Finding Focus: Risk Management, Service Desk More

The ITIL v4 framework from Axelos defines 34 distinct IT management practices, and David van Heerden narrows them to four worth treating as your possible "one thing": risk management, service desk, deployment, and infrastructure and platform management.

The episode borrows its central idea from Gary Keller and Jay Papasan's book The One Thing: with fires popping up all day, pick the single practice you lean on so that even when everything else falls apart, you got the most important thing right.

Risk management is framed as more than worst-case thinking. It is about articulating to leadership how budget cuts, dropped tools, or removed automation introduce bottlenecks and opportunity cost, forcing manual toil that pulls the team off higher-value work.

To find your one thing, walk business stakeholders through the practices and have them score how much they value each (for example, rating a five-minute versus 30-minute ticket resolution) so the priority surfaces from the people who define your team's value.

Once stakeholders sponsor your one thing, automation and training drive it down to a low-effort practice the whole team can run almost without thinking, which frees you to take on the next priority.