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With over 25 years in the Information Technology industry Roger has been involved with support, tactical and strategic level issues relating to the provision of quality IT services. He has spent time working in mining, oil refinery, systems integration, consultancy and training businesses.

Roger has been involved with major infrastructure projects and has worked in account management and leadership roles. In the 80’s and 90’s, Roger was involved with the Mine Rescue squad in Mount Isa, Australia – during this time his passion for clear, open and effective communication was not only required it was critical. This philosophy carries over to Roger’s business beliefs.

Roger has delivered ITIL Managers education to hundreds throughout the world, as well as multiple Apollo 13 ITSM Simulations and ISO 20000 Consultant programmes. He has spoken at a number of conferences including the first itSMF conference in South Korea. He has a capability to take complex concepts and show how they can be applied in simple terms. He is an international speaker and has a passion for IT professionalism.

Roger can shed light on a variety of topics that most IT professionals simply are not aware of; but are exceptionally useful to understand.

Roger shares one of those topics here.
The principle of Diminishing (or marginal) returns is something that I learnt during my my Uni days, but thought it would be a good topic to share with the general community interested in the ITIL framework and Service Management in general.

I wonder if you’ve ever come across an organization that despite its best efforts just doesn’t seem to be making any progress with improving their service quality. I know I have. Well intentioned staff making their very best efforts but with little or nothing to show for it.

Here is an interesting Hypothesis… perhaps they are trying too hard! At the outset, the principle I am sharing with you is not the answer to every such situation. Usually, it is a case of the wrong or inexperienced people in the wrong positions at the wrong time. This explains why good consultants are worth their weight in gold.

The Law of Diminishing Returns is an economics principle that is easy to explain and it COULD help ITIL professionals, consultants and managers better understand why some organizations need to be told to “slow down” or even stop trying to make such dramatic improvements to their overall IT Service quality.

This diagram illustrates Diminishing returns very nicely. Organizations base their decisions on information received. The more  information received the better the decisions. However, there comes a point when the decision making quality starts to fall, even though the amount of information coming in is still increasing.

The term “information overload” is applied to this example; which is a classic case of diminishing or marginal returns. Diminishing returns can therefore be defined as the point where the increasing quantity of available resources has an overall negative effect on the objective.

Consider a situation where more people and more tools are poured into an environment looking for radical improvement; but the opposite happens. Things get worse. Diminishing returns explains the situation as having gone past the optimal peak of resource input and a different strategy is required. In an ITIL sense it would require a phase of embedding and consolidation, rather than driving for new improvement. The concept could be explained by people, process, organizational and/or technology maturity has not caught up with the vision of those driving the improvement. The end result is the same, revisit and revise what was done earlier – to improve and fine tune what is already in place, rather than looking for new fields of improvement.

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