The ITSM Team of Tomorrow - Start Building it Today

InvGate October 8, 2015
- 6 min read

As we dive deeper into the conversation on building your ITSM Dream Team, it’s important to look ahead at what we see as the future of ITSM.  

To add more context to the conversation, we will be hosting a Live Panel Discussion on October 22nd with experts from both the Service Management and HR/Recruiting world. 

If you can’t make it live, don’t worry.  We’ll be recording the session and it will be available on demand! Sign up HERE.

Your Team and The Future of ITSM

We recognize that there’s a shift taking place in the ITSM industry and that means the dream team of tomorrow is going to operate differently than the dream team of yesterday, or even the dream team of today.  Essentially, the shift we see is the joining of development, operations, and IT, in a way that helps organizations hit an ever expanding set of business goals.

In our previous posts we’ve focused on team building and empowerment.  In the next couple of posts we’m going to expand on the topic by showing you how to include the #DevOps movement into your ITSM projects to help you prep for the needs of the future.  

IT Responsibilities Are Already Expanding

If you’re currently a service desk manager, a lot of your energy probably goes into preparing your team and training them for the traditional tiered ITSM roles.  It’s important to recognize that while traditional roles are here to stay, the responsibilities associated with each role are expanding every day.  While that may add pressure to the mix, it’s making your ITSM Dream Team even more critical to the success of your business.  

If you’re going to set your team up for success, you should communicate often with your C levels and rank what they see as IT’s most important contributions to the business.  If you aren’t sure how to start that conversation, consider offering the items below, then let your CIO/CTO rate what they see as the priority ranking for the IT side of your operation:

  • Improving customer/user retention (or satisfaction)
  • Gathering real time user experience data to assist your developers
  • Creating a more effective knowledge base to reduce ticket volume
  • Eliminating bugs and other systemic issues through documentation and problem/incident management

Once you’ve got things ranked, share the information with your ITSM team so that they have a clear understanding of how their daily contributions fit into the business.  This is also a great opportunity to encourage your team to set up goals (with applicable deadlines) on any areas where contributions can be improved.

Where DevOps Can Help

When you read through the list above, it may seem like a daunting challenge because there are elements involved that IT doesn’t necessarily control.  This is why we see such a great opportunity for Development and Operations to play a role in your ITSM challenges.  

If you’re still new to the DevOps movement, check out this Wiki page to give yourself a foundation on the topic.  Personally, we see DevOps as something that can help an ITSM team immensely when it comes to their day to day interactions with end users.  As I see it, a productive relationship between IT, Development, and Operations leads to:

  1. Increased reliability for your products
  2. Better stability and uptime on your services
  3. Heightened security
  4. Improved automation for business critical tasks

These 4 items in particular can have an immediate impact on your service desk operation because they lead to a natural reduction in your ticket volume.  It’s also important to note that a successful integration of DevOps and ITSM can allow up your customer facing reps to focus on the quality of their interactions with your customers.  

Chemistry Between IT, Dev, and Ops, Is a Must

This shift is still a work in progress but there are a lot of great minds in the industry looking to answer the important questions.  We’re searching for ways to build chemistry and get different departments focused on a singular goal so if you have suggestions on methods - let us know!

Here are 7 things you should incorporate into the working relationship between IT and DevOps:

  1. Transparency: The more quickly you can identify root causes, the better.  Keep communication between the 3 groups as open and fluid as possible
  2. Real Time Data: IT is in a great position to provide your developers with real time user stories and troubleshooting data
  3. Testing: Your ITSM team members make perfect testers because they’re already trained to diagnose, document and, escalate
  4. Measurement: Development can utilize ITSM reports to measure elements of their own successes and failures.  Look for trends in the most commonly reported types of issues to see if Development can provide a solution from their end
  5. Customer Feedback: Your customers and other end users already communicate with you through your service desk, so use it to your full advantage
  6. Problem Management: When the Service Management team recognizes a problematic service, it can be returned to Development for review
  7. Internal Knowledge Base: Thankfully Development and IT are a good cultural match and often times they “speak the same language” so use that to your advantage.  Allow Development access to edit your internal knowledge base.  Train your customer facing reps to add that to their toolkit so they can answer customer questions more thoroughly

More To Come

The future of ITSM is so important that we decided to present this portion of the series in 2 parts.  In the next iteration we’ll show you some other important components of planning for the future.  I’ll walk you through the core elements of succession planning for you and your team.  Then we’ll take a look at some of the benefits being realized as a result of Enterprise Service Management.  As always, keep your feedback coming.  We love to hear from our audience!

Also, don´t forget to join us on the 22nd of October at 1PM EDT for is this special Live Event on building your ITSM Dream Team.

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