Monthly Archives: March 2019

What you don’t know about Mobile Security

Articles, Documents, Resource Hub, Standard Requirement Self Assessment Information

When we’ve been working in the same industry for a while, you get used to knowing a lot about a specific subject.

For example: You’re a security Management expert, you have all your qualifications and certifications that make you very wanted in this field.
People (clients) look at you as the subject matter expert because, let’s face it – your LinkedIn profile shows all the right experience and education.
You don’t even think about it, because it has become second nature.

Easy to get complacent at this stage – you still read articles about security and you have an interest in mobile security so you pay a bit more attention to that. But in reality you’re just super busy with all the engagements you have booked to dive deeply into the matter.

On top of that, you don’t really know what you don’t know. You know a lot – but not everything.. so how do you find out what the best way is to allocate your effort when you want to learn something new about Mobile Security? (or any type of security for that matter).

That’s why we at The Art of Service created the Mobile Security Self Assessment Toolkit. Because we’ve all been there… and we want to help you break through this challenge.

The toolkits consist of 3 different sets of questions about Mobile Security. These questions help you with your clients or your teams, to get them thinking about Mobile Security or the definition of this within the context of their business.

The questions are organised based on an increasing level of maturity of the business processes surrounding Mobile Security:

  1. Recognise – at this level you recognise that there is such a thing as Mobile Security and that it may have an impact on your business or career.
  2. Define – Once you understand the applicability of Mobile Security for your business it is time to define what it really means in the context of your business processes and customer service deliverables.
  3. Measure – Identify how you measure and who measures what within the business and suppliers’ organisation to help you understand the performance of Mobile Security
  4. Analyse – It’s not enough to measure, you need to do something with the raw data. Analyse it and map it against KPIs and metrics or benchmarks that you’ve identified earlier in the Define step.
  5. Improve – Now is the time to improve the business processes surrounding Mobile Security. Take a structured approach to this improvement step and don’t try to do too much at the same time.
  6. Control – This level is all about the control you have over each step in the business processes. How can you control the trigger responses, the process activities, the deliverables and results to make the process predictable and controlled.
  7. Sustain – Now that we have control of the business processes surrounding Mobile Security it’s time to look into the way to sustain the results.

How can you use these questions? (being the subject Matter Expert)

There are a number of ways you can use the questions in the Self Assessment Toolkit. To be honest – the name says it all… Self Assessment.
Go through the questionnaire and randomly pick a couple of questions. Can you answer those questions for your current organisation without having to look for the answer online?

For Example:

Recognize – What is the underlying issue behind endpoint security and why is it becoming more difficult for companies to address it?

Define – Do the security policy and procedures clearly define information security responsibilities for all personnel?

Measure – How is the value delivered by Mobile Security being measured?

Analyse – Which users are working with the enterprises most sensitive data on mobile endpoints?

Improve – How much tolerance for risk do you have?

Control – Are all router, switches, wireless access points, and firewall configurations secured and do they conform to documented security standards?

Sustain – What are the most critical application security testing elements to add to CI/CD work ows?

These are just a small number of questions from a total of almost 1000 questions relating to Mobile Security.

You can also use these questionnaires to perform a self assessment with your team or with the stakeholders in the organisation. It is not a knowledge test, when you use these questions for your team or client you frame the question as follows:

In your belief, is the answer to the following question clearly defined

This will help with finding the gaps in the business processes and the assumptions made in relation to Mobile security in the organisation.

Going through these questions will unearth exactly what you don’t know about Mobile Security, especially in the context of your business (or your client’s organisation). And because you have a list of questions to choose from, you’ll be surprised at the un-expected gaps in your knowledge, understanding and definitions surrounding the business processes of Mobile Security.

Want to know more about the Mobile Security Self Assessment Toolkit? Check it out in our store.

In this 26 minute presentation Ivanka Menken (co-Founder of The Art of Service) walks you through a proven approach to find these gaps and how to use them to your advantage.

Questions Based Consultancy

Articles, Resource Hub, Standard Requirement Self Assessment Information

Questions based consultancy

Earlier this month I attended a business retreat with my forum which is always a wonderful way to assess my current understanding of the way we run the business, as well as an introduction to new strategies and tools. While going through my notes and reflecting on the lessons learned, my thoughts circled back to the importance of questions.

Human beings learn though the mechanism of questions. Every parent (or older sibling) has experienced the relentless barrage of questions that toddlers and young children ask. This is how we learn. Sometimes asking the same question over and over again until there is a satisfactory answer, or at least a consistent answer (which will be the lesson in itself). 

For some reason though, during our school and college years most of us stop asking questions. Perhaps it’s because we’ve been told it’s annoying, or the question is ‘stupid’. When we attend conferences, seminars or webinars we don’t want to ask questions as we don’t want to be seen as the only person who doesn’t understand what the speaker is talking about. When you’re lucky there is the opportunity to email or text the speaker to ask the question in private, but most of the time you will be left with the unsatisfactory feeling of unanswered questions and not fully grasping the topic at hand and its impact on your life.

On the other side of the spectrum it seems that people who continue to ask questions are the ones who tend to keep an open mind and a healthy desire for life long learning. 

I believe that the moment we stop asking questions is the moment we stop learning. 

Whenever we are in a new situation, or faced with a new challenge or topic, it’s important to ask questions to analyse the situation. Or to analyse the amount of learning it requires to become skilled and experienced in this new topic. Most of the times, the questions are needed to be able to make a conscious decision.

On the other hand there are also people who think they have all the answers, and as such don’t need to ask as many questions (apart from the questions that make them look superior or to confirm that they have a well developed understanding of the subject) . But I seriously question if it is really possible to have ALL the answers? After all, the world is constantly changing and evolving… shouldn’t we evolve as well? And if we are to evolve with the changing nature of our environment, doesn’t that mean that we need to continue to ask questions? Even if it is to challenge the status quo. To understand if there is a better way to do things. Or a more elegant/subtle/more effective way to complete a task.

For this reason I have learned to approach my consultancy assignments from a questions based philosophy. 

To get a solid understanding of the situation, and where I can help or add value, I need to ask questions:

  • Clarifying questions on the best experiences to share.
  • Clarifying questions to identify the maturity or understanding of a certain topic.
  • Clarifying questions to be able to understand where they are ‘stuck’ and what the impact is of this situation.
  • Clarifying questions to identify what the nature of the pain is and how / if we can help

But that’s not all – while working with the client there will be many more questions at every stage of the project. 

  • Leading questions as part of an educational experience or workshop
  • Leading questions to help the other person to arrive at a specific point / thought
  • Checkpoint questions to confirm that we’ve covered all the steps that needed to be completed before going to the next stage of the project.

In the past 20 years I’ve mentioned many times that my favourite English word is WHY. Why is such a powerful word. Keep asking WHY helps you to dig deeper and to get a richer understanding of the true underlying problem. This helps to guide the implementation teams to understand which way to utilise resources more efficiently and not waste time and energy on superficial solutions that won’t provide any benefits in the long run.

Helping professionals unleash their potential

Asking questions doesn’t come naturally to everybody, especially when you’re a bit self-conscious about the questions you ask based on previous experiences. Being put on the spot about a specific subject can be stressful (to say the least). Your brain stops working and you simply can’t think of a smart or clever thing to ask.

That’s why we created the Self Assessment Toolkits. We want to help you unleash your potential….. through the power of questions. 

Each toolkit has hundreds of questions you can ask at various stages in you consultancy assignment or implementation project that help you get a better understanding and to bring focus to the implementation project at hand.

No need to stress about asking the right questions – simply choose one or a number of the questions from the toolkit and use it as a pre-project information gathering exercise, or use the questions as part of your project brief.

These questions can be used for conversation starters in meetings, or as the basis for your presentation to the stakeholders and/or executive teams. Armed with these questions you can go to the various subject matter experts in the company to identify where knowledge is stored and to what level the business processes are created, documented, measured and controlled.

What type of questions can you expect?

Each toolkit has questions that are sorted by business process maturity level:

  • Recognise
  • Define
  • Measure
  • Analyse
  • Improve
  • Control
  • Sustain

There is also a folder with checklists that include questions based on specific topics that are appropriate for the subject of the Toolkit.

Lastly, there is a folder with resources to help you with your implementation projects. These resources go beyond the questions and offer templates for every stage of your project. A valuable resource irrespective of the type of project you do, or the project management methodology you may use.

Let’s have a look at an example toolkit to recognise the various styles of questions that are included in the Self Assessment Toolkits to help you in your professional career.

For more information on our Self Assessment Toolkits, and to discuss how you can benefit from the questions based consultancy products, contact us.

Like the toolkits? Sign up for The Art of Service Membership and automatically receive 60% discount on every toolkits you purchase in the next 12 months.

Written by: Ivanka Menken
Owner / co-Founder The Art of Service Pty Ltd (since Feb 2000)
Prior to founding The Art of Service, Ivanka was a management consultant in The Netherlands – working with companies in the Finance/insurance industry as well as government owned corporations.


What question can I ask my team to improve our Help Desk Management?

Articles, Documents, Resource Hub, Standard Requirement Self Assessment Information

What is a great question to ask about Help Desk Management?

Effective and efficient Help Desk Management is important for a wide range of businesses and companies. Private and Public companies use Help Desks and Service Desks to stay in touch with their customers, Irrespective of them being for profit or not for profit. 

Running a smooth help desk is not just important for IT departments and companies, it is an important skill set for many different industries. A successful help desk creates improved customer satisfaction as well as an improved business image. After all, we all make mistakes and unforeseen things happen but it’s how you handle the impact is what separates the successful companies from their lesser counterparts.

That’s why this month (March 2019) one of the Self Assessment Toolkits is the Help Desk Management (Available for Silver and Gold Level Subscribers).

Let’s take a deep dive into this toolkit and how the questions help you to identify the effectiveness and efficiency of the Help Desk at your work (or your customer’s )

In this toolkit there are 3 different sets of questions:

  1. Checklists

The questions in the checklist are useful if you need a selection of questions in relation to Incidents, Management or Service. These checklists are specifically for those topics. For example, with your team you can go through the questions to identify if you’ve missed certain aspects of Incident management.
You can also use these checklists to quickly find areas where you can improve. These areas will be mostly around measurement, analysis and documentation. It’s one thing to be able to guess the answer to the question – the challenge is to find the correct and documented answer.

In this checklist you will find questions like:

  • What do outages and major incidents cost you?
  • How quickly are you responding to incidents?
  • Who has the ultimate responsibility in case of a cyber incident?

2) Self Assessment Questionnaire.

In STEP 2 you will find a PDF book with a full Self Assessment and an Excel Spreadsheet with up to 1000 unique and specific questions in relation to improving the management of a Help Desk.

The Self Assessment questions are organised based on the maturity level of the business processes in the organisation.

For the benefit of the Self Assessment questionnaires, we identified 7 levels of process maturity:

  • Recognise —> You recognise that Help Desk Management is a thing and that it may be of interest to you and your organisation.
  • Define —> Now that you know that you need to invest in a more robust Help Desk Management system you need to define what this means to you and your organisation. What are the timelines you accept for incident handling? What are the definitions of a customer, VIP customer etc.?
    This section is important to set the foundation for improvement projects down the track, ensuring you don’t waste time and money by implementing the wrong thing for the company.
  • Measure —> You have a Help Desk and a management system in place, but are you measuring the tasks and activities? How well do you document your measurements, and are you considering dependencies between measurements? To what level of granularity do you need to measure and report in relation to Help Desk Management?
  • Analyse —> Measuring is great, but the raw data doesn’t tell the story. What type of analysis do you perform around Help Desk Management?
  • Improve —> Now that you have an analysis of the measurements that you’ve taken about your Help Desk Management system you can start planning for your improvement projects. How can you implement ongoing and continual improvement as a second nature in all your processes? What needs to be done to achieve this?
  • Control —> Once you achieve this level of maturity it becomes all about controlling the input, the activities and the output. How can we control every step in the management system so we can proactively change course when we feel things are going off the rails?
  • Sustain —> The ultimate level of maturity and sophistication. It’s (relatively) easy to achieve a result once, but can you sustain this level of quality without negative side effects?

The questions in this questionnaire help you improve the Help Desk Management processes as you’re getting a deeper understanding of the process maturity across various areas in the organisation (or even between individuals). It helps to identify the gaps in knowledge, processes and documentation. 

You can use the questionnaire ‘as is’ to perform a Self Assessment in the organisation. Or you select a number of questions as the basis of an executive presentation or white paper to start a conversation about the Help Desk Management Processes that are currently in operation in the business.

You can also randomly select a question to use as a communication starter at your weekly meetings with the Help Desk team. 

NOTE: The questionnaire can be a bit overwhelming, especially when you’re looking at 1000 questions. It’s quite OK to cherry pick a number of questions from each section to have a more manageable sub-set of the questions to go through with your team. Also – make sure you mention to your team that they can skip questions they don’t understand or that don’t make sense in the context of the Help Desk you’re running in the company.

3) Implement, Track, Follow up and Revise Strategy

The questions in this section of the Self Assessment all focus on the implementation of Help Desk Management process activities and how to track the results. We recognise that most of our clients will use a specific project management methodology or toolset already in their organisation. But it never hurts to have a fresh look at the specific questions to ask at the different stages of an implementation project.

For example, as part to the Executing Process Group there are questions about change requests, quality audit, team performance assessment and Issue logs.


For example, in the Team Performance Assessment checklist you can find questions like:

  • To what degree can all members engage in open and interactive conversations?
  • How do you keep key people outside the group informed about its accomplishments?
  • To what degree are the goals ambitious?
Walk Through of the Help Desk Management Self Assessment Toolkit

Want the Help Desk Management Self Assessment Toolkit at 60% discount? Sign up as a The Art of Service Member.