Hold Steady — Vol. 01 No. 02 / The practice

What I think about

Three corners of the work.

The patches of the platform where ten-plus years have left the deepest marks. Less a service menu, more a field notebook — what I notice, what I've learned, and where the patterns tend to hide. Click any entry to read the full notes.

  1. 01.

    ITSM, and the ghost of the old ticketing tool.

    The most consistent pattern I see in enterprise ITSM: teams who migrated to ServiceNow and rebuilt the old tool inside it. Same workflows, same friction, newer login.

    Read the notes →

    Incident · Problem
    Change · Request

    ITIL-aligned process
  2. 02.

    CMDB, and the graveyard problem.

    Most CMDBs are dead on arrival. The records exist, Discovery runs nightly, the dashboards populate — but the operations team doesn't trust the data.

    Read the notes →

    CSDM · Discovery
    Service mapping

    Governance habit
  3. 03.

    Optimisation, or the quiet cost of accretion.

    Instances grow faster than the teams running them. Customisations accrete, performance drifts, releases get skipped, licence counts creep. Nothing breaks. But the platform stops feeling like an asset.

    Read the notes →

    Customisation audit
    Upgrade readiness

    Platform governance

How the work tends to take shape

A few working modes.

When the work does happen outside my day-to-day, it usually takes one of these shapes. Descriptive, not a menu — every situation deserves its own conversation about what would actually help.

  1. A.

    A defined project

    A clear goal with a concrete deliverable — a rescue, a re-implementation, a remediation. Scope written down, milestones visible, end date in sight.

    Scoped
    Time-boxed
  2. B.

    A few days a week, embedded

    Sitting alongside a team for a few months while they level up. A senior voice in the room for design reviews, hard decisions, and the long tail of "is this the right way to do this?"

    Embedded
    Mentorship
  3. C.

    Lightweight advisory

    Periodic check-ins for the calls you'd otherwise be having alone. Architecture reviews, second opinions, sanity-checks before you commit budget. Async-friendly.

    Periodic
    Async-friendly

If anything here is your problem right now —

Tell me about it. Not every conversation needs to turn into a project; sometimes the most useful thing is an honest read on whether you need a consultant at all.