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Insights
Notes from the practice — on service management, governance, audits and the parts of improvement work that nobody puts in the proposal.
ITIL 5 is here. What actually changed — and what didn’t
PeopleCert calls it ITIL (Version 5). The community already calls it ITIL 5. Behind the naming argument sits a more useful question: how much of the framework genuinely moved, and how much of the change is in the certificates rather than the guidance?
June 27, 2026The ITIL 5 qualification path, and how not to waste the money
Nine modules, four designations, a paid bridge, a paid transition, and a stated plan to retire every ITIL 4 module on 31 December 2027. Here is what the scheme actually contains, what it costs, and the four decisions a training buyer has to make.
June 13, 2026Product and service management: what ITIL 5’s scope change asks of your operating model
ITIL 5 stops calling itself IT service management and starts calling itself digital product and service management. That is not a marketing tweak. Ten days in December 2022 at Southwest Airlines show exactly what it costs when a critical internal product has no owner.
May 30, 2026Service continuity is no longer a policy document. In India it is a licence condition
The RBI does not fine banks for IT failure. It stops them acquiring customers. HDFC Bank lost fifteen months of its digital programme; Kotak lost nine and a half months of online onboarding. Both orders read like an audit against the service continuity practice.
May 16, 2026You cannot protect what you cannot list: configuration and asset management after Equifax and Log4Shell
Equifax's vulnerability scan came back clean because it looked in the wrong directory. Organisations with software bills of materials could not use them to find Log4j. Maersk survived because of a power cut in Ghana. The CMDB is not paperwork.
May 2, 2026Problem management is the practice everyone funds last. WannaCry shows what that costs
A patch existed. Alerts had been issued twice. The fix was free. And 81 NHS trusts were still disrupted, because nobody had a mechanism to check whether the advice had been followed. Known errors are only useful if somebody owns them.
April 18, 2026Channel File 291: what CrowdStrike taught every change advisory board
Eight and a half million Windows machines stopped booting because a configuration file expected twenty-one values and got twenty. The defect is interesting. The absence of a staged rollout is the lesson — and it applies to far more of your estate than you think.
April 4, 2026Adopting PRINCE2 Agile without the bulldozer
The sharpest criticism of PRINCE2 Agile was written in 2015: full PRINCE2 applied to agile projects is "like plowing a garden with a bulldozer". It is a fair hit against an untailored implementation — and tailoring is the seventh principle for exactly this reason.
March 21, 2026PRINCE2 Agile Version 2 was rebuilt, not refreshed — and the hexagon has quietly gone
Version 2 sits on PRINCE2 7's architecture, which means seven performance aspects instead of six. A six-sided hexagon cannot carry seven variables — and fix-and-flex, the hexagon and the five targets do not appear in the new syllabi at all.
March 7, 2026Big bang or increments: what four audited failures say about your cutover strategy
TSB, Birmingham, Phoenix and Revlon all chose a single cutover. Each has a published investigation. Read together they describe a specific mechanism of failure — and the incremental alternative is not a technology choice but a governance one.