5 Way to Improve IT Service Management (ITSM)

In addition to the one platform approach and enterprise integration with iPaaS, there are a few other best practices you can follow to quickly improve your IT Service Management delivery.

1. Establish a Comprehensive, User-Friendly Knowledge Base: A well-built knowledge base promotes self-service and allows people to easily access the information they need. When building out your knowledge base, think about how you will present, index and categorize information so users can easily find and use it. Crowdsource the knowledge (judiciously) from multiple departments to make the knowledge base as comprehensive as possible.
2. Create a Centralized Portal for Universal Access: If you build out a single centralized portal that crosses over all areas such as IT, Facilities, HR and more, then end-users can use it as a centralized access point. Once in the hub, the knowledge base will be available to answer any self-service inquiries, and there will also be quick access to service requests – these could be basic IT requests such as “Wi-Fi is not working” or it could be to initiate a process such as onboarding a new employee or to make an inquiry such as requesting a conference room.  When evaluating ITSM software, be sure that you’re able to leverage the portal and platform for enterprise service management. Having the ability to use multiple portal front ends that funnel into one ESM platform is a key factor to success.
3. Consolidate Service and Project Management: This allows organizations to obtain a unified, accurate view of what tasks need to be done and what projects are assigned to who. It also helps optimize resources, allocate workers’ time appropriately and improve project performance. When you can see all resources in one place, you can engage in resource capacity planning more effectively and end-users or technicians will be able to have a single dashboard that gives them a view to tickets, change requests and project work.
4. Choose the Right Tool for the Job: Users can become frustrated when they are asked to follow methodologies that are unwieldy or unnecessary for a given task or project. To encourage broad adoption of a project management methodology, consider the scale and complexity of each project, and then choose the model that best serves the project. ITSM platforms should incorporate project portfolio management so that you can do things like turn a ticket into a card on the card wall or KANBAN area. You can also create a more complex waterfall project plan and create specific tickets within this plan to assign out tasks related to a bigger project. This is important because not every project step will be assigned to project team members.
5. Make Project Management a Discipline: If you don’t have one already, create a Project Management Office (PMO), appoint a certified project management professional to lead it, and establish policies and procedures to help standardize and enforce best practices. In a survey of IT leaders, respondents reported that their PMO had contributed to a 23 percent drop in the number of failed projects, a 35 percent increase in the number of projects that were delivered under budget and a 20 percent improvement in productivity. You can’t argue with those results. Effective ITSM depends on resource capacity; if you are managing projects outside of the ITSM platform then you will never truly gain a view into resource bandwidth. This can cause frustration and delays for your end-users.

Want to see how other organization are improving their service management? Check out these TeamDynamix customer stories:

• The Gratz Bank
• Covenant HealthCare
• Cornell University