Kanban has become a very popular work – or workflow – management tool, especially in the Lean, Agile, and DevOps worlds. It has also found its way into IT service management (ITSM) as a way of providing focus and insight into work jobs/tasks and flows. For example, in managing ticket queues, planned and unplanned tasks, or projects and improvement activities. As well as offering a visual overview of all of the work to hand, it also provides insight into the status of work items and offers motivation to people who can hopefully see their work progressing from left to right – from “to do” (or “to-be-started”) to “complete.” Plus, it allows management to better understand the relative workload levels, blockages, and the performance of both individuals and teams.

Topics: Kanban, Agile, Lean, DevOps, ITSM

You’ve probably already heard of COBIT – it has been around for a while. If you have, then you might remember COBIT from its days of being an approach that was applicable to those with, shall we say, audit requirements. You might also remember COBIT’s longer name (as was) – “Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies” – which reinforced its audit-based roots. But it’s just plain-old COBIT now. Like ITIL, and the IT Infrastructure Library nomenclature, the acronym has superseded the longer-form name to reflect the evolved focus and scope of coverage. And if COBIT is potentially of interest to you, especially with the new COBIT 2019 recently replacing 2012’s COBIT 5, please read on for 10 tips on how best to start your COBIT journey.

Topics: ITSM, COBIT, ITIL

IT service desk reporting is an essential IT service management (ITSM) practice, which can help to identify troublesome processes, training requirements, customer satisfaction, and more. Most IT service desk managers understand this and make the time for reporting, but often the reports produced aren't as effective as they could be. So, if you’re spending significant time creating performance reports that aren’t being read or acted upon by your department, then it would be wise to look at what your reports contain and how the important messages are delivered. Ultimately, do they hit the mark – and help the reader – or do they sadly hinder more than they help?

Topics: ITSM, Service Desk, KPIs, Business Analytics, Analytics

For the last few years, employee self-service access to IT services has been offered as up as a key way to reduce costs, speed up resolution/provisioning, and deliver a better service experience. According to both North American (HDI) and UK (SDI) data, over 80% of IT support organizations have already invested in some form of IT self-service technology. It all sounds great until viewed through the lens of benefits realization, when – according to SDI research – only 12% of organizations have realized the expected benefits from their investment in self-service for IT.

Topics: ITSM, Self-service

Continual service improvement (CSI) has unfortunately been a long-neglected area in IT service management (ITSM), sometimes viewed as the ultimate post-success undertaking (“We’ll get to that once all of the planned work has been completed” – which is shorthand for “never”). With the publication of ITIL Practitioner, CSI as crucial capability has become significantly more prominent, but the results could often be better. This blog explains why and what to do about it.

Topics: CSI, Continual service improvement, ITIL, ITSM

It’s been a hectic week for the team here at InvGate now that we’re back from the Service Management World conference. We’re still distilling our notes and following up with the folks most interested in our approach to Service and Asset Management. We’ve also gathered our initial thoughts into something that makes sense collectively, and we’ve taken those insights to our developers so they can crank out great new features that mesh well with the needs of front-line IT staff. All of this introspection sparked a thought from us; why not share our notes from the field and insights with you? So here you go, a collection of thoughts from our team and our partner, QuestDesk.

Topics: ITSM, partners, ITAM, service management

Knowledge management is a capability that every IT department knows it should really be engaged in. However, it’s often something that works its way down to the bottom of the IT service desk to-do list. This probably happens because people are too busy “fighting fires” and the value of knowledge documentation is not seen immediately.

Topics: ITSM, knowledge base

In my last ITSM 101 blog, I wrote about five ways people commonly misunderstand and misuse ITIL. From overly focusing on the processes, through expecting a new IT service management (ITSM) tool to fix everything, to running large projects (or programs) that take too long to start to deliver value. In this blog, I offer up five more common ITIL mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.

Topics: ITSM, ITIL, Service Desk

If you follow Twitter and read blogs about IT service management (ITSM), as I do, you will probably have read lots of complaints about ITIL. And yet most of the IT organizations that I work with use it as the basis for how they run IT, and it seems to work very well for them. So why are there so many complaints? Well, when I read the complaints, they almost always seem to be based on a distorted view of what ITIL is, or what it says you should do. So, before you complain too, think about my first five examples of ways that people misuse or misconstrue ITIL.

Topics: ITSM, ITIL, Service Desk, Request Management, enterprise service management