Episode 126 - Neurodiversity in ITSM and the Workplace

Episode 126 features Faith Thomas, Lead IT Service Management Practitioner at the University of Birmingham, discussing neurodiversity in the workplace and how agile practices can create environments where neurodiverse teams thrive.

Faith shares her personal journey through ADHD diagnosis, the relief and validation that came with it, and how understanding neurodiversity has changed her perspective on past behaviours and work patterns. She explains the advantages neurodiverse individuals bring to IT roles, particularly in problem-solving, empathy, and seeing solutions others miss, and why these aren't just nice-to-haves but genuine competitive advantages.

The conversation covers how Faith's team successfully integrated agile practices like time-boxed stand-ups, structured retrospectives, and gratitude check-ins with service management, creating a framework that works particularly well for neurodiverse team members while improving outcomes for everyone. She emphasises the importance of awareness training for managers, the need to understand why people behave as they do rather than forcing them into rigid role definitions, and the risks that AI can perpetuate existing biases around disability, gender, and race.

The episode also includes Ian's trivia on rising IT job demand and the discovery of chocolate honey made from cocoa bean waste.