PDCA Consulting Monthly Newsletter November 2026

Hello,

Your service desk closes tickets all day and still hears that IT is slow. Your PMO produces reports that nobody reads. They usually get treated as two separate problems, owned by two separate people and fixed (if at all) in two separate projects.

This issue is about joining them up: a podcast on the service desk that stops waiting for the phone to ring, a way to look at your service desk and your PMO in one go, and a free webinar series to put practical fixes in front of your team. October was quieter for delivery and busier for preparation, which in my experience is the right way round.

If any of it sounds uncomfortably familiar, reply and tell me. I read every one.

Fewer places for the problem to hide

• Your service desk and your PMO, measured in the same engagement. At the end of October I qualified as an assessor for service management maturity, to sit alongside the project and portfolio assessment I added in September. One assessment can now cover both sides of the house against recognised benchmarks, so the gap between “IT says it’s done” and “the project says it’s late” has nowhere left to hide.
• A free monthly webinar for your team, from early 2027. Together with fellow practitioner Amjed Altayyan, I’m putting a monthly 45 to 60 minute session to the training partners I work with: one practical fix a month, such as getting a PMO listened to, free to attend and useful CPD for your IT team.
• Engineering capacity when the fix needs software. My agent agreement with Innowise is in its final signing stage, so when an improvement needs something built rather than just a process changed, it doesn’t stall while you hunt for a separate supplier.
• Training delivery with a large IT services group in the new year. We’ve agreed to keep working together on training from early 2027. I can also put PeopleCert’s official course material into a training organisation’s own branding, so if you run an accredited training organisation and want your courses to look like yours rather than everyone else’s, I can do that work for you.

If someone measured your service desk and your PMO side by side tomorrow, which one would you be more nervous about?

The service desk that stops waiting for the phone to ring

How many of your tickets this month were the same three problems wearing different hats?

October on LinkedIn ran as five weekly stories, each one a real problem from a real organisation (names left out), told over a week:

This is the web edition of the newsletter, published on PDCAConsulting.com/blog. Every post title above links straight to LinkedIn.

November

Find out what’s really slowing you down, in about a month

Which fix has been “next quarter” for the last four quarters? Thirty minutes is usually enough to tell whether it’s worth doing now.