5 strategies to modernise your ITSM solution

IT Service Management (ITSM) is not a new concept and many organisations have been following ITSM principles for years. But often, those that have been ‘doing it for years’ are the ones left behind.

Unless you’re updating your ITSM strategy regularly, you’re probably not making the most of all the great opportunities that modern ITSM presents.

Although it may seem like your current ITSM processes are working, outdated methods—especially ones that were once considered best practice—are still in place across many businesses.

If providing the best customer experience possible is key for your business, here are some ways you can ensure your ITSM strategy has the customer in mind at all times.

A term called ‘shifting left’ is about equipping lower support tiers with the tools and knowledge they need to solve tickets themselves, instead of escalating.

By sharing information across each line of support, all employees are empowered to resolve more issues themselves rather than seeking the assistance of others.

You can even cut down on the number of tickets you receive by sharing key information with customers, too. When your customers know where to look first, they can seek out their own answers and are less likely to come to your service team asking for help. This means you can keep working on the more challenging issues while your customers are able to support themselves with minor problems.

Shifting left also reduces your Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) and improves overall customer satisfaction.

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework is the most commonly applied ITSM practice and is currently in its fourth iteration.

ITIL 4 redefines ‘Change Management’ as ‘Change Enablement’. Where Change Management is the responsibility of just a few people in the organisation and is pushed from the top down, Change Enablement is the responsibility of everyone.

All changes made need to benefit your organisation, and ultimately improve the service you provide for your customers.

The shift towards Change Enablement—focusing on products and services across the business, not just people—encourages your business to make changes that enhance the experience you provide to customers.

The Change Enablement practice for ITIL 4 includes categorising changes based on the level of complexity and urgency—standard, normal, or emergency.

The standard category is for routine, low-risk changes. They can be implemented without authorisation and are not likely to cause any issues to your set-up.

Normal changes are the everyday medium risk changes. These follow a process of being assessed, authorised, and scheduled.

Emergency changes are high-risk and need to be implemented quickly, but also carefully. When something falls into the emergency band it can often sidestep some of the normal processes to be resolved faster.

Emergency changes can be riskier and require more resources as they are usually unexpected. To mitigate some of the risks, many organisations require that changes are approved by approval from a Change Advisory Board (CAB) before they can be implemented. More recently, the practice of having a change authority—a person or team responsible for authorising change—instead of a full CAB is becoming popular as a way of speeding up the process.

Some examples of emergency changes include resolving a serious incident, rolling back an unsuccessful deployment, or carrying out a security patch.

Streamlining your IT service and support with automation can help your teams skip time-draining, repetitive admin and focus on more important projects. By automating routine tasks such as routing tickets to the right person, and sending alerts when there are priority tickets, this removes the process of flagging each ticket manually. It also eliminates the possibility of human error, so no important tickets are misplaced.

Applications like Jira Service Management (JSM) offer various automation rules to help your support team manage tickets. From routing tickets, to SLA breach alerts, and reopening resolved tickets after a customer comments, JSM automates a variety of administration to remove the burden from your teams.

Another great advantage of JSM is that tickets can be automatically assigned based on keywords used in a customer’s email—getting tickets where they need to be, faster.

With automation, your IT teams can free up time to concentrate on more important, big picture tasks that improve your overall customer experience.

One of the main issues with traditional ITSM practices is lack of collaboration. And the more siloed your teams, the less they’ll be collaborating on a daily basis. This means there are barriers to providing an excellent customer experience.

All of your teams need to be able to easily communicate with one another, and share not only vital information but the everyday details, too. It is especially important for development, product, and customer service teams to be closely aligned and regularly communicate with each other. With open communication, everyone is aware of what is happening across the business at all times.

When your teams are connected in a highly collaborative space, this enables simple cross-team collaboration, and leads to faster and more effective response times for customer queries.

An open and collaborative space provides visibility across teams and processes, and allows more opinions and views to be shared.

Although replacing your legacy systems is not a fast and straightforward project, it is an essential part of modernising your ITSM processes.

Without the proper tools, your teams will be spending much longer trying to implement all of the modern ITSM techniques mentioned above—and many, such as automation, are just not possible with traditional tools.

With ITSM there’s not one solution that fits for every business, each organisation is different and has unique needs.

Here are some of the features that you may need from your ITSM tools:

• Integration with your other essential tools to save you from having to manually transfer information, which often doubles up work across teams
• Accessible and great performance globally, with cross-platform availability, and are easy for your teams to maintain
• Flexible and customisable so you can tailor them for the requirements of your business
• Secure and able to monitor for security risks so your platforms and data is SAFe