June full of events

I came back from the HP Munich training mentioned in previous post that first week of June and later I went to Prague for the conference organized for my client's team. It was nice to participate in that and to meet face to face people I cooperate everyday with. Previous week I attended second part of ITIL training -Service Delivery but out of 5 days I came only for one day - another one I became sick with flu so I ended up at home fighting with the sickness.Seems that one month flights, conferences, trainings overwhelmed me :) but it was worth the try.

HP Project and Portfolio Management training in Unterhaching(Munich) HP-Mercury training center

This week I am on another training (this month is crazy regarding that) organized by HP&Mercury in Unterhaching(Munich). I like the fact that after each theoretical module there is an associated exercise so I can practice what you learnt. One doesn't get bored quite easily. A user of PPM - Project and Portfolio Management can compare proposals, projects and operational activities against budgets and resource capacity levels to achieve alignment with business needs (the sentence from marketing materials). One feature in favour of Microsoft EPM is that budget planning is more emphasised in that application. PPM seems to be more budget oriented - so during tool selection business needs should be considered accordingly.
There is an event called German Girl Geek Dinner in Munich - I have already been to such a meeting in Barcelona where I met many interesting woman with IT managerial positions from Grupo Intercom. I like the idea so much but I am wondering who in Poland will organize such a meeting as to my knowledge there hasn't been any organized. Do I need to ping Microsoft?
Maybe someone from them already proposed it :)

ITIL Service Manager Service Support training

I am currently attending ITIL Service Manager Service Support course organized by CTPartners - Polish Exin accredited training provider. It lasts 5 days (40 hours) and the biggest advantage of that is the opportunity to meet people from other companies which implemented or would like to implement ITIL. I am wondering if there is any ranking of companies in Poland that introduced ITIL.
I think the least mature processes in majority of companies are configuration and problem management. By the way - any idea if there is any tool that discover by itself problems among incidents? Of course after such automated discovery the manual verification would be necessary but still it would be helpful for problem manager.
ITIL foundation certification is more popular in Poland than ITIL Service Manager one. Still the numbers in UK and Holland regarding ITIL certification is incomparably higher.

Up to date ITIL aligned tools

Due to the commnents to previous post I wanna share with up to date document on ITIL /ITSM supporting tools mentioned in pmit.pl : "The Forrester Wave: Service Desk Management Tools, Q2 2008". Enjoy reading!

ITIL aligned tools

ITIL based organization uses ITIL aligned tools in order to streamline IT service processes and manage the IT service life cycle. The most famous are:

• HP OpenView Service Desk
• CA Unicenter ServicePlus Service Desk
• Peregrine ServiceCenter
• Remedy IT Service Management

Personally I have experience in working with HP OpenView Service Desk but the biggest weaknesses of that tool are lack of advanced knowledge base (third party tools are needed) and advance reporting (with proper time calculations).
Microsoft is working on ITIL aligned tool - Service Manager as part of System Center products. However, it will be available in 2010. Too bad for MOF :)