high performing change enablement team on the forefront of organizational change. She will share how they eliminated the weekly CAB meeting and loosened other controls too. Learn how American Fidelity challenged themselves to get out of the way and adopt a process that allows changes to flow as fast as possible based on risk by acknowledging that not all changes are the same.

Code: General

Organizations agree upon service levels with their clients, and they adopt frameworks and best practices to help meet those levels of service. The government environment is just as focused on these practices as other sectors of business; continually striving for better, cheaper and faster ways to undertake IT service management.

During this session, Bob will present a real-world case study of how ITIL best practices were adopted in a government IT support area. He will discuss how applying the ITIL framework continues to result in:

• More accurate and, faster delivery of IT services
• Reduced costs for IT services
• Greater value perception and user satisfaction.

Join Bob to discover how ITIL was made real and practical in a government IT services organization.

Code: General

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are a set of technologies that will transform most industries and domain areas, including those dominated by “knowledge workers” and that have been safe from the impact of automation so far. Organizations that practice ITSM can benefit from the use of AI in their quest to deliver better IT service outcomes for their customers by becoming more proactive, predictive and adaptive.

During this session, Peter will examine numerous use cases at the intersection of AI/ML and ITSM, called Cognitive Service Management. He will discuss the benefits and risks of these Cognitive Service Management use cases and share some best practices of how companies can rollout Cognitive Service Management effectively within their organization.

Code: General

TSO, The Stationery Office, owns the ITIL books. Justin plays a key client liaison role (meaning, with you!)

Justin will discuss how the fourth industrial revolution has provided us with a plethora of ways to engage with content, while the volume of content we’re exposed to has increased beyond comprehension! ITIL 4 has its own story and during this session, Justin will explain how both telling and listening to a story played a part in this co-creation of value. Furthermore, this session will introduce the characters of the Golden Thread, the story that runs through the ITIL 4 Foundation Manual. He will elaborate on the practical context of this story.

This session will also help to demonstrate how stories can help us connect and engage with content to enhance our professional development. Also, the new ITIL 4 Foundation App – the perfect companion learning tool from the Official Publisher – will be revealed!

Code: General

Not your typical presentation. This is more of a discussion forum.

Brian has some thoughts to share with you. A dedicated and very knowledgeable senior Pinker for over a dozen years, Brian is ready to take your questions!

By now you’ve heard about the change to the ITIL® framework: ITIL 4 is going live in mid-February with a Foundation course and following that up with five advanced-level books and two designations (Managing Professional and Strategic Leader). Some of you who are already sitting at ITIL Expert (way to go!) have figured out that you need to take a bridging class – Managing Professional – to keep your equivalent distinction in place. But what about the many, many people who have just completed their ITIL v3 Foundation certification? What do they do?

Well, there is no official ITIL 4 Foundation Bridge course or exam, although you’ll find some training organizations offering up some sort of course that claims otherwise. It might seem like the course on steroids for a day, but please note – you’ll still be expected to pass the official ITIL 4 Foundation exam – a separate ITIL 4 Foundation Bridge exam doesn’t exist.

If you remember a bridge certification being available back when ITIL v2 changed to ITIL v3… you are correct! Why not now, you ask? Back in 2007, when the ITIL framework was last overhauled, ITIL took the 10 core processes in v2 and expanded them further for v3. It was pretty simple to develop a bridge course and exam as the concepts really didn’t change a whole lot.

That brings us to present day. ITIL 4 is VERY different to ITIL v3. It’s a whole new way of thinking and modeling your processes and projects. Brian’s view? He personally does not think you’ll be equipped to succeed in taking a one-day “Foundation Bridge” course.

Here is his take (and, he says proudly that he – and Pink – have been at this for a long, long, long time). If you truly want to understand the direction this new framework (and industry) is headed than in this session he will explain why his view is that you need to take the full two–day course (or self–paced equivalent). It’s just a bit more time, but that investment will reap you rewards moving forward and also give you a MUCH better chance of obtaining the certification, and more importantly, UNDERSTANDING the new Service Delivery System approach to IT Service Management.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Since about 2008, the term ‘DevOps’ has been used to describe a philosophy that enables business value through cross-team synergy and business alignment between developers, operations and other business areas. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline created by Google in 2003 – predating DevOps – that incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies these to IT operations. The main goal of SRE, as originated by Google, is to create ultra-scalable and highly reliable software systems. Google’s SRE practices have proven to be successful and have in fact been implemented by many other organizations. In 2012, Nassim Taleb coined the word: Antifragile, a concept now embodied in the software called Chaos Monkey.

What can IT Service Management (ITSM) professionals learn from SRE and Antifragility? George will tell you! Is it a case of choosing SRE or DevOps or Antifragility? George will provide guidance there too! SRE and DevOps share many of the same foundational principles. SRE is viewed by many, as cited in the Google SRE book, as a "specific implementation of DevOps with some idiosyncratic extensions." SREs, being developers themselves, will naturally bring solutions that help remove the barriers between development teams and operations teams. In many ways, Google’s SRE is an early implementation of Antifragility as well. Taleb says: “Only the Antifragile will survive!”

Attend this very informative session to learn more about how SRE and Antifragile practices can help you support the pillars of DevOps success in your organization.

Code: General

DevOps is all about moving from business requirements to business value quickly through a collaborate culture, efficient processes and effective automation. Major DevOps themes include good practices related to code management, process standardization and the use of virtualized environments to supercharge release orchestration, provisioning and deployment. However, this is starting to sound a lot like Release Management, right?

It is a case of what’s old is new again? Well, they do say, a rose by any other name...

Is Release Management an old process with a new name? Many years ago Release Management became the solution for the “threw it over the wall” mentality of the Development community. Primarily driven by Operations, Release Management contributed to the stability, availability and overall quality of IT service delivery. Now, in this Agile world, there’s the risk that Release Management has become a dinosaur made extinct, never to return. Yet what has taken its place? Can we really rely on DevOps and Agile to protect the integrity of new releases? Or are we in danger of taking a step backwards? In this session, find out how there’s “life in the old Release Management yet”!

Code: General

Graham is set to demystify DevOps for you, and in very practical terms!

Taken from Pink’s new certification course, DevOps Essentials, this session provides a new and unique perspective of DevOps through the ‘Full Stack’ of culture, practices and automation. Unique to Pink, no one else provides you with this necessary view!

What is the ‘Full Stack’ approach? As a major game changer in IT, the DevOps revolution has brought about new practices in the Application Development and Systems Operations areas that can help your organization deliver IT services better, faster and cheaper. This session will provide an overview of the three critical success factors that make up the ‘Full Stack’ approach, including:

1. Changing culture
2. Improving practices and processes
3. Leveraging automation technologies

Attend this insightful session to really understand the workings of DevOps, and what it takes to be an effective, contributing member of a DevOps culture. Understanding how simply working more collaboratively amongst key teams and leveraging automation solutions will result in better business results.

Code: Beginner

DevOps, the latest hot topic in the IT world, promises faster, more frequent, higher quality software releases. However, according to Paul and his research, many initiatives fail!

In this session, Paul reveals why these initiatives fail and will offer guidance for helping you prevent these from happening. The reasons are taken from his organization’s global findings based on research with more than 400 organizations! Paul highlights that DevOps is not something you can ‘implement’ or ‘install’. It will require more than simply sending staff through DevOps certification or investing in the latest automation tools. It represents a significant cultural change, impacting the business, the management layers and operational levels within the organization.

So how can you ensure that your DevOps initiatives will succeed? In this presentation, Paul profiles three top critical success factors taken from organizations who are delivering significant, sustainable value from their DevOps investments. Attend this session to learn why DevOps has become an ‘imperative’ for survival for many organizations to support and enable their Digital Transformation. For many CEO’s ‘failure is NOT an option’!

Your CEO expects you to come back and make DevOps succeed!

Code: Beyond Beginner

In 2017, Standard Bank was struggling with an organization-wide Agile and DevOps transformation. Delivery teams across the multiple departments within Standard Bank were frustrated with the lack of trust in the system and the onerous, one-size-fits-all approach to change management. In response to this struggle, the Earn Your Wings model was launched. This model had a very simple premise – the better a team performs, the more autonomy the team is awarded!

The Earn Your Wings model categorizes teams into one of five different categories, all of which have varying levels of governance. The model has not only redefined the governance layers within Standard Bank, it has also ignited teams to start focusing on the way they engineer their systems and ensure that they have considered all the functional and non-functional requirements before a production deployment moves forward. In addition, Earn Your Wings has been a driving force for team accountability and trust. Teams now feel that they have more control and are being recognized, trusted and are better equipped to transition into true service owners.

Join Bianca as she discusses the following:

• An overview of the Earn Your Wings Model
• Understanding the metrics for measuring and why they were chosen
• The impact of Earn Your Wings on people, processes and technology in an IT organization of 5,500 employees
• How you can leverage the Earn Your Wings way of thinking within your own organization

Code: General

The doctor is in! George will take you through many key questions that you can use to rate the maturity of your organization’s DevOps practices.

This is a very hands-on presentation that was taken from Pink Elephant’s DevOps Essentials certification course. George starts with an overview of the concepts of “process maturity” – must-have knowledge for all IT managers. He will then walk you through each question as you rate yourself on the maturity level of several key cultural, practice/process and tool related areas. Not only will you walk away with an understanding of the health of your organization’s DevOps discipline, but you’ll also have the start of a real and meaningful action plan for improvement!

Code: General

DevOps is being introduced to organizations, IT and ITSM teams and processes are adapting to its agility, but with DevOps comes some discussions challenging the established nature of ITSM processes. Successful organizations can and will be able to take advantage of the benefits of DevOps while preserving proven ITSM concepts like service orientation.

During this session, Peter will discuss the emergent practice of “swarming”, which is an enterprise-ready methodology that is ideally placed to bringing technical support into the DevOps era. Swarming is built on many of the same principles that underpin the success of DevOps and replaces the traditional mod el of tiered IT Support. He will elaborate on how organizations that have adopted swarming principles for customer support have seen significant improvements around key performance metrics.

Code: General

I don't know about you, but I have always found it ironic working in IT where everything we do is about enabling a business to change, yet our natural skillsets mean that we are often poor change agents ourselves. We're good at using our left-brain, analytical, logic-based thinking to analyze, design, deliver and maintain systems and technology, but generally poor at the right-brain, creative, emotion-based thinking required for helping people through the change. During this session, Kirsten will discuss how IT professionals need to evolve to add real value to their businesses. Today, the technical jobs increasingly are completed by cloud providers, managed service providers and are outsourced (commonly internationally) to dev shops. So, increasingly we need IT professionals to understand and advise on the tech portion, but more importantly be proficient in working with commercial suppliers and excellent at helping the business transition through the changes that the technical component enables. Kirsten will explore a range of approaches, sourced from Agile, Lean, neuroscience, organizational development and change management practices to give you new tools to become a 'human-centered' change agent.

Join Kirsten as she elaborates on:

• Understanding how the human brain reacts to and assimilates change
• Understanding how beliefs are formed in humans
• Developing an understanding of several change management techniques
• Where to go for more in-depth understanding

Code: General

Building a customer-focused culture in an IT organization can be one of the most challenging, yet most rewarding movements a leadership team can make. During this session, Mark will discuss how he has taken the universal customer service principles learned during his career at Disney and applied them at Brigham Young University (BYU). He will describe how the customer support group at BYU has been transformed from a “2-for nothing” department into a group that will do whatever it takes to provide exceptional customer service. Mark will share, in detail, what these principles are and how they can be applied across any line of business, even in IT.

Code: General

A conference mainstay, and favorite from Harvard Business School. Every IT leader should know about Kotter’s 8-step model for implementing change!

Leading Change is recognized as one of the all-time best business books and the definitive work on the subject. Harvard Business School Professor John P. Kotter methodically and carefully explains his 8-step process for leading and managing major organizational change in an easy to understand fashion. Leading Change captures his wealth of knowledge and experience working with major companies all over the world. Professor Kotter takes concepts like leadership, urgency, vision, strategy, quick wins, and communication and puts them in well-explained, practical terms that anyone can follow.

If you're a manager at any level of your IT organization who is currently leading any aspect of a change (and today, it’s an ongoing occurrence!), understanding Kotter’s 8-step change process is a must-know, and this is a not-to-be-missed session. Plus, learn how to apply the best practices from this book from one of the world's leading ITSM consultants – Robin Hysick. You'll gain huge benefits from Robin's extensive ITIL implementation and IT project management experience as he walks you through several real-world examples for each of the 8 steps.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Leading organizational change with the goal of achieving service excellence can be a daunting task! At First American Financial, the service desk and desktop services teams were being challenged to maintain an unrealistic level of service and business expectation that could not be delivered consistently across the county due to a limitation in resources, tools and processes. After performing an organization assessment across multiple distributed sites that uncovered gaps in process and performance, it was critical to prioritize the creation of service desk performance strategy. First American’s service desk’s leadership team decided to focus on several improvement items including: team structure, individual performance competencies and teamwork as well as opportunities to align with business priorities.

During this session, Pete will share his personal experiences, detailing how his team was able to get senior leadership along with business confidence and buy-in to deliver valued services that were reliable, responsive and quality-minded. He will discuss how a balanced mindset was created for focusing on customer satisfaction, financial responsibility, a culture of knowledge and a focus on measurable performance and results that had to be owned and shared.

Code: General

Engaging key people in projects and organizational change initiatives is not only a good thing to do, but a necessity to ensure success.

While stakeholder engagement can be complicated, time consuming and resource intensive, this ongoing dialog between stakeholders, starting from project conception through to the anchoring of new attitudes and behaviors long after the project is delivered, can influence a variety of outcomes and help companies circumnavigate a host of issues.

Join Robin in this must-attend two-part session that illustrates how people are the secret sauce for successful change initiatives.

Part 1: Defining The Stakeholders Affected By The Change Initiative

In chapter four of The Effective Change Manager’s Handbook, Patrick Mayfield summarizes the first principle of Stakeholder Engagement with the quote, “You can forget important stakeholders, but they won’t forget you.” Part 1 of this Stakeholder Engagement series will address stakeholder identification as a continuous process, identify what matters to each stakeholder group in relation to your change initiative and how to plan engagement strategies appropriate for different stakeholder groups.

Part 2: Using Effective Communication Techniques To Gain Buy In

For every stakeholder group and, ultimately, for every individual, what matters to them aligns with the old phrase, “What’s In It For Me (WIIFM).” The second part of this series will focus on effective communication strategies that engage stakeholders and help them understand their personal WIIFM. One of several techniques covered in Part 2 is the marketing approach: “Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA)” to move stakeholders along a journey from the first announcement about a change, to gaining buy in and, finally, engagement.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Quite often, being around mature Service Management environments tend to make you forget the successes and large improvements that have been made along the way. Starting an ITSM implementation in an organization that has been set in their ways for many years can and will present challenges, confusion and fear! The good news is that these fears are unfounded.

During this session, Nicole will share her personal experiences of leaving an organization with a mature Service Management environment and starting from scratch at a new organization. She will discuss the key challenges faced and approaches taken on this new journey, including remembering the lessons already learned by seeing processes in a new light. She will share how she gained the trust of stakeholders at Grinnell Mutual and how important this step is in the journey. Nicole will also dive into getting passed the vocabulary confusion, dealing with the competing frameworks and how to gain quick wins.

Code: General

Leading others through major organizational and process change for any program or project manager can be a daunting task! But there is a right way versus a wrong way to go about it and Gary will tell you which is which. Based on his many years of ITSM process implementation experience, Gary will dig into his consultant’s case book to share his laundry list of the biggest challenges that most program managers face and how to successfully overcome them. If you’re new to ITSM, or have tried to implement major change without successful outcomes, don’t miss this highly informative session. Gary will share invaluable dos and don’ts you won’t find in any certification course!

Code: General

When implementing Service Management, some organizations often only focus on creating and implementing tools, processes, and procedures, but often forget about the most important element: people. Organizational Change Management (OCM) exists to help people through the type of major change essential to implementing a Service Management program, and is the key to the success and return on investment.

Dart Container has seen the benefits of establishing and improving an effective OCM program. During this session, Lisa will profile how Dart used OCM strategies, tactics, and approaches to engage people in creative ways, including programming ideas, key metrics, and the importance of a champion program.

Lisa will focus on how to use an organization’s greatest asset to accomplish everything needed, and more, in a Service Management implementation – its people. She will discuss key activities, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), and lessons learned related to employee engagement.

Code: General

As Robin notes, approximately 70% of change initiatives fail due to the ineffectual handling of the process side of change and because the people side of change is not managed effectively – if at all. The problem is, many managers are not aware of the models for leading their organizations through major change!

Robin will share several methodologies taken from Pink’s certification course on Organizational Change Management, including a major focus on: Lewin’s Three-Stage Model of organizational change that states the collective mindsets and practices of a group must be broken down before a change initiative can progress; Bridges’ Transition Model that provides an approach for effectively guiding individuals through the lifecycle of a change initiative; and information on how to provide effective leadership during change initiatives.

Code: General

Over the past 15 years, Ashland has experienced significant change as it transitioned from an oil company to a specialty chemical company, including numerous acquisitions and divestitures. Along the way, the IT team incorporated nearly 30 different geographies into its single instance of SAP. Most recently, Ashland IT has elected to partner with a third party service provider for many of its basic services and at the same time implement a new ITSM tool!

Ashland is no stranger to change, it has significant experience with organizational change management for its user community but in this venture the IT leaders needed to adapt those techniques for its own IT staff and it was no easy feat. Carol will discuss the change management techniques that have provided the most value during the company’s change journey, including the best practices of “project why” as well as “project how.”

Join Carol as she explains:

• How to perform simple but effective stakeholder assessment
• How to have a transparent discussion of both the “knowns” and “unknowns” of change
• How to mentor the project champion to become your best and most powerful ally

Code: Beyond Beginner

Imagine… your company’s order intake has grown by 27%, its revenue is up by 24%, and you have taken on 19% more employees – in one year! This might seem like an incredible – and daunting – transformation for many organizations. However, this is precisely what happened at Vanderlande, a global market leader for value-added logistic process automation at airports and warehouses as well as in the parcel market. With a need to scale to meet the growing rate of demand and focus on customer experience, Vanderlande’s leadership identified several challenges which were strongly related to a major shift from a project mindset to a service management culture.

During this informative case study session, Michiel will describe how Vanderlande is successfully delivering on their organization’s business objectives using ITIL Service Management practices. He will describe how they have defined and rolled out a global service desk approach underpinned by a shared service management tool set.

Michiel will also discuss the following:

• How to move from a project- to a service-oriented culture
• How to build awareness, urgency and buy-in for process maturity
• Establishing process governance and leadership on a global scale
• Building clear roles and responsibilities for a change project as well as how to prevent the ‘blind spots’ in an organization

Code: General

Culture change is hard – really hard! Deliberately changing a culture takes a lot of hard work and communication and it was no different at Brigham Young University (BYU). Join Elaine as she takes you on the journey of culture change at BYU. She will share her personal experiences of how they have been able to purposefully change from a culture of silos and distrust to one of teamwork and trust. Elaine will discuss the pitfalls of feeling that you might not have the necessary skills or support from management that a cultural transformation requires and how to work through them. She will take you through the process of growth experienced at BYU and explain that even though it often feels scary and impossible, it can be done!

Code: Beyond Beginner

In our evolving digital economy, organizations are facing intense pressure to increase speed to market, address accumulated technical debt and move their focus from run to innovation. The result of these drivers creates a trend to leverage cloud technologies and increased use of third party suppliers. However, the growing complexity of our supply chain creates new challenges around alignment, shared priorities and service delivery. To address this challenge, organizations are adopting an emerging management model called Service Integration and Management (SIAM) based on frameworks such as ITIL, COBIT and project management to improve service delivery alignment across different suppliers.

In this practical session, Troy DuMoulin will describe how organizations use process and service governance structures including the creation of a SIAM function to create common practice across diverse internal and external supplier environments. Key takeaways from this session will include:

• Different models and approaches for process ownership and governance
• The role of a service owner for retained and outsourced service lines
• The role of a service management office or center of excellence
• The emerging SIAM management approach for establishing a service integration function to orchestrate service delivery between internal and external providers

Code: Beyond Beginner

Disruptive web technologies represent a double-edged sword to business goals. They create real opportunity to accelerate value delivery and improve customer engagement and experience, however, these same technologies are equally available to your competitors and the rapid global adoption is driving businesses to become more agile and increase speed to market under the banner of digital transformation.

Digital transformation translated into IT service delivery means accelerating speed to value by finally addressing decades of growing cultural, process and technology technical debt. Silo-based culture and architecture strategies have created a major problem of variability, fragmentation and complexity leading to highly fragile and slow to change IT environments. Join Troy for this strategic session where he will provide you with the tools to make a compelling business case for service management standardization and simplification in order to reverse this trend and address the problem with Lean, Agile and DevOps practices.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Erie Insurance needed to mature their approach to process improvement – FAST! Past improvement efforts took too long, were too expensive and implementation, adoption and proficiency were spotty at best. In addition, resources were limited, which created a need to work smarter, faster and set expectations for implementation up front.

During this session, Tony will share how Erie Insurance has been leveraging principles from Lean Six Sigma, Business Modelling, ITIL and Organizational Change Management to accelerate process improvement. He will share how related disciplines have been integrated in a pragmatic way to ensure all required components of well-formed processes were present and able to reduce process improvement initiatives from months to weeks, and in some cases days. He will also show how problem statements can be used to validate scope, maintain focus, demonstrate best practice in process mapping and how all of this informs organizational change management plans.

Tony will also discuss:

• Understanding what’s required for successful process improvement
• Using data from recent improvement initiatives to help develop an understanding of how to capture and prioritize process pain points
• Understanding how to leverage related Lean principles, BPM standards, ITIL principles and how all of these things inform organization change management plans
• Considerations and timing for gathering data for qualitative and quantitative value realization

Code: Beyond Beginner

From a technology perspective alone, adopting DevOps, Agile, Scrum and hybrid Cloud models can prove to be a daunting task for any organization. Add on top of this challenge the need to adapt your ITSM processes to work with the emerging models and it becomes even more complicated. During this session, John will share the roadmap and lessons learned at Esri and of how they incorporated DevOps, Agile, Scrum and Cloud into their existing Incident, Problem and Change Management frameworks. He will describe the approach they took including:

• Defining and understanding the goals, scope and focus of the different frameworks, processes and platforms
• Determining the business drivers for each approach and model
• Determining how to implement each option to achieve the best results

Join John as he walks through how Esri used an integrated approach focused on ensuring that the business needs of the organization came first and foremost in every decision.

Code: General

Are you intrigued by the concept of artificial intelligence? It’s still a relatively new frontier, and do we really understand exactly what AI is? Join George as he explores various types of artificial intelligence including the true artificial intelligence more accurately known as machine learning. He believes unsupervised machine learning will test humankind’s capacity to trust machines – and points out a troubling truth about self-learning machines.

There is no escaping the fact that AI will significantly impact IT service management. George will discuss the expected consequences of AI on various areas of ITSM including network management, Service Level Management, Change Management and Incident management – reactive versus proactive versus predictive.

Code: Beyond Beginner

According to Linda, executing ITSM automation requires careful consideration of people, process and technology and is a journey fraught with peril and pitfalls. From executive sponsor and stakeholder expectations, to vendor selection, to designing catalogs, workflows, reporting, training and go-live strategies, knowing what not to do at each stage of the project is key.

During this session, Linda will share some of her experiences from her 20+ years of IT support center leadership. She will discuss the various upgrades and re-engineering efforts – each with its own set of unique challenges and learning outcomes that she has experienced. Linda will share her first-hand experiences from the past 20 years and more recently at CURO with the evolution of ITSM suites from its humble beginnings as help desk ticket tracking software to a powerful tool that, when coupled with the right processes, can support and enhance IT service delivery to the business. In this session, Linda shares lessons learned about how to avoid the pitfalls that can sabotage an ITSM project as well as:

• How to speak to why ITSM suites are not a simple point solution i.e. help desk software
• The importance of understanding the business value of ITSM automation
• Why the role of executive sponsors and stakeholders from both IT and other business areas is so critical to the success of an ITSM project

Code: General

In today’s digital world, organizations invest in enterprise solutions to help cope with the increasing complexity and lack of visibility into IT. At the end of the day, Technology needs to be adopted by staff and leveraged with efficient processes.

During this session, Vincent will share the eye-opening results from various surveys on the state of incident and response management and how the lack of response automation, communication and collaboration hurts the business and negatively affects IT staff's morale.

Join Vincent to:

• Learn how your organization compares to industry benchmarks as it relates to cost of IT downtime per minute, time to respond, number of major incidents
• Understand why quickly engaging the right team of IT experts is a hard thing to do
• Understand the mechanisms that lead to a call storm and learn how to prevent it
• Learn how automation can help improve your incident process and streamline the communication between the Service Desk, your IT teams and impacted business users

Code: General

Don’t be left behind. The artificial intelligence (AI) train is picking up speed and your organization needs to be ready to jump on board. In the not-too-distant future, artificial intelligence will be used to make our lives easier – both professionally and at home. Some industries are already embracing and anticipating the competitive advantages of AI while other industries that don’t keep pace could be at a distinct competitive disadvantage or even be in danger of becoming extinct.

Will artificial intelligence totally disrupt IT service management? Jennifer believes no industry or service provider can afford to ignore AI’s potential impact on business as usual – especially ITSM. She recommends organizations take the time necessary to develop an AI-assisted IT service management strategy and is confident that being proactive will enable IT divisions to retain their status as valuable business partners.

Join Jennifer as she discusses seven artificial intelligence traits that can be applied to IT service management, including:

• AI-assisted diagnostics
• AI-assisted CSI
• AI-assisted ‘what if’ analysis
• AI-assisted agility
• AI-assisted communication
• AI-assisted voice and image ITSM
• AI-assisted ITSM robotics

Code: General

Is your organization trying to navigate the cloud-filled skies of service management? Who knew there were so many different types of clouds!

Most organizations have incorporated cloud services, but the use and reliance on cloud services is accelerating at a rapid pace. The challenges these organizations are faced with need to be addressed and resolved; this is where Service Management becomes more critical. A little-known truth is that Service Management isn’t really about the technology but has always been about using technology appropriately to provide value through services.

In this session, Charlie will differentiate the various types of cloud services and provide basic guidance on how to become more strategic and tactical in your Service Management approach. He will discuss four key areas for ensuring value to your business with cloud services. By better utilizing these services as part of your overall portfolio, you can help solidify the role of your IT department within your organization in the cloudy world of the future.

Code: General

Digital transformation is revolutionizing service management, but it can be hard to know where to start and how to focus your efforts to maximize its value. It may help to think of it as “modernizing” service management – more of an evolution than a revolution. During this session, Matt will present a modern view of service management including how it benefits organizations inside and outside of IT. He will use real-life case studies to illustrate the valuable opportunities available to today’s service and support organizations.

Join Matt as he discusses:

• What service transformation is and the value to your organization
• The keys to successful service management modernization
• Real world examples of organizations transforming and extending their service management

Code: General

Risk Management is a critical process for decision making at all levels in organizations across all industries. Informal practices and a culture of ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ can deliver inconsistent results and fail to maximize the potential of formal Risk Management process and techniques available from ITIL, ISO, COSO and Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). When effectively applied, and further enriched with modern tools and technology for business intelligence, ERM can be leveraged to gain competitive advantage and speed decision making.

Ontario Northland is a 100+ year old railway that has been applying ERM, ISO and ITIL processes and practices underpinned by modern technologies to accelerate risk-based decision-making and efficiencies in operations. During this session, Chad will explore a real-world implementation of ERM that greatly enhanced Ontario Northland’s ability to manage and optimize its services.

Join Chad to:

1. Learn how modern technology is improving ERM for railways.
2. Understand how risk mitigation strategies by Ontario Northland are mapped to ERM discipline.
3. Get an inside look at a day in the life of a railway track inspector. A true risk management practitioner!
4. Walk away with risk identification, assessment and mitigation techniques attendees may consider for their own organizations.

Code: General

Earlier this year, data protection and privacy were huge topics as GDPR loomed on the horizon. As a Germany-based company that is directly affected by the regulation, we continue to see its ramifications and the ongoing struggle of companies as they try to deliver on data privacy promises. Both internally as we stay compliant with the regulation, as well as externally in working with our customers, we are observing various ways in which data privacy guidelines and activities impact all business units – and where we all need to make some improvements.

During this session, Christopher will address the three common data privacy mistakes that are being made by organizations in relation to the new regulations. He will also help you to understand how to protect your business and your customers from making these mistakes.

Code: General

In the age of digital transformation, employers are tasked with redefining their approach to transitioning individuals and teams to a desired future state of IT and service desk excellence. Part of that transformation is learning how to successfully rollout technology for rapid adoption. When talking about an investment in a self-help platform, it is not merely an investment in behavioral change, but also adding the right tools for a more engaging and dynamic knowledge experience for those who are very comfortable working in the space, and those who aren’t. Self-help technologies allow IT organizations to gain a unique understanding of how to improve their current knowledge management model, and more importantly, what they can do to turn it around quickly. Creating and maintaining traditional knowledge has always been a significant time investment, and is one of the primary reasons knowledge fails in most organizations. However, the ability to manage the effect of new and modified IT business processes will ultimately lead to enhanced user satisfaction and address the people side of change.

During this session, Evan will discuss how to gain an understanding of why the current knowledge management model is failing and what organizations can do to quickly turn it around and how to deliver a self-service approach that will actually be used and preferred by your employees and customers. He will also elaborate on the most impactful options to reducing operational costs with self-help technology.

Code: General

Today, digital transformation is at the forefront of virtually every organization’s future. An often overlooked—but equally critical – component of any successful enterprise evolution is facilitating an environment where employees can optimize their productivity through effective access to engaging self-service experiences. Delivering an exceptional employee self-service experience, however, can be easier said than done. Being efficient while providing superior support will undoubtedly result in significant business value, but it’s the method of delivery that can cause the greatest challenge.

IT departments play a critical role in delivering a better self-service experience and there are key technologies that can help. Similar to many popular consumer apps, the delivery of self-service should be personalized, contextual and intuitive to foster positive and effective engagement with employees. Technologies that are evolving to play a key role include:

• AI – More than ever, AI is accelerating productivity and fundamentally transforming the interaction between humans and the service management process.
• Chatbots – Virtual agents are becoming the common channel for interacting with IT for services and support.
• Intelligent Knowledge – Employees want answers at their fingertips without having to contact support. Self-help technologies makes it easier than ever to capture and deliver knowledge in an interactive, on-demand way.

During this session, John will highlight how to maximize the powerful combination of these technologies, ultimately delivering experiences that employees will appreciate across any enterprise.

Code: General

So, what's so hard about designing and implementing a process? Some would say EVERYTHING!

Getting your stakeholders on board with designing and documenting their processes can be a daunting task, kind of like herding cats! Then comes convincing your management team that the tools don’t get implemented “out of the box”. Don’t forget your developers. They need clear requirements to implement your processes in a tool (as you designed them). And of course, there is the near-impossible dream of process governance and Continual Service Improvement.

What is a person to do? There is hope! During this session, David will walk you through a proven and practical approach to process design and implementation. He will also provide you with some common-sense tips that you will be able to use to improve your next process design project.

Code: General

Service Management is being disrupted by technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), chatbots, virtual agents and Internet of things (IoT). These technologies are driving dramatic changes to enterprises. Highly cognizant business leaders are jumping in headfirst and applying AI and ML to solve real business challenges in service management and beyond to get a competitive edge in the market.

Join Peter for an in-depth discussion about these advances in technologies and what they mean to the future of Service Management. He will talk about how organizations are managing through these changes and how getting a head start on them can benefit the organization.

Code: General

Ever wonder why DevOps is getting so much attention nowadays? DevOps solves the most important problem of our generation, which is, how do we eliminate the chasm between development and operations so we can deliver digital solutions with high speed and reliability. If this chasm is not addressed, it creates two opposing teams with different goals.

Development and operations must be aligned to one mission, with one goal and act as one team. Implementing a DevOps mindset, principles and practices is key to achieving this harmony, but by itself, it’s still not enough to compete in today’s marketplace where digital disruption rules the day. To master the imperatives of digital disruption and cross the chasm, organizations need to become Lean enterprises, who apply the knowledge of proven, integrated principles, practices, and competencies for Lean, Agile, and DevOps.

During this session, Richard will discuss a proven CALMR (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measure, Recover) approach to DevOps. He will elaborate on how it helps create a culture of shared responsibility that aligns people, processes, and technology throughout the organization to achieve faster time-to-market and make work more engaging, productive and fun.

Code: General

Join Margo Leach, Chief Product Officer at AXELOS, for an exciting and interactive session where they will be ALPHA testing the higher levels of ITIL 4 with Pink19 delegates! Don’t miss this opportunity to have insider knowledge on ITIL 4, and directly impact how it is shaping the industry.

The purpose of this session is to test and gain feedback on key hypotheses around the higher levels of ITIL 4 (Managing Professional, Strategic Leader). Pink19 falls within our key ALPHA testing phase of ITIL 4 higher levels so we want to ensure we gain maximum benefit from the wealth of experience and knowledge of Pink19 attendees.

We also want to gain valuable insights to help us shape ITIL Master. What does ITIL Master means to you? What would make you proud to be an ITIL Master? We want to know what candidates should ‘prove’ to demonstrate their experience and understanding.

If you want to help build the future of ITIL 4 then this is the session to attend!

Code: General

Service management workflows span the business, often encompassing other departments and external providers involved in service delivery. How do you automate these workflows when multiple systems of record are involved?

Join Andrew as he discusses the ins and outs of Service Management Integration best practices using real life case studies from Perspectium customers who have made ITSM a strategic foundation for their business. He will elaborate on the dos and don’ts as experienced by their customers and what was learned each step of the way.

Code: General

During this session Mike will discuss the ITSM journey at Sleep Number including the rapid implementation approach. He will share the lessons learned along the way and the progress made so far.

Sleep Number was using outdated and disparate IT tools to track incidents, changes, and service requests, with no centralized CMDB; does this sound familiar? It quickly became clear that in order for the organization to move forward, a transformation in the way work was being done was needed. The transformation began with the selection of a cloud-based ITSM solution and the adoption of the ITIL framework. An alignment of their IT services with industry best practices was also needed. These changes led to the replacement of four legacy systems in less than three months. Now two years into the transformation, they are taking advantage of other Service Management capabilities to further their growth and IT maturity.

Code: General

Conversational interfaces are expected to save businesses $8 billion per year by 2022. What are you waiting for? Join us to learn how you can quickly and seamlessly deploy preconfigured chatbots that solve high volume and common requests quickly to reduce cost, increase customer satisfaction, and keep agents focused on more pressing issues. Empower your business with consistent, scalable, and always-on self-service interactions that provide instant information and kick off workflows across the enterprise.

Code: General

The term “enterprise service management”, defined as a means of extending service management across an entire organization, often from ITSM, has gained traction in recent years. However, it is important not to confuse the primary objective of internal service, which is delivering value to customers with ESM. It doesn’t matter how far you expand service management; the employee is still your customer.

During this session, Liz will discuss the importance of ESM, ITSM and how to build a single platform of services for the entire organization while at the same time meeting the increasing expectations of employees.

Code: General

Today’s employees are accustomed to easy and frictionless experiences with their technologies. They expect to be able to use any device, no matter where they are, to do pretty much anything. But IT support tools are still caught in the dial-up age. With an increasingly remote and mobile workforce, how can IT Departments effectively support these growing needs?

During this session, Sam will explore how organizations who are primed to deliver innovative solutions, such as self-service AI and mobile support, can resolve issues faster, reduce costs, and ultimately satisfy their end-users.

Sam will also discuss the following:

• How businesses are challenged to support and provide the best experience for modern workers
• How AI-enabled and collaborative solutions benefit IT organizations
• How to leverage new technologies to improve remote and cloud-based IT support capabilities

Code: General

Artificial intelligence for the service desk has arrived! What does that mean, and how can you use it for tangible improvement? During this session, Brendan will discuss how customer-facing AI and behind-the-scenes smart technology can deliver an experience your employees will love. He will also give you a sneak peak of what to expect from smart technology in the coming year.

Code: General

Often, organizations are being asked to do more with less. Less people, less money and less time, but are still expected to be quicker, deliver more, and keep improving quality. These expectations are often met with challenges within the business.

During this session, Ed will discuss how the role of IT Asset Management has become a key player in meeting the wider business challenges within the context of Service Management. He will elaborate on how systematically tackling the challenges with simple, clear steps can move you away from analysis paralysis and get you started on targeted journeys to deliver a specific, tangible outcome.

He will also discuss the following;

• How to control and optimize your software usage to align with your business goals
• How to ensure that you have the proper software assets to support your operations
• Understand what is deployed on your network, reduce vulnerabilities and remove underutilized resources

Code: General

Artificial intelligence is making our lives easier – both professionally and at home. Some industries are already embracing and anticipating the competitive advantages of AI while other industries that aren’t keeping pace could be at a distinct competitive disadvantage. Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform IT and Enterprise Service Management. However, it is important to separate hype from reality. During this session, Dr. Sahai will present a real-life case study on how enterprise productivity was scaled using an AI-driven IT management solution. He will discuss how a global leader in connected car technology and lifestyle audio innovations with several locations around the world and a very complex IT environment used AI and Enterprise Service Management to deliver a ‘consumer-like’ 24/7 experience to their customers while obtaining high efficiency from their IT operations.

Code: General

For the most part, end users don’t embrace the IT service desk. Efforts to advocate the importance of self-service have traditionally fallen flat. Based on an SDI report, ‘lack of marketing awareness’ is the second highest reason for the low ROI from self-service technologies.

The inference? End users aren’t using the service desk and self-service portal as much as we would like them to. While part of the reason is the lack of awareness and internal marketing, the other major barrier is the psychology of end users.

During this session, Praveen will discuss how combining marketing techniques will help IT teams overcome the psychological barrier that end users have in adopting the service desk. He will also present a set of techniques with practical examples that can be used during this adoption process.

Code: General

Organizations often expect a lot from self-supporting Agile teams in today’s world. Time to market is crucial and the velocity of your Agile team seems to be the only key performance indicator.

The forming–storming–norming–performing model of group development has taught us that these phases are all necessary and inevitable for the team to grow, face challenges, tackle problems, find solutions, plan work and deliver results. The smoother the transition between storming and performing, the sooner an organization will see results, which will have a positive effect on your team’s velocity. During this session, Richard will help you recognize what the various group development stages are and what your strategy for each stage should be.

Join Richard as he elaborates on the following:

• How to gain insight into the various stages of group development
• Recognizing the characteristics of each stage
• How to develop a strategy for each stage
• Understanding the importance of stable teams

Code: General

In this session, Jack profiles the book, The Jelly Effect, which is about how to make your communication stick.

Like throwing jelly at a wall, poor communication never sticks. Too much information and not enough relevance is a problem that pervades almost all business communication. So what's the answer? More relevance, and a lot less jelly!

Jack’s review includes a look at the book’s key teachings. The Jelly Effect teaches you simple ways to be effective at communicating only what is relevant 100 percent of the time. Imagine that! You would be better at talking to others, presenting, networking and selling. You would excel in interviews, meetings and pay-rise discussions. The benefits would be endless.

Jack will also give you examples of how to apply the key teachings of the book to make you a better IT professional as you communicate with others and work through major projects, organizational change initiatives, creating and delivering presentations, team meetings, meetings with senior executives, and in leading and managing others.

Code: General

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND!

This session features two things everyone likes: chocolate and motivation! It teaches nine motivational concepts that can help participants get more out of every day, both personally and professionally. You will learn about persistence, passion, effective allocation of resources, the law of diminishing return and more! During this session, Denise includes a chocolate tasting to demonstrate not only how to appreciate chocolate, but life itself. Attendees will learn about the communication styles of the world’s best chocolate makers and determine their own style. This insight can be used to better relate to others.

Code: General

In his famous book, Leading Change, which describes eight steps for effectively leading major transformations, the author John Kotter talks about the right way versus the wrong way to communicate a change vision. According to what he describes as step four, good communication is a critical success factor to making a change take hold in any organization, and especially so in large, complex structures. According to Kotter’s research, most leaders UNDER communicate their change vision by at least a factor of 10, and many by as much as a factor of 100!

When leaders communicate the change vision effectively, they and the guiding coalition promote organizational understanding and it establishes a foundation for gaining the commitment from employees and managers to embrace this new direction. They effectively capture both the minds and hearts of the employees and managers that are needed for the change. Through effective communication, these important stakeholders not only understand the reasons for the change but they also agree with it, and are committed to making it happen.

During this enlightening session, Gary uses components of Pink’s certification course, Leading The Organizational Change Process and, together with his expertise in organizational change management, and his vast experience as a seasoned veteran of many major change initiatives, profiles: the difference between a corporate vision and a change vision; the components of a strong change vision; how and why to communicate the change vision in many different ways; the difference between getting buy-in from the minds and the hearts of employees and managers, and why BOTH are necessary. Gary also digs into his consultant’s case book to give you many real-world examples of what other organizations have done to achieve success.

Code: General

One of the highest rated sessions of last year’s event, Karen will update and repeat her hugely successful presentation!

Do YOU feel overworked and overwhelmed? It’s no secret that most employees feel this way as they run on empty trying to keep up with the constant demands placed upon them. 70% of people in the US say they never receive recognition in the workplace and more than 50% of managers are missing the mark when it comes to showing appreciation. Showing and receiving genuine appreciation can help you handle and manage the stress of constant change.

During this session, Karen, a certified facilitator of The 5 Languages Of Appreciation In The Workplace, will help you understand the languages and how she has used her certification to apply them at Corning. She will use her hands-on experience to help you gain a deeper understanding of your own appreciation needs and the needs of others. You will also learn:

• How genuine appreciation helps people handle the stress of constant change
• The secrets of valuing yourself and your colleagues
• Practical methods to boost engagement and commitment in employees

Learn the language, hit the mark, and change your workplace!

Code: Beginner

Automation. Speed. Agility. Adaptability. Are we talking about the organization of the future? You could be forgiven for thinking so, with the hazy and vague view of DevOps that is so commonly seen today. But at Pink, we believe this describes how your IT organization could be today.

We have worked relentlessly with subject matter experts to bring you the ideas and innovations that shape the future with Pink Elephant’s 15 Essential Practices For DevOps Success.

Attend this workshop with our DevOps guru, George Spalding. Taken from Pink Elephant’s DevOps Essentials certification course, George explains who explains the exclusive-to-Pink ‘Full Stack’ approach, which integrates best practices such as Lean, Agile and ITIL/IT Service Management. George’s practical and uncomplicated advice will guide you on where to begin, and what to do to ensure your DevOps implementation transforms your department into an organization of the future – today!

This workshop is also presented as a two breakouts in the Power Hour Track of the conference program. Part one includes Practices One Through Eight and Part Two includes practices nine through fifteen.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Join Troy, one of the key architects of ITIL’s new version as he reviews the ITIL 4 Service Value System – which replaces the ITIL v3 five-stage lifecycle. Troy will describe how this new approach to IT Service Management enables the creation of real business value. This is a not-to-be-missed session where you can hear directly about the strategic elements of ITIL’s new service management model from one of the world’s leading ITIL authorities.

Code: Beginner

Easy in theory, but not always easy to implement! Join Jennifer as she digs deep into her vast implementation experience and takes you beyond the theory in the ITIL certification courses. It’s like getting free consulting!

Jennifer will start by identifying the biggest issues that most organizations have when applying the theory of ITIL to these three key and interrelated processes; she'll then provide you with practical how-tos for how to overcome the most common barriers to success. This is a not-to-be-missed session if you want to learn not just “what to do” but “how to” get it right!

Jennifer’s half-day workshop is taken in part from Pink Elephant’s ITIL Release, Control & Validation certification course.

Code: Beyond Beginner

In today’s high-paced and dynamically-changing IT environments the critical and urgent always seems to take priority over the necessary and the good! This makes finding time to make tangible improvements a constant battle for many IT leaders and teams. Compound this with the challenge that many large-scale change initiatives seem to stall out or just plain fail, one could almost be justified to give up hope in the principle of continual improvement.

However, Lean IT provides an answer to this challenge by providing a structured problem-solving methodology called a “Kaizen Event” that is focused on making small incremental improvements that make a big difference. Join Gary for this very practical look at the steps, tools and participants of a Kaizen Event that enables any organization to finally start making real and lasting change happen in their environment.

This workshop is based on Pink Elephant’s Lean IT Kaizen certification course.

Code: Beyond Beginner

Based on Pink’s new certification course, Integrated Service Management Essentials, Charlie explains how the practices of Lean, Agile, DevOps and ITIL work together with proven organizational change management principles to enable successful business outcomes.

No one else provides gives you an 'integrated' view of IT Service Management (ITSM) – a must-have in today’s demanding and ever-changing business environment. This includes a unique “Full Stack” view of DevOps, which is a necessity to successfully enable improved quality, higher speed and a reduction in costs.

IT organizations are constantly challenged to improve the way services are delivered in respect to quality, speed and cost. In response to these ongoing pressures, organizations have long turned to ITSM frameworks such as ITIL to improve the quality and value of their service delivery capabilities.

In addition to ITIL, recent trends and market pressures have introduced new models, methods and concepts designed to further accelerate traditional IT management practices such as project management, software development and service delivery. However, many organizations find that these practices are leveraged in isolation by different teams. This leads to competition for resources, which creates conflict and distracts management focus, rather than collaborating and gaining the benefit of integration.

The Integrated Service Management Essentials certification course, of which Charlie provides an overview, adds to your knowledge of proven ITSM capabilities and demonstrates how the practices of Lean, Agile and DevOps work together with ITIL processes to enable successful outcomes, remove waste, lower costs and increase business value.

Code: General

Robin has been a major subject matter expert (SME) contributor to ITIL 4’s new body of knowledge. Her work has led to the creation of the ITIL 4 Train The Trainer materials for all training organizations world-wide. Join Robin for an in-depth operational and grass roots look at ITIL 4. She will describe the new processes/practices in detail and compare them to ITIL v3, including what’s new, what’s changed and what needs to be considered for your ITSM process improvement initiatives. Robin will also highlight the dimensions and principles of the ITIL 4 new service management model. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear about ITIL 4 from one of its major contributing SMEs.

Code: Beyond Beginner

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In this half day workshop, Jack will present excerpts from Pink’s Lean IT Leadership certification course – quickly becoming one of the highest rated education programs. Jack’s overview includes:

• The importance of establishing True North (aligned principles and priorities)
• The role of Governance vs. Compliance
• Cascading IT Strategy to Operations (Hoshin Kanri)
• Establishing structure and performance management systems that enable vs. disable collaboration
• Leading from the Gemba (how leaders lead and coach by example at the shop floor)
• Building a culture of personal accountability and ownership
• Establishing employee engagement strategies to mentor and develop potential