ANNUAL BIRDS OF A FEATHER EVENT
 
To Be Led by ITSM Experts (You) in the DC Metro Area 
 
October 15, 2013  2:30 p.m. -- 6:00 p.m.
  
 LOCATION: Offices of L-3 Stratis 

11955 Freedom Drive, Reston VA

 MEMBERS - FREE
GUESTS - $10 
 
You must bring identification to the meeting. 
 
This is a secure building. Attendees will need to indicate upon registration if
they have US Citizenship or a valid Green Card

Badging with photo id only that indicates this status.
 
Please register early so we can plan the food and space accordingly.

 GREETINGS itSMF National Capital Area Members

Hope you have enjoyed a fabulous summer and are ready for a busy Fall season of IT Service Management. As you know, both the Federal Government and Commercial Organizations in the DC Metro area have both best practice ground breaking successes and their own unique struggles with implementation of IT Service Management principles and processes in their organizations. YOU are the experts who are in the best position to support, lead, and assist agencies and organizations with their efforts and what better way to stay "in the know" than networking with other knowledgeable, intelligent and informed colleagues who are ITSM experts. Our annual itSMF National Capital LIG "Birds of a Feather" event has always been one of our most popular and well attended events. The format of 5 topics running at 50 minutes with a small group and then repeated for a new group allows for in-depth discussions, sharing of experiences and challenges and the opportunity to network, collaborate, and brainstorm with other ITSM professionals.

Complimentary refreshments will be provided. Since we will be in the Reston Town Center, we invite you to plan to enjoy Happy Hour after the event at Il Fornaio in the Town Center. Get a group together and enjoy the afternoon, continue your
discussions at Happy Hour and kick off the weekend with knowledge, networking and refreshments.

The Following Sessions will be available:

1. "DevOps/ Agile – Rapid Evolution or the Fast Path to Extinction- How it is evolving” ; DevOps is the result of the collision of advances in tools and widespread agile adoption. It is the marriage of agile practices and system administration. You may know DevOps by another name: Agile Operations or Agile for Infrastructure. DevOps is really about increasing the level of collaboration between development and operation as well as between QA and operations.

About the facilitators :

Arun Simha is a Fellow and Solutions Architect within L-3's elite Solution Engineering Team. This team is part of L-3 STRATIS's Chief Growth Office (CGO) that collaboratively brings together L-3's top technical and business minds in spearheading strategic pursuits in enterprise agile IT, cloud computing, Big Data and cyber security. Arun is a Contributor and Reviewer of the ITIL v3 2011 Edition. As an ITIL Expert and Service Manager, Certified Scrum Master and a recent PMP, , Arun is constantly refining business models and leading key growth initiatives to differentiate L-3 with Federal, DOD, Intelligence Community and International customers.. Arun has been actively involved in the itSMF National Capital Area committee since 2006 and hosted the first two "Vendor Shootouts”. Arun has over 24 years of experience in the IT industry with a strong focus on applying ITIL and Continuous Delivery methods to achieve lasting transformation.. More information on L-3's STRATIS division is available at: http://www.l-3stratis.com .

Jay Flowers in the Director of Agile Practice for the Agilex Health Care Practice, with over 14 years' experience in information technology as a software developer, engineer, architect, and is expert in Agile engineering practices. He is the created the old CI Factory, a turnkey Continuous Integration system, as well as the new Agilex DevOps Factory, a turnkey solution for development project hosting using Continuous Delivery. He has published articles in magazines such as Microsoft's MSDN and contributed to an O`Reilly book on Development Power Tools. Jay Flowers has been a speaker at user groups and conferences across the United States of America on CI Factory and Agile engineering practices. More information is available at http://www.agilex.com .

Joe Porto is a Director of Systems Engineering with a focus on Agile development at Agilex. He has over 13 years of experience in the design, development, integration, testing and deployment of Intelligence Community Systems. He has provided technical leadership for multiple teams of Agile engineers involved in all aspects of end-to-end systems development. More information is available at http://www.agilex.com .

2. "Advance Problem Management Root Cause Analysis – Using thinking methodology to apply critical thinking to Root Cause Analysis”. - Dr. Matt Fourie co- founded Thinking Dimensions with Chuck Kepner in 1997. Together they developed the KEPNER and FOURIE™ thinking methodology which is recorded in published literary works such as "Managing Beyond the Ordinary”, "Innovation – The FreeZone Thinking Experience” and "SOLVE IT, Root Cause Analysis”.

About the facilitator :

Dr. Matt Fourie's primary focus is on product design and managing the international network across 20 countries. This is supported by solution design, facilitation and capability development in the areas of process improvement, ITIL Continual Service Improvement, Lean-Sigma and general problem solving practices.

Root Cause Analysis helps avoid unnecessary and expensive "Trial & Error" fixes by using a step-by-step critical thinking approach to identify, analyze, resolve and prevent major incidents and problems. Due to the highly specialized disciplines in Infrastructure, Database Management, Networking, Security/Risk, Development and Design, IT professionals often lack a common skill-set across their silos to solve major incidents and problems effectively. Root Cause Analysis applies to all IT disciplines and is most effective in bringing all these varied skills together with a common process and language to resolve problems.

The KEPNER and FOURIE skill-set shared during this session goes hand in hand with Problem Management initiatives utilizing Problem Managers, Project Managers, Application Managers, and Service Delivery Managers as the key to results generation. These skills are quickly applied to Major Incidents, Problems and Projects in the workspace and results are measured in time, cost and quality metrics. Participants will have an opportunity to share and contrast their Root Cause Analysis and Problem Management processes with the other session attendees. More information is available at: http://www.kepner-fourie.com/about_us.html

3. ITSM"s Role in the Consumerization of IT - How this approach can be adopted to immediately improve the level of service to end users and their overall IT experience.” People's expectations of service have changed. We can order a plane ticket from anywhere on our mobile devices. We can search and combine information instantly from multiple sources and across the web. End users now wish to request and receive IT services in the same way that we do in our everyday lives. Unfortunately, an average of 87% of employees reported losing an average of 18 hours per month due to IT friction. This friction causes shadow IT and makes IT as an organization become less relevant to the enterprise. In this session, we discuss new approaches that allow IT to remove friction, empower end users, and become more relevant as an organization.

About the facilitator :

Stuart Ainsworth of BMC Software is a Technical Director with the Federal Division with over 14 years of BMC solutions experience. He has worked with clients providing cutting edge cloud and enterprise based solutions across a diverse group of clients and business models. This coupled with BMC's position in the marketplace provides Stuart with a rich history to draw upon his experience around IT consumerization. More information is available at: http://www.bmc.com

4. "Capturing and Sustaining Stakeholder Excitement for ITSM" ; It's often difficult to keep stakeholders excited and engaged after the"newness" of an ITIL initiative has passed. This session will discuss ideas around both creating stakeholder excitement at the start of an ITSM program as well as maintaining stakeholder interest for ITIL over the long term.

About the facilitator :

Erika Flora is an experienced Project and Program Manager with over 10 years' experience in a variety of industries and sectors. She began her career as a drug development project manager for a growing pharmaceutical company, then made the leap to IT when she led an Enterprise Project Management (EPM) system implementation and established business processes to support the firm's rapid growth.

Erika has built Program Management Offices and led multiple EPM and IT Service Management (ITSM) projects. She has rescued failing tool implementation projects and revamped IT and Business processes for her clients, helping organizations implement ITIL v3 processes and ensuring alignment with IT and business strategy.

Erika is PMP, PgMP, PRINCE2, ISO20k, and ITIL v3 Expert Certified and is the lead Project Management curriculum developer at Beyond20. She has a Masters Degree in Microbiology from the University of Florida and serves as an adjunct professor of Project Management for San Diego State University (SDSU)

In addition to PMP and ITIL training courses, Erika teaches PRINCE2 and other project management curriculum. She also delivers training on VMware's "Ionix” ITSM platform, Microsoft Project, Project Server, and SharePoint. Erika is a skilled writer, blogger, and presenter on a variety of technical and business topics. She is passionate about community involvement and was honored as PMI Global Volunteer of the Year in 2007. More information is available at: http://www.beyond20.com/team

5. Achieving True World Class IT EXCELLENCE - Is IT performing at the maximum possible level of performance in your organization? Think for a moment about most industries in America. We all know of organizations that consistently and faithfully deliver high performance in many respects – lower costs (or high profitability), extremely high customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, revenue growth, high market share. For example, in the hotel industry, companies like the Ritz Carlton are always at the top of rankings on quality and on perceptions of value for the money. In this BoF session, we will talk about some of the lessons learned and secrets of high performance that are proven and have been statistically validated since the official establishment in 1987 of The Malcolm Baldrige Award. This Award is conferred each year by the President of the United States to America's top organizations and has led to job growth of 93% versus 3% within the same industries to organizations that have been repeat winners of the award. What can those of us in IT learn about EXCELLENCE from the model employed by America's best organizations? What does it take for IT to be revered and to be thought of as a high value investment just like your favorite personal service provider? Can IT be the best place to work ? How does IT provide a level of user experience as legendary, pleasurable, and memorable as Disneyland

Come to this BoF session to receive some basic information on the high performance model that you can take away with you and share your own experiences and lessons learned on the various components that we will discuss around the group. The group will generate examples through this brainstorming of ways that IT organizations can do a better job of becoming a true high performance organization focused on EXCELLENCE.

About the facilitator : Kirk Holmes is President of Holmes and Associates, Inc, a leading advisor and consultancy to government and commercial organizations on ITSM, IT operations, performance, and organizational improvement (http://www.holmesinc.net). He was co-founder (2003) and Past President from 2006 to 2009 of the National Capital Area Local Interest Group, the largest itSMF local interest group in the world. He also served four years on national Board of Directors of itSMF USA in the roles of Treasurer, Business Development, Publications, and Knowledge Management. In that role, Kirk represented the USA in the itSMF-International Publications Executive Subcommittee that coordinates and endorses publications as representing global best practice for IT Service Management and he was also managed the launch and growth of ITIL Version 3 in the USA on behalf of global itSMF community. Outside of itSMF activities, Kirk was appointed by the Administrator of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, he has been serving as an Examiner since 2011 for the Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence Award, the award conferred by the President of the United States or Vice-President to America's greatest organizations. He is also Chair of an ASQ Special Interest Group on Performance Excellence and sits on the Advisory Board of ISO 15504 for Enterprise SPICE. More information is available at http://www.linkedin.com/in/kirkeholmes