What Sourdough Taught Me About IT
Two decades of IT service management. A gold medal at Britain’s Best Loaf. Zsolt Varga, ITIL Master and founder of the micro-bakery Baked by the Varga, joins Alan Shimel on Techstrong TV to share what may be the most unexpected ITIL case study ever — applying the four dimensions of service management and value-stream thinking to scaling an artisanal sourdough operation out of his kitchen. Zsolt walks Alan through how sourdough’s un-rushable rhythm taught him patience and empathy with level-one support engineers, why a B2B “toastie” client forced him to swap loaf shapes for an open crumb that melts cheese properly, and how chasing the actual end of the value stream — the hungry customer pulling apart the perfect sandwich — beats chasing a pretty loaf every time. Plus: why obsessing over ITIL v3 vs. v4 vs. v5 misses the point, and how ChatGPT helped name his award-winning Pharaoh’s Loaf.
