Superheroes, Service Desks, and Chaos Monkeys – What I Learned from SDI SPARK26

This new article has been provided by Vawns Murphy of i3works… It’s Birmingham, baby! The Service Desk Institute (SDI) held its annual SPARK conference in Birmingham in March (SPARK26). The conference was attended by hundreds of IT service management (ITSM) professionals, gathered in one place to listen to industry superstars, share ideas, and hear real-life case studies. In this SPARK26 article, you’ll find an overview of what I see as the best bits, including top tips and advice from the presenters. 

SPARK26 Keynote: Great Service Desks Shouldn’t Exist – Mark Boyer – Softcat

Mark’s SPARK26 session asked: For years, we’ve been brilliant IT service desks, with tighter service level agreements (SLAs) and better metrics, but have we been focusing on the wrong things? Mark made the point that IT service desks should become a source of insight. 

Mark’s session was all about focusing on helping people rather than on having a textbook-perfect IT support model. IT service desks should move from ticket processors to sources of insight. Too often, they compensate for poorly designed services by having agents use empathy, kindness, and exceptional people skills. But instead of designing for reassurance, we’ve built front doors focused on routing and process.

The opportunity is clear: automate the admin and make our toolsets do the heavy lifting so that our people can improve customer experience (CX), elevate human interactions, and focus on fixing root causes. Done right, the IT service desk becomes a safety net – not a factory – and IT support becomes something that removes dread, not adds to it.

SPARK26 Keynote: Small Margins Matter – Ross Surplice, Arjuna Le Gross, and Dennis Wahome – Freshworks

This SPARK26 session, by Ross, Anjuna, and Dennis, was all about reducing complexity, tool drag, and lost opportunities. Every switch costs time and risks something falling through the cracks. It asked the question: Do your teams spend more time on admin and maintaining software than on solving business problems?

The Freshworks team used Formula 1 as an analogy. F1 races are all about fine margins – the difference between winning and losing could be as little as an extra half second in the pit lane or a disconnected radio. With “complexity tax” the invisible resistance that stops teams from moving forward.

Complexity is a choice, so we can also choose to compete by replacing it with urgency. When the McLaren team wanted to improve their IT systems, they built a system with zero tolerance for failure – they wanted their global ops to run as fast and as flawlessly as the cars on the track. They did this by:

• Being focused on delivering
• Making the user experience frictionless
• Designing services that were enjoyable to use
• Design workflows that actually work.

By reducing complexity, you’re spending more time supporting your end-users and driving innovation.

The presenters finished by sharing some practical advice:

• Do an audit – find your “regret spend”
• Consolidate strategically – don’t just rip and replace – use unification where it makes sense
• Redeploy to grow
• Accelerate with quick wins and take people along that process with you.

We Need to Stop Hiding Behind Metrics – Mark Bewick – Happy Signals

Mark’s SPARK26 session was all about CX. He talked about how IT decisions should start with people and that we should be focusing on the end-user experience rather than numbers. Let’s face it – we’ve spent years chasing SLAs, key performance indicators (KPIs), and dashboards. But let’s be honest, those numbers can be “managed.” Watermelon SLAs are still very real: green on the outside, red on the inside.

So, what should we measure instead? Two things: happiness and lost time. Because these are much harder to manipulate, and far closer to what end-users actually experience. It comes back to a familiar model: people, process, technology in that order.

Mark explained that the common theme among good customer feedback boiled down to three things – speed, communication and accuracy:

• Speed improves with automation, better resourcing, and – critically – getting it right first time. If you had to pick one improvement, reduce reassignments.
• Communication is about setting expectations, using clear, jargon-free language, and keeping end-users informed. Good updates and meaningful closure notes go a long way.
• Accuracy underpins everything. Correct routing, validated information, and closing the loop with end-users.

Mark’s final advice was to automate the basics: password resets, account unlocks, and standard requests to free up humans to focus on value and trust. Make IT service desk portals more intuitive, build in intelligence, and remove friction. If it’s easy for end-users, it’s efficient for IT.

The main takeaway is this: You don’t need big budgets – fix the basics, listen to end-users, and design around real experiences.

SPARK26 Keynote: We Need to Make it Safe for People to Make Mistakes – Matt Beran – InvGate

Matt Beran’s SPARK26 session focused on something we don’t talk about enough in IT: mistakes – and why we need more of them. He opened by talking about his own personal “Oh jeez” moments and how, in IT, it’s possible to make an infinite number of mistakes every day.

The key message? We need to make it safe for people to fail. Because in reality, we’re all experimenting all the time. Every change, every deployment, every decision – it’s a test. The difference is whether we treat it that way.

Too often, mistakes feel like failure. But captured early, they become learning. Write them down, track them, review them. Done properly, they shift from regret to documentation and from blame to improvement. The most successful teams don’t avoid mistakes – they behave like scientists. They test, learn, and adapt. And importantly, they share those learnings.

So how do we let our people make mistakes?

We create a culture of psychological safety. So let’s normalize mistakes, reframe feedback, and encourage openness. As more and more of us are leaning into artificial intelligence (AI), we have the opportunity to experiment, make mistakes, and get better faster – but here’s the thing. We’re only as good as our data. Get it right, and we can make real improvements. However, if we don’t trust our data, if our configuration management database (CMDB) isn’t up to date, if our knowledge articles are suspect, then all that happens is that we get worse, faster.

So, what can we do?

Matt finished with some practical tips:

• Treat ideas as assets – share them
• Run small, testable experiments
• Review regularly (Plan–Do–Check–Act still works)
• Track learning, not just outcomes
• Report not just reactive and proactive work, but also what you’re experimenting with and what you’ve learned.

SPARK26 Keynote: AI Can Be a Gamechanger in Improving UX – Sriram Kodovayor Subramanian – ManageEngine

Sri’s SPARK26 session made AIOps more relatable with a simple scenario: an end-user can’t connect to Wi-Fi. They try the basics, then log a ticket and hope for the best. What’s missing? Not process, but the impact on end-user productivity. That’s where AI comes in – not as a shiny add-on, but as a way to diagnose issues faster and get people back to work. The real value isn’t all the fancy technical things that AI can do, but how it improves everyday service.

Sri explained that there are three levels to this: plug-and-play (quick wins and automation out of the box), configurable (tuned to your environment), and custom (fully embedded, self-healing capabilities).

But as Matt said in the previous session, AI will only amplify what’s already there. Good data, strong CMDB, clear processes? Things get better. Weak foundations? Issues scale faster. The basics still matter: accessible tools, quality data, solid governance, and clear resolution notes. Knowledge must be usable, modular, and easy to maintain.

Done right, AI reduces effort, improves consistency, and enables self-service. Just remember your governance so that you have the right guardrails in place to protect your people and your data.

Put Your People at the Centre of Everything You Do – Alex Harding – Head of IT Services, Runshaw College

Alex’s SPARK26 session discussed how his IT service desk was rated world-class by SDI. He talked about how the mission became – put students at the heart of everything and build from there. What followed was consistency, not compromise. The focus remained on experience: understanding journeys, identifying friction points, and designing services that actually work for the people who use them. The team focused on the 3 Ss – simple, sustainable, and secure – and worked to build the right culture, enhance the customer experience, and remove friction points.

Some practical advice that Alex shared included:

• Look at your organization – what it wants to do and see how you can help it get there.
• Value everyone’s voice, treat failure as an opportunity for growth (i.e. thinking about change management or recovery plans), empower people (let people run with things), lead with empathy, and be clear and be there.
• Host and servant leadership – set the table (welcome people, make them feel safe, and get everyone around it).
• Remove friction early.
• Own the outcome, share the credit, be present when it matters (show up, be calm), listen, and grow people, not dependency.
• Standards not shortcuts: clear expectations, experience, and knowing your customers.
• Shamelessly look at best practice – get ideas and scale them for the organization.

The takeaway was straightforward: focus on culture, keep your promises, design for real experiences, and scale what works.

Being Honest is Authentic – Sophie Hussey

Sophie’s SPARK26 session explored what authenticity really looks like in the workplace – transparency, consistency, self-awareness – and, just as importantly, what gets in its way. Imposter syndrome came up a lot, alongside burnout, stress, mental health, and toxic environments that make it harder for people to show up as themselves. Sophie shared why psychological safety matters so much – and she’s right – if we can’t make our people feel safe, how will they be comfortable showing up as their true selves?

One of the strongest takeaways was around values. Sophie talked about values being the cornerstone of your authenticity – they make up who you are and what matters to you. How to define your value? Figure out what values speak to you – no more than seven – and check in on them regularly because life experience changes you.

One of my favourite moments of Sophie’s session was when she talked about breaking out the influencing guns. We need to figure out how to be vulnerable and share stories, be curious and listen to people, communicate positively, lead by example, and show empathy.

The final part of Sophie’s session focused on the 321 rule. It’s a tool CEOs use to prioritize effectively. The idea is you look at the three strategic things you need to do, the partnerships you need to have for support, and what’s your one north star, i.e. what’s your ultimate goal?

Sophie finished with more practical advice:

• If you’re dealing with someone who is displaying challenging behavior, kill them with kindness because we need to be comfortable that our behavior aligns with our values.
• Break down barriers. In other words, why fit in when you can stand out? None of us is the same, and we can understand ourselves and others better through self-reflection. However, maintaining your self-esteem can take work.
• Invest in the bank of you. Drop the dead weight. This might be behavior or ways of working – take the time to understand what isn’t working for you and drop them.
• Find what your passion is, understand what defines you. Ask the people around you; it might be uncomfortable, but at least you’re learning.
• Bring forth the evolution – self-improvement is like continual improvement in the ITIL framework.
• Be bold; have the conversations, even if it’s hard.
• Be brave, share how you like to work.
• Be you, because we’re all unique.
• The sweet spot in the middle. Combine them all, and the only image to keep is the one you created yourself.   

That’s my take on SPARK26. What do you think? Please let me know in the comments.

Further Reading

The Genealogy of AI Slop: Generative AI Didn’t Invent It – It Learned It

AI Help Desk Software: How LLMs, AI Agents & Chatbots Are Transforming IT Support

How AI Will Break the 1–3x ITSM Implementation Cost Rule

ITSM Benchmarking – Your Chance to Get Involved

Ending the L1 vs L2 Escalation Wars: Rethinking IT Support Tiers