What is ITSM?- IT service management process, implementation (2024)

The following steps are best practices that can help simplify the implementation and efficient use of ITSM processes and workflows:

Audit your current ITSM operations and identify the gaps

Before implementing ITSM processes in your organization, it's best to identify your organization's early goals and then work your way up. When it comes to implementing IT service management workflows, there's no one-size-fits-all approach. Therefore, it's important to carefully identify the areas of IT where ITSM processes can be; involve the right people; deploy the relevant technology; choose the right workflows; be aware of what's at stake and the potential risks involved; and be prepared with strategies for recovery in circ*mstances where initiatives fall through the cracks.

Educate, communicate, and involve stakeholders while implementing ITSM processes

According to a McKinsey report, 70 percent of change projects fail because management is unable or unwilling to help employees embrace the change. To prevent this, your organization needs to create a culture that is receptive to change. This can be done by ensuring that all stakeholders are convinced about the benefits of strategizing and implementing good ITSM processes, and communicating with people outside the core implementation team through workshops, meetings, etc. to ensure that everyone involved is on the same page.

Outline the Critical Success Factors and keep tabs on KPIs and metrics

As the ITSM implementation progresses, your team needs to regularly monitor your IT help desk's performance using metrics and KPIs to ensure continuous improvement. With the built-in reporting capability that ITSM tools offer, your team can generate various reports containing both high-level and granular data, aiding in performance analysis and decision-making. While it's necessary to regularly analyze KPIs, the trick of the game is to measure the right metrics and KPIs for your help desk. This will help you avoid wasting time on irrelevant or insignificant metrics. Here are the most significant metrics and KPIs:

Lost business hours

The number of hours the business is down because IT services are unavailable

Change success rate

The ratio of the number of successful changes to the total number of changes that were executed in a given time frame.

Infrastructure stability

A highly stable infrastructure is characterized by maximum availability, very few outages, and low service disruptions.

Ticket volume trends

Total number of tickets handled by the IT help desk and their patterns within a given time frame.

First call resolution rate

Percentage of incidents resolved by the first level of support (first call or contact with the IT help desk).

SLA compliance rate

Percentage of incidents resolved within the agreed SLA time.

Cost per ticket

The total monthly operating expense of IT support, divided by the monthly ticket volume.

Software asset utilization rate

Percentage of software products and licenses in actual use by the business.

Incident response time

Time taken to respond to an incident.

Incident resolution time

Time taken to resolve an incident.

Reopen rate

Number of tickets that are reopened after being resolved.

Problem resolution time

Time taken to resolve a problem from the moment the problem is identified.

Use relevant tools to automate processes

IT help desk management solutions simplify the implementation of ITSM processes by providing out-of-the-box best practice processes and workflows. Most help desk software include automations, real-time analytics, customizable ITSM processes, and so much more. That, coupled with the right processes, shifts IT teams' focus from fire-fighting to strategic business objectives and growth.

It's also important to choose an IT help desk tool that fits your organization's IT needs, instead of blindly investing in a high-end tool, or one that promises a wide range of features. More often than not, you aren't going to use all the functionality available right away. It's wiser to invest in a tool that is customizable and flexible to match a big part of your current IT requirements, with the ability to scale up in the future. You should look for a tool that's practical, user-friendly, and includes integrations with other IT management tools to ensure that you go to one place for your IT management processes, instead of scrambling around multiple, siloed tools. And of course, it goes without saying that the software must be budget-friendly.

Develop a feedback loop from end users and other stakeholders

Efficient ITSM strategies don't just stop with implementation, but should continually develop over time. It's important for an organization to leverage their ITSM processes to achieve defined business goals. To this end, your IT team needs to collect feedback from end users, identify pain points, visualize their desired state, and build roadmaps for further improvement. Commonly, feedback comes for areas such as technical support, feature requirements, or even user interface functionality. It's also important to note that user feedback can sometimes be less helpful. To extract good, constructive feedback, survey questions should be framed carefully and be very specific. Here are an example of good and bad end user feedback:

Bad feedback: "Your IT technicians are great."

Good feedback: "The way your IT technicians handle requests is great. Danny, my sales rep, knew exactly what I was looking for and helped me find the add-in that saved me a lot of time and effort. I'd like to make a suggestion as well. It would be great if the add-in could work for Office365. All in all, I'd definitely recommend your help desk tool."

Although the first example was positive, it was shallow and didn't provide anything constructive. The good feedback, on the other hand, provided information that could be used for improvement and was also a good endorsem*nt for the product.