IT Service Management (ITSM) is a hot topic! It is a topic that we also encounter intensively in this blog. Overall, it's worth looking into it because you can benefit from ITSM, especially if your goal is to smoothly and efficiently set up your company's IT infrastructure. Regardless of whether you are an IT expert or an entrepreneur: We have put together ten best practices to help you optimize your ITSM!
An initial overview - ten tips for your ITSM
- Develop a sound, strategic direction
- Define clear Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
- Establish metrics and KPIs for your Service Management strategy
- Train your employees
- Build up a knowledge database
- Use automation for repetitive tasks
- Establish effective Change Management
- Implement a sensible incident and problem management strategy
- Choose a suitable Service Management tool
- Keep your finger on the pulse
1. Develop a sound, strategic direction
The first step to successful IT Service Management is understanding the company's goals and requirements. It's crucial to ensure that your IT services directly contribute to achieving these goals. Additionally, it can be beneficial to realistically assess the maturity level of your IT Service Management (ITSM) and then analyze areas that require improvement. Where does the Service Management strategy fall short of expectations? Where do tools need upgrading or processes optimization?
Once you have examined the starting point, the ITSM maturity level, and the desired scaling for your company, you can strategically align service and support offerings with the business objectives. Collaborating with key stakeholders—such as colleagues on the IT service desk, company management, and customers—is essential. Together, you can shape and implement a strategy to establish a solid foundation for your IT Service Management.
2. Define clear Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
In line with the first tip, this is about goal setting, but with a different focus - now on customers. The focus here is on defining clear Service Level Agreements, or SLAs for short. The agreements document the arrangements between your IT team and the customer. The SLAs should contain measurable (and realistic) targets that meet your customers' expectations. For example, that support should be available five days a week. Or that the response time should be a maximum of 30 minutes on weekdays. However, SLAs can also specify customer responsibilities, for example that they should contact IT immediately if a device is damaged. In any case, clear SLAs create transparency and increase customer satisfaction.
Ultimately, the main task of your IT service is to create added value for customers and therefore for the company as a whole. Here the customer experience plays a crucial role. To achieve this, you need to know your customers inside out and understand their needs, and offer and continuously deliver appropriate services.
3. Define metrics and KPIs for your Service Management strategy
This tip involves implementing a good strategy. After all, preparation and a strategic framework for your management are essential to have for sustainable success! Define key performance indicators (KPIs) for your ITSM software and all your self-service add-ons to refine your strategy. You can also use them to identify opportunities for improvement. Six KPIs could be for example:
- Level Zero Solvable (LZS): This is an indicator of the quality of the knowledge transfer articles you use to introduce and explain self-service features. In general, LZS is often used as an indicator of self-service success.
- Self-service usage: Overall, it is helpful to understand how self-service features are used by your customers. With this KPI, you can take various dimensions into account, such as the absolute usage volume, but also the percentage of the total volume. You can also look at the different types of usage, such as access to knowledge articles, the creation of support tickets, service requests made, automated solutions used and much more.
- Success and error rate of the software: You can have these rates measured by the system as well as through user feedback. For example, take a look at how many searches in the knowledge base have led to the creation of tickets.
- Costs: Costs are a classic performance indicator. You can compare the costs of various support channels, for example by comparing their monthly costs.
- Speed: You can measure whether your self-service offerings result in customers finding a solution faster than if they had to resort to direct personal support. TTR (time to resolution) is also a classic KPI that measures speed.
- Opinion of your employees: In addition to the satisfaction of your customers, the satisfaction of your staff who work with the systems and software on a daily basis is also important. How do your employees rate the quality of the self-service? Do they get on well with the communication channels? Are they satisfied with the software?
4. Train your employees
Speaking of employees - your teams must have the necessary skills and knowledge to perform their tasks efficiently. After all, they are the executors of your ITSM! Investing in training and further education pays off in the short and long term.
After all, the technology sector is developing rapidly. It is therefore important that your employees are always up to date and can quickly adapt to new developments. You can support them with training and other update formats. The result: everyone involved benefits from the increased flexibility of your IT teams.
5. Build up a knowledge database
Apart from training, you can also help your employees greatly by having a well-maintained knowledge database. This database contains all the know-how, information and experience required for smoothly running IT services. The articles in this database can also be integrated directly for self-service in the service desk so that users are shown relevant articles directly. This allows your teams to access proven methods, solutions and information to solve problems faster and improve customer service.
At the same time, an IT service catalog is also a tried-and-tested means of recording knowledge (and should therefore be part of every knowledge database). This service catalog records the IT service portfolio and can be viewed by all employees. There they can find out how IT services, hardware, software and support are handled in your company.
6. Use automation for repetitive tasks
Repetitive tasks are time-consuming and encourage human error. Use automation tools to make such tasks easier. This not only saves time and therefore personnel costs, but also increases accuracy. As a result, your IT team has more capacity to devote to more complex tasks, while your customers can rely on low-threshold self-service.
Hyperautomation is a popular ITSM trend, combining a range of automation and intelligence functions to gain insights on the IT environment, service delivery and user behavior. This data is available in real time and can help to ensure (or even increase) the quality of IT services in many different areas.
7. Establish effective Change Management
Changes to the IT infrastructure can have a significant impact on the service. Effective Change Management ensures that changes are carefully planned, tested and monitored to minimize service disruption.
It is crucial that you communicate provisional changes, the selected maintenance windows and release plans well. This makes it possible to calculate and plan the impact of the changes, their scope and their duration - so you can continue to guarantee a smooth service!
8. Implement a sensible incident and problem management strategy
In order for your IT services to withstand all the challenges that arise from time to time in the form of disruptions and problems, it is crucial that you react quickly and provide effective solutions. But it's not just you, it's your entire workforce. This requires clear processes so that incidents and problems can be recorded, classified and then eliminated.
If you invest in a sensible incident and problem management strategy, you will benefit from minimizing service outages, increasing customer satisfaction, and stabilizing your ITSM!
By the way: You can find more valuable tips in Atlassian's latest Incident Management Handbook, which you can download free of charge.
9. Choose a suitable Service Management tool
Your ITSM tool forms the basis for all your IT services, from ticket creation, tracking and incident management to analyzing incidents to track down their causes. However, if you reach a point where you've exhausted the functions of your tool, it's time to think about switching. Even if this sounds like a challenging undertaking.
The most important decision factors for an ITSM tool are:
- the total cost of ownership
- scalability
- user-friendliness
However, there are many other aspects that can influence the decision. We have had very good experiences with Jira Service Management from Atlassian, as it is both user-friendly and scalable. Among other things, it has official certification as a "PinkVERIFY Certified ITIL 4 Toolset" and therefore fulfills all the functional requirements for professional Service Management in IT teams.
10. Keep your finger on the pulse
IT Service Management is a helpful construct that is constantly on the move. It is therefore important that you continuously make improvements: Get feedback from customers and team members and adapt your processes accordingly to keep up with changing requirements.
Ensure that you continuously increase the efficiency of your IT services. To ensure this improvement process, you can run through PDCA cycles (Plan-Do-Check-Act). This will keep your company innovative and competitive.
Conclusion
With these ten best practices, you can increase the efficiency of your IT Service Management and improve customer satisfaction at the same time. ITSM is like an exciting journey on which you will constantly encounter new challenges that need to be mastered. Be open to change and continuously optimize your way of working, if you do that then this journey will be a complete success for you!
Sources:
https://www.bmc.com/blogs/it-service-management-best-practices/
https://www.easyvista.com/blog/7-itsm-best-practices-for-service-management-easyvista
https://www.manageengine.com/products/service-desk/itsm/itsm-story-best-practices.html
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-service-management-itsm-best-practices-you-must-know-provglobal/
Further Reading
- The Importance of Service Desk Automation in ITSM
- Service Portfolio Management – A Bridge Between ITSM and Corporate Strategy
- Knowledge Management in IT Service Management – It’s Enough to Invent the Wheel Only Once
- ITSM Teams Between Stability and Change: What Is Change Management Actually?
