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ITSM Maturity – Low Hanging  Fruit

Published Date
Author Brooke Tajer

It’s no secret IT departments are busy – especially now. And because so many IT departments are focused on triaging their support by focusing on the most serious incidents, it can be hard for departments to step back and find the time for larger projects. 

Often, IT departments get stuck in a cycle of resolving time sensitive support tickets, unable to break the cycle and take a more proactive, forward-thinking approach to IT Service Management (ITSM). To remedy this, you can implement an approach that focuses your team on managing problems, instead of incidents. This, coupled with a self-service approach to IT support, can help improve your organization’s delivery of IT service. 

How to Manage Problems vs. Incidents

With the right ITSM platform in place, you can stop treating each incident that comes in as a separate, unconnected event that must be fixed. Instead, you can use your platform to look at the big picture. Use the data you have at your fingertips to identify larger issues and patterns. By doing this, you can uncover the root cause of the incidents and, by fixing it, prevent similar incidents in the future. 

Practical Advice for Breaking the Cycle

While moving from incident management to problem management can make a lot of sense intuitively, it’s easier said than done. There are a couple of things you MUST have to successfully make the move and break the cycle. 

  • Service Catalog – - Sure, this seems obvious. If we all had the time we needed, we could do anything. But to move successfully to a proactive approach you need to invest time and resources into creating the proper categorization of your tickets.  Analyzing the root cause of the most frequent IT issues within your organization. By making this investment up front, you can free up IT staff who would otherwise be working on resolving repetitive service requests.  If you have a service catalog in place and are appropriately categorizing your tickets, you will be able to perform these analytics easier. 
     
  • Visibility – In order to uncover your most common IT issues, you need visibility into what is happening within your organization. You need to be able to look at the data from your help desk and see what the most common requests are. Dashboards for the CIO or other key leadership roles can help bubble up the most critical areas for focus.  By having visibility into your organization, you can more accurately identify your most time-consuming problems and take a proactive approach to resolving future issues.

Why Visibility is Crucial: ITSM Dashboards Help

Without true visibility into your tickets and requests, you have no way to identify trends. Using and ITSM platform is the easiest way to get the visibility you need. By using an ITSM platform, you can see if there are more service requests for one particular type of server, compared to others in your network, for example. This could lead to an investigation that uncovers and unreliable server in need of replacing. Or maybe you see that you get a number of requests about Wi-Fi service being interrupted within a single building and upon investigation discover faulty wiring in the building that’s causing the problem. Now, instead of trying to solve each Wi-Fi request from that building with little to no success, you can replace the wiring and solve the problem for everyone.

It’s OK to Think Long-Term

In service-based departments, it can be very hard to not focus on quickly solving every little issue that comes in. But a long-erm strategic approach can pay huge dividends with a little short-term pain. And if you are feeling overwhelmed by IT service requests that need immediate attention, there are trainings available to IT leaders to help you prioritize and make the move to a more proactive approach to ITSM. The ITIL certification process teaches leaders how to manage problems rather than incidents, and the Help Desk Institute (HDI) has some useful resources as well. 

By reducing the number of recurring incidents your organization experiences, you can save time and make your IT department more efficient and effective. To read how one organization improved their IT maturity through a proactive ITSM approach, check out the latest customer spotlight from TeamDynamix – Taking It Service to a New Level.  

Asset-Preview-ITSM-Report-2022    TeamDynamix Ranked #1 in ITSM​

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