today we're going to discuss a very exciting topic which is what separates a good from a great conflict manager hi I'm Alex and I'm the managing director at aimer and partners and for the past years we worked with many organizations when it comes to the art of conflict management yet it's difficult to find tangible tips around how you really succeed in your internal role so for that reason we created this video of the four key essential strategies that you need to know to do Kick-Ass config management come with us [Music] yeah before anything else let's first have a look at what a concrete manager actually does we'll have a look at both the formal and the informal definitions but first I need some slides to help me [Music] let's have a look at the roles and main responsibilities keep in mind that this is a simplified version starting with the configuration manager this is typically a person who is very involved in the day-to-day operational task such as the data loading this could be an individual who oversees Integrations import jobs sometimes even Discovery jobs but also assist in documenting where does the data come from and what is the expected frequency on the data into the system and speaking of data data quality is equally important the configuration manager tends to work with different stakeholder groups to produce audits configure Health rules such as what are the required attributes what are the recommended attributes but they also Monitor and make sure that no configuration items for example go stale or that we don't see any duplicates in the system last but not least we have the reporting part the configuration manager tends to create meaningful reports to different stakeholder groups it could be sent on a regular basis for example what is the trends regarding incidents for our particular CIS what is currently going on in the change management landscape and other sort of meaningful business intelligence and also helping configuring dashboards it's very common that the config manager helps different groups of people set up meaningful dashboards that they can utilize in their day-to-day business let's now have a look at the cmdb process or product owner we can immediately see here that this is a bit more of a strategic perspective for example creating the configure Asian management plan and process producing long-term roadmaps and painting The Dot on the horizon correlating the cmdb to relevant use cases for the business and also tying it to Strategic Mission targets typically dictated by management at the same time the process owner is also responsible for Designing the overall cmdb to scope it what should be included what should not be included what sort of metadata or what sort of attributes are important and what is critical or not also the governance aspect how is this maintained over time and by whom and how do we ensure the data quality and last but not least how do we interface to other processes to really generate full value of the CDP but we also have enablement enablement is critical as a cmdb process owner to provide valuable training and mentorship to the organization but also being able to produce good propositions of wide parchments should use the cmdb and what is the value behind it keep in mind that these roles sometimes might overlap depending on the organization so let's go to the Internet partner Studio to have a little chat and introduce our guest speaker who has a few sentences about this topic we've spoken now a lot about process ownership versus a conflict manager now these lines can get a little bit blurry so for that purpose katargina first of all welcome to the a m partner studio now you have a lot of experience when it comes to config management it's this something you recognize as well pleasure to be here I do have experience working as a config manager and before that as a cmdb owner it is something that can be blurry especially depending on the size and or maturity of organization it's never black or white to distinguish [Music] the first key essential tip that we like to give is focus on your diploma skills quite some counter-intuitive because Conflict Management implies a very technical role perhaps but that's not always true you see you as a conflict manager should absolutely have the ability to see where can I fit in configuration management within the organization and to do this you need to form relationships you need to know the values and really speak on the behalf of conflict management so on this topic of diplomacy we often hear that the role of a conflict manager is a tactical one but your perception is also that it contains strategic Elements which I absolutely agree upon could you expand more upon that config manager role is a tactical role you are the owner of cmp's configuration management plan and you should drive cmdb roadmap but also it's in my opinion within your responsibility or moving your gut to have this proactiveness towards I.T Enterprise and to drive cmdb strategy if the organization is evolving it or not fully know which way to go with cmdb you have the best visibility an umbrella visibility of it Enterprise and what you want to do with cmdp as a product and a data layer and how it can be later use an organization thank you being able to really articulate the value of the cmdb that's one of these mistakes that I communistly being repeated if you go back a couple of years the first time that you started working with the cmdb what is that advice that you could get here give to yourself when it comes to the value focus on the data model and data model quality data model quality and data model gives you this linkage to life cycle and processes so if you have good enough data model and you know how to manage that and use all the best practices for the data model governance you have trustworth data and they are more easily to be used in other not only atsm but you know vulnerability processes apms TPMS there's a lot that you can deal with cmdb data not only for the operational perspective so focus on the cmdb data governance model so start from properly ingested data work on the reconciliation of the data then focus on the data life cycle and when you are ready with that free go to data or data completeness and then to data audit [Music] okay yeah no I think that's excellent tips and to add to that another thing which I have seen is commonly missed as well is not really being able to tie the cmdb to relevant business objectives of the organization and I see you're laughing because I bet that you agree here a little bit right I do so cmtp it's a big topic and it also has a lot of data so one of the trick is to get focus on whatever organization needs uh in short and long term so if you can please find it strategy if the organization is still evolving at ID strategy go on to every it Tower and try to get stress plans from them especially it is infrastructure applications transplants maybe you can go to Enterprise Architects because they know what kind of applications are going to be developed go to you know infra guys to get to understanding its organization to be focusing more on data center side or Cloud site you this way you can attach cmdb data and what you're working on and the roadmap for cmdb with what actually organization needs for a couple of years foreign having other people to maintain the data quality is perhaps the most difficult part now how do we succeed with this stem we have to work with both the carrot and the stick and I'll show you how how to get people to do their part so on the left side here we can see some examples of using the so-called stick it could be a variant of we're sorry but we're not receiving or correlating event data in the cmdb from what we believe is your application so we cannot offer you premium level of monitoring but it could also be other things such as we don't have ownerships for your resources so we can't offer you a vulnerability assessment or that perhaps they are receiving a more expensive bill because we are lacking some critical unnecessary metadata on their infrastructure in an inverse way on the right side here we see some examples of using the carrot instead and this is all about Simplicity having people to do a very small amount of effort to gain a lot of value for example just fill in these tags and Security will pick you up or just confirm these attributes once per month with a few simple clicks and will give you the highest level of support something else that we've seen been used successfully is trying to do a sort of gamification on the data quality for examples with the certifications and we have also seen examples of companies actually carrying data accuracy as an objective across departments so keep these tips in mind for how you can balance the carrot and the stick in order to promote a better data quality within your organization with the evening coming to an end here in Amsterdam I hope that you really found this video useful and that you can apply some of these aspects in your daily job don't forget to follow nrm Partners on LinkedIn subscribe to our YouTube channel and keep on following our updates because we'll come out with a lot more videos moving forward so thank you so much for watching and see you next time [Music]